So sorry that I haven’t been keeping up with you lately. I’ve been a bit distracted. In truth, I was spending time with an old love. Some of you may know what it is like to reconnect with your first love.
Initially awkward, you stumble to find the words that you want to use. Your heart beats faster than normal for a bit and your sleep schedule becomes inconsistent as you wonder whether picking up where you left off is really the best thing for you to do. Eventually, you decide to take the leap of faith and you plunge right in, going for it.
I started writing when I was just seven years old. Poems, short stories, plays, and songs. I wrote them all. As I grew up and time went on, my writing style transformed from creative to informative. Business briefs, university assignments, research papers, and educational curricula were the new order of the day.
It’s not that I didn’t appreciate my new love, but as with any change of heart, there is always the what-if that comes with looking back to the past. What if I could have published that book? What if I could have become an international journalist? What if? Can I do it? Why not?
After many years of looking back and wondering what if, I decided that I was asking the wrong questions. I started asking the question, why not now? For many nights, I lay awake looking up at the ceiling, recalling the characters, the heroes, and the fantastical scenes and imagery of my novel. I tried shaking it, putting it out of my mind like a very bad breakup that just needed to die a long overdue death. Sadly, I could not get rid of it. Like clockwork, it reappeared, nightly, and conveniently at 2:00 AM like last call at the local pub.
Shamefully, I must admit, that I tried bartering with the Divine to remove this horrible memory from me because it was simply a passing thing, like you know, a fling, that simply transported you from a miserable reality to your own Cinderella story that ends at midnight. All good things should come to a fleeting end.
But it would not let me go. It followed me from room to room, and I simply could not shake it. At last, I gave in to hear what it had to say for itself. I listened, I reflected, and yes, finally decided that I needed to give it another shot. It would not be easy. The reconciliation would take time; I had a few other pressing things to handle, but it would slowly come back together with all the right words, expression, love, and excitement that it had originally.
Stepping away from my first love, my soul’s purpose, was one of the hardest things I’ve ever done. Like many aspiring writers, I had to make choices. Specifically, I had to make the choice between eating and not, paying bills and not, and taking care of my children, and there was no “not” option for that!
In time, I let the wound close and accepted that I would not publish, nor would I write beyond the confines of business context. No creativity, no fictional characters, only cold, hard, well written, concise facts and instruction.
But fate would intercede and nudge me to open the pages of my novel again. I found the copious notes and drafts one day when I was cleaning my office during the pandemic. For months, I stared at it. I read it a couple of times and perused the scribbles and outlines that I wrote in airports, on planes, and even on bar napkins.
It all came rushing back to me. The scenes, the characters, the conflicts, the heroism, and of course the love. It all came flooding back with such vivid imagination, accuracy, and ease. My heart was filled again and my creativity in other areas quickly followed. After weeks of writing one page a day, the goal became three pages, and now, three months into it, I have fallen deeply into love with writing once again and often must remind myself to stop so that I can do all the other things on my list each day.
Peace and calm are now constants in my life. I no longer feel imbalanced or lacking. My creative desire to take more risks and let the current of the day take me where it leads is more the norm and not the exception. The freedom I must create has no boundaries and for that I am grateful. Isn’t it strange how the soul know what it needs and what lengths it will go to get it?
Sometimes, it takes an old love, a first love, to return, even briefly, to remind us of who we are and what we are to become so that we are shaken at our core to wake up and get back to being what the soul has come here to be. (Notice that I did not say what it came here “to do.”)
While much of the novel has changed a bit, it will be much longer than originally planned, the story line and ending has not and will not. The writing is easier this time. Strangely, the letters fly from my fingertips as if they were simply channeling the thoughts and words of someone, somewhere else. Perhaps, because I manifested help with the writing, it is.
But of course not everything has changed from the original; in the end, there will be triumph after much tribulation and like most fantastical novels, there will be a return to love. This only leaves one question: who doesn’t love a happily ever after?
Much Dutch Love,
Mia Moore, Author