My 6 year old self’s vision
Capturing lives through the written word
Everyone has that moment when someone asks them at a young age ‘What do you want to be when you grow up?’ Whilst there may be earlier times, I recall my six year old self telling my kindergarten teacher that I wanted to be a writer. As time went my love affair with the written word certainly never dwindled but my response to that question was formed by experiences, expectations and the people around me.
Cut to 2020 some 34 years later and my six year old self is screaming for her dream to be realised ‘It’s my turn’! So here I am creating a new website to document that dream and open a new chapter in this book I like to call “My Life”.
Creation inspires creation
someday you’re going to be someone’s favourite author
Saying I am inspired by others work is an understatement. There are so many books I’ve read which have left their mark on me that I could spend the rest of my life talking about just that!
Having read countless books though there are some that leave a deeper mark than others. My year six teacher gave me A Bridge to Terabithia by Katherine Paterson to read and I cried over this book for many hours. It lingers in my mind and whenever someone asks for a recommendation for a book for their children I can’t get it out fast enough.
There are many others, Jane Austen’s work, especially Persuasion and Pride and Prejudice are almost on an annual rotation, The Diary of Anne Frank, Chris Cleaves’s The Other Hand, and lets not forget my twenties where I think I read every popular and some not so popular crime novelists work.
Then my most recent book that is never far from my thoughts and made me think of how the structure of a novel can mirror the story itself, is Jock Serong’s On The Java Ridge. I promise to write more about this one in a future blog post.
In a past life
there are no right and wrong choices, just consequences of our actions
For the past 18 years of my working life I have had the honour and privledge of sharing the lives of my clients through the practice of psychology. This career has had a profound affect on me personally and I have learned as much from my clients as they have from me. I remember a conversation with a client about writing a book in the future, and that this book would be about what clients had taught me. I am not writing this one…yet, but let me assure you it would not be a stand alone book but volumes in a series.
The written word has played a role in this journey, not only through the writing of clinical notes, letters and reports but through the development of resources, workshops, conference proceedings, journal articles and blog posts. It is because of this that I can with confidence already call myself a writer, well with growing confidence anyway.
