As I put the cap back on my special black inkie, zipped up my pencil case and gathered my scribblings together, I pondered.
I’m very good at pondering, but this was a very special occasion; I have reached the end of my Master’s course. Me!
The two years have flown by and my dissertation looms.
I started out wondering (pondering?) if I could write anything apart from a blog. I’m still not sure, but I’m going to give it my best shot.
I would love to say that I enjoyed every minute – but where would be the fun in that? I took this course to push me to my absolute limit. And it worked.
My MS brain was failing me big time and I wanted to do something that would/could wake it up. I like books. I like reading. MS started to chip away at that, so what better way to wreak revenge on this pesky illness than to do something completely contrary? MS reared it’s ugly head again last year (gah) and I had a third course of Campath in September to help combat it.
Then my relative became ill and real life took a dramatic turn, no need for improvisation. But, honestly, what kept me going was writing. I know it sounds strange, but telling it as it is was was a lifeline – in a strange way, it allowed me to distance myself from the emotional turmoil. I would fashion sentences in my head, such as, ‘she walked with trepidation towards the ward, room, blissfully unaware of what she would could face’. I was self-editing.
But back to the Master’s. The whole course has been an exhilarating journey through literature, a non-stop assault on the senses. I’ve been reading my whole life and now, suddenly, I find that those decades, those towers of books I have read, are coming in to good use.
I’m not a starving artist in a garret, much as I’d like to be. Instead, I’m a chocolate-addicted scribbler in a very small cottage. I don’t wear fingerless gloves and I’m not freezing, MS heat-intolerance has put paid to that. The Teenager doesn’t like baked beans much, sadly. Nor baked potatoes from the microwave.
Yet, galvanised by the last two years of lectures, tears, upsets and criticism (always constructive), I am tentatively calling myself ‘A Writer’.
Don’t laugh, lol.