Passions gone but not forgotten

When I was a little girl I had a dream, to write a book and design. I didn’t care what I designed I remember when I was 14/15 I designed a wedding dress, my GCSE design was redesigning a hotels kitchen. It didn’t bother me I was always redesigning and repainting my room.

As a painter and decorator my father used to despair. Many a time he would come home from work and my bedroom would be deposited in the hallway and I would be painting, I remember vividly his face when I was rag rolling my room in green paint. He wasn’t happy, my dad likes magnolia! You can imagine his face.

I loved doing it and I always felt free doing it.

If I couldn’t paint my room, I would be drawing or painting, I had a thing about pencil drawings, and I have thousands of books at mums house that are full of art that I have done over the years.

If I couldn’t do this I would be writing I have huge amount of journals, that I wrote over the years when I was younger. I used to pour my heart into them, if I couldn’t get what I wanted to say in the journal I would write poetry. I could always get what I wanted out via poetry and it helped me so much when growing up.

I carried on doing all of these things, until I was at university and then other things just got in the way. Mainly studying and socializing.

All of my creative juices were drunk away by the time I had finished university. I then started working with special needs, and I tried to pick up my writing again, and my drawing actually but everything seemed to be very dark. I found especially with my writing that I was going over things that had happened in the day, and I didn’t want to be talking about those things I wanted to be escaping from them, writing didn’t help at this point in my life. I did not want to relive the fact that my tooth was head butted through my top lip, I was bitten so badly on the leg that I was signed off work for three weeks and it looked like a horse had bitten me, it was an eight year old child. They are things that you don’t want to keep revisiting, now I can but at the time I couldn’t.

I just got on with my life really, in the back of my head there was always the thought I would love to write and I wanted to do something creative.

I then discovered scrapbooks, well that brought my creativeness back again. I loved sitting down and designing my photos into these wonderful albums. I felt again that I was free, and I could and still can sit there for hours and don’t even realise that I have been there that long, and I feel so relaxed while doing it.

So for a while that was fine, I had a passion back and I loved it, I could create and I was happy with it.

Then I had Baba, and it all changed. I suddenly wanted to write from the moment I found out I was pregnant. It wasn’t so much wanting to write the novel from when I was little but I wanted to make sure that my Baby had every little detail of their life in front of them. I didn’t care that they may not read it, as Mr L tells me, but I still wanted to do it. So I would sit and still do, writing in Baba’s diary of the things that we have done that day, and what he has said, or seen.

However after a year of this, I was again scribbling things down, ideas for stories and poems jotted here and everywhere. I had found a creative writing course that I wanted to do, and kept looking at it and debating it. Mr L decided to pay for it last year, and I have loved everything that I have done on it so far.

I started writing my blog only a  month ago, and haven’t looked back. I love writing and just generally being creative in any kind of way. If you know me, you will know that I make my cards, I do a bit of knitting, sewing, quilting. I am not fantastic at any one thing, but I love to try them all. It is the one thing that makes me truly relaxed and happy. I love it all.

When I was younger I can vividly remember my mum telling me about her friend Ann, she lived in this big farmhouse, and both parents were arty. The children were allowed to do what they wanted with their rooms, mum used to say that you would go in and the kitchen would all be painted in different colours, and would be different every time you went round. The table and chairs would be painted and the floors, nothing went unscathed. That is my idea of fun, just using your place as a blank canvas, and going with what inspires you that day. Imagine what you could do?

This post was inspired by Sleep is for the Week Writing Workshop, prompt 4. Tell me about a childhood passion that somehow got left behind as you moved into your adult life.
– Inspired by Dad Who Write’s rediscovery of  ‘Riding’.”>