Day 20 – a hobby of yours and how it changed since your loss.

I want to say art. All my life art has been my thing. I was just good at it, always. Louise, she’s the artist in the family. But it’s not art. For me it is writing

And it may seem obvious, given this blog, but it wasn’t obvious to me.

I wrote a few poems when I was younger. I’ve kept the odd travel journal. But I never thought of writing as a thing. It was there, but I didn’t notice it and I didn’t heed any of the comments people made about what I wrote. Sure that was nothing. I just did it. No biggie.

But…

A friend gave me a notebook and pencil when she came to see me in hospital, just after I’d found out Laura had died. Not the first notebook I’d been given, but this time I was in a hospital with nothing to distract me and I had just been given the worst news of my entire life. This notebook became my outlet.

I woke very early the next morning, the morning of the day I would give birth to my darling, dead daughter and I wrote Laura a letter. I didn’t think about what I wrote I just let it pour out of me. I didn’t structure it consciously. I didn’t edit it. And then I closed the book.

The letter was printed in the order of service at Laura’s funeral, so other’s read it. Some commented. Somewhere in there I started to hear that maybe I didn’t write just the same as everyone else. And in a conversation months later with my cousin, she asked if I had ever done the Myers Briggs personality test. I promptly did it and my personality type was sometimes known as “The Writer”. It dawned on me that because I’d been “The Artist” all my life I’d never considered that I could be or do anything other than that.

And all along, in the months after Laura’s death, I filled one book with writing, then another, then started blogging and in the writing I’ve found a way to fumble through this fog of loss, a thread to hang on to, a lifeline……