The day I dug myself into a hole when I called myself a 'writer'.
A label that has stuck somehow, although I am now 24 years old, from the days when I surrounded myself with purple prose, when I was inspired by the emotional ramblings of other people - convoluted, unbridled, neurotic. But that's just it, it was raw, no filter needed - for what? In all honesty, that, in itself, was probably a filter - a shield from having to put in the simplest and most straightforward of terms that I'm hurt in need desperate alone.
Does it have something to do with my entering a Communications school and taking a journalism module? Direct, they said. Don't put into three words what you can say in one. Don't write things that people don't understand or have to read twice to get. I scoff at the thought that a single module could somehow change the very way I write, but indeed, sometimes a moment is all it takes. Was there even a way I wrote at all? I can't place the moment when I decided that I couldn't write anymore whenever I wanted to - or rather, when it became something external rather than something from within. Dependent on you this that them, anything anyone but me.
I am many other things too. Some identities fall away. Is this one I am no longer willing to embrace?
