I still remember the first story I wrote. It was about a girl who lived on a bus. I was 12 years old and had received a laptop for my birthday, something I wanted specifically to use to write. I'd written stories before, sure: tiny stories about my favorite band (98 degrees) or things for school. With that laptop, though, I felt like I could really become a writer. I remember that every day of middle school and high school, I got home and wrote. Every single day. By the end of high school, I had amassed hundreds and hundreds of pages of writing.
The sad part: two years ago, I went through and deleted all of it. I had carried those digital folders of Word documents around on various laptops for years. It was time to let go.
That kind of dedication to creating is pretty impressive and I haven't met the output of my high school years yet. Everything I wrote was pretty bad; I mean, that's why I deleted it. But I still wrote a lot. In journals, on my computer, online, everywhere. I wrote and I wrote and I wrote and I wrote. I was always creating, always thinking, always having a new idea for something.
I wrote significantly less in college. I filled a lot of journals, but I would argue that I never actually wrote anything. Pages and pages and pages of... nothing. I wrote a lot for school (including some papers for history classes and English classes that I'm still pretty proud of). My senior year was probably my most productive year, but that was out of necessity (several poetry workshops and a capstone), rather than actually wanting to.
Since we started sleep training, though, I have had all kinds of time. After cleaning, washing bottles, putting away dishes, and generally doing all the chores I put off for nine months , I had more free time than I realistically know what to do with.
So for the first time ever, I started writing again. In a few days, I sat down and wrote a short story, I wrote 6 poems, and I finished blog posts I have been meaning to write for ages .
That first short story felt like the biggest triumph. Is it good? Not really. I would argue that it's actually pretty bad, but I wrote it and that's what is most important. It feels go to write again and to have the time to write again. I always dreamed of being the kind of mom that Forrest would remember writing and now I feel like it might be a reality.