Sometimes, I Forget I’m a Writer…

Sezane tank
Zara shorts (similar)
Diego’s espadrilles (similar)
Ellen James bag
Ace & Tate sunglasses (similar)
Maris Pearl Co. necklace (c/o)
Linjer rings (c/o)
Gisel B. earrings (c/o)
Location: Ancient Agora of Athens – Athens, Greece

There was a time, not so long ago, when a visit to the Ancient Agora of Athens would have inspired me to pen a poem – or two. When I would have written a lengthy journal entry detailing every moment of the experience and reflecting on how I felt afterwards. It’s astonishing how much can change with just a little time. Sometimes, now, I almost forget that I’m a writer.

I know, I know. But it’s easier than you would think to forget, even for someone who spent their entire childhood scribbling in a series of notebooks, impatiently waiting for the day when she would be old enough to be considered a “real” writer. We still got our news from newspapers back then, although the idea of pursuing journalism as a career already seemed to me like a good way to spend my life just trying to scrape by. No one owned a cell phone – and if they did, its sole purpose was to make phone calls. I wrote, in my earliest days, because I read. Books, magazines, an occasional encyclopedia – anything I could get my hands on. While I was already a minority, that didn’t make me exceptional. Not at the time.

I launched my blog a couple of years after I finished university. While I was finally old enough, I was not the writer I imagined I would be. My day job at an insurance company paid the bills. And I didn’t hate it, exactly, but the life it allowed me to lead was a far cry from what I’d envisioned for myself. It’s not unusual to be confronted, in young adulthood, by the stark contrast between the life you wanted and the life you can actually afford to have. What you do in the wake of that confrontation is what shapes the subsequent years. Personally, I chose to do something about it – I wanted to be a writer, so I wrote, in this space.

I had passion, but I didn’t have a crystal ball. I doubt anyone could have predicted what the world of blogging would turn into, back when we were all just nerdy people behind computer screens. While I’ve always loved fashion, I chose it as my primary focus mainly because my intent was to blog with someone else. That didn’t last, but the blog itself did. And in the intervening years, I’ve realised that, for me, the writing is the easy part. I spend, at best, half an hour putting together the written portion of a given post. There is generally no planning in advance. I just write – because in that sense, I am a writer, even though my job title is something else entirely. Words always come easily. Blogging and social media didn’t have any impact on that.

If anything, blogging and social media made me a photographer. The skill I’ve developed the most in the past decade is, without a doubt, photography. While the act of taking good photos is just as challenging as writing well is, the gratification is far more immediate. In order to react, a person only needs to look at a photo – it takes seconds, while reading takes minutes, maybe longer.

All creation is inherently egotistical. I learned that in my writing classes in university. The desire to be a creator of any kind of art comes from the belief that we have something of value worth sharing with the world. And that isn’t a negative thing. But the fact is, when you create, you don’t create into a vacuum – no artists makes art with the intention of locking it in a cupboard where no one can see it. And so, if you are drawn to or seeking a response from an audience, it’s only natural to gravitate towards the kind of creation that garners the largest response. For me, that’s proven to be photography.

I am not a better photographer than a writer. But words lack the immediacy of images. While I am a quick writer, I can’t just sit down and write a fully formed poem in ten minutes. It takes time to refine an idea. There is an editing process. Sometimes, the right words take weeks – even months or years, to come. All that a picture requires is a subject and a camera. Every photo I take isn’t my favourite, but there are very few I hesitate to share until they are “good enough.” I sincerely doubt that most people notice or care about the flaws I perceive in my work, anyway. So I allow myself to get caught up in creating images. I string them together with the flimsy thread of a basic narrative because – I cannot overstate this – it is just so much easier than the alternative.

That’s what it comes down to, in the end. Sometimes, I forget that I am a writer because writing is hard. And I often don’t feel up to the challenge of acknowledging and confronting my own vulnerability, which is so essential to the writing process.

But lately, I’ve begun to wonder just how much I’ve given up by letting myself off so easily. I never want writing to feel like a chore – I learned the hard way in my university years that it can, if it becomes work. The result of that, though, is that I don’t prioritise it, because priorities come with pressure. So after work and content creation and just life, if I have a little time, I might write. Which is to say to say that I don’t write much at all. (In fact, I was pretty transparent about that recently. Since I published that post, I’ve done a couple pages worth of work on book three – it’s not much, but it’s progress.)

I visited the Ancient Agora of Athens and these are the words I have to tell you about that experience. I wrote nothing at the time. But I suppose you could say that it still lead to reflection, because I realise now that it’s time to get my pens out again.

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