Last January, I found myself waiting for a response and being left with only disappointment. I had, for lack of a more apt term, been seeing someone in an admittedly on-and-off manner in the weeks leading up to the end of the fall semester. The last day of finals was the last time we saw each other before heading back to our hometowns for winter break and before I left to study abroad for the spring semester. I wasn’t sure where we would go from there, but as we were parting to go our separate ways he suggested that we keep in touch while I was gone — that we “start an email chain.”
I was immediately sold on the idea and needed no further convincing. And so, when the day came for me to leave the country and begin my time abroad, I typed up an email with hope in my heart and with his words, his suggestion, his implicit promise of responding — all ringing like a chorus through my ears. And then I waited. And nothing came.
Of course, I hated the situation for a whole handful of reasons. First, I wished that he’d respond, and, upon realizing that he never would, I wished that I had never sent the email in the first place — never showed my hand in such a way. As all this was going on, I found myself feeling like I needed to talk to someone about the events, like I needed to recount our back-and-forth to someone and flip back through past events to figure out how exactly we — I — got there. And yet, my study abroad program took place on a ship, and I was quite literally in the middle of the ocean at this time, surrounded only by strangers who would be completely uninterested in my musings about my arguably pathetic situation.
And so, I wrote.
Writing had always been an outlet of sorts for me, but it had been years since I had done anything even remotely creative. When I was a kid, I had dreams of one day being an author. I would race home after school and spend hours typing away at the computer, crafting ridiculous stories about faraway places and fascinating people. As I grew older, though, I stopped finding the time for writing. Over holidays and at family gatherings, I was excitedly greeted by aunts and uncles who unfailingly asked, “How’s the writing coming?” As middle school and then high school hit, I would shake my head, say sadly that I hadn’t done any in a long while — I just couldn’t find the time. By college, they stopped asking.
I kept journals religiously and always carried a notebook with me, but I never wrote for any purpose other than academics or for the sake of mere recording. And yet, when I found myself feeling conflicted, confused and with no one to talk to while on a boat in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, it struck me suddenly that there was one thing I could do — write about it. And so I did. And it was a brilliantly fun thing to do, so I kept it up.
Fast forward to today, and my writing is not, on the surface, in such a different spot than it was however many months ago. I haven’t done something with any of my words, but I have written them down. I have found myself having so much fun while writing and feeling so much more clear-headed after I’ve finished something. I have found myself asking — and wondering — where can I put this, what can I do with this, where can I go with this from here? I have found myself completely unknowing of the answers to any of those questions but still wanting to write and continue anyway.
I’m frustrated — in many ways — that I did not return to writing sooner. I think of all the creative writing classes I could have taken, all the workshops I could have applied for, all the literary magazines with which I could have tried to edit or intern. I think that had I known or remembered how much I loved this thing — this act, this practice — sooner, I could have started earlier on a career down this path. I think of all the lost time, all the lost material, all the moments already passed that were so worthy of being written down and that are now gone, unremembered and untold.
This renewed interest in writing came up the other day when I was talking to my thesis advisor. She mentioned a fabulous book she had just finished writing a piece on and was raving about the impressive narrative voice of the author — about his nuance and empathy and jaw-droppingly good storytelling. I admitted that I always found myself in awe of writers like that. I have always loved good work when I saw it but have never understood how people were able to produce something so wildly remarkable.
My advisor then asked if I did any creative writing and I smilingly recounted the story of how I came to write again and shared my frustrations about having only returned to the hobby now.
“Timing doesn’t matter,” she said in response to my worries about being too late to the game to do anything productive with my words.
“I wrote all the time in my twenties, and I loved it, but knew that nothing I was writing was good, so I stopped. And I didn’t come back to it until I turned 50. But that doesn’t matter. It comes to you when it’s right. It all comes back. It all comes back when you need it to.”
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