Put It Into Words.

I was born to write. Ever since I was a little girl, with a big gap-toothed smile and crazy, curly hair, walking around like a miniature female version of my dad, words have always been my friends. Books became my whole world, losing myself in them as I escaped the arguments and the bitchiness going on all around me at home. They were my escape, as the confusion around why I didn’t feel a bond with my mother grew ever-present. I threw myself completely in to them when my parents and my siblings moved house but I stayed behind and continued living with my grandmother – the only child in a house of adults.

There are pictures of me from when I was in nursery school, aged just 3 and a bit, writing or drawing away in a corner, all by myself. It’s always been my safe place, my happy place, my ‘me’ place. I wrote when my grandfather passed away – I was just 6 years old. I wrote poems to my best friends in primary school – it was the best way I could express myself. I wrote to bring some clarity to my grief when my dad passed away when I was aged 14 – I remember writing and writing and writing away in my Winnie the Pooh journal; letters to him, poems about him, anything to help me to get my head around the fact that I would never see him again in this lifetime.

I wrote when I first fell in love. I filled diaries with all these brand new feelings that I couldn’t just keep contained inside, the words dancing over the pages like the butterflies swarming around in my belly. I wrote when my heart was broken. I wrote in what I felt like was blood at the time, writing in order to piece together the sharp, tiny fragments of a heart that I felt would never be whole again. I wrote when I felt injustice. I wrote when I felt peace. I wrote when the best friends I thought would be forever, disappeared into the dust, never to be seen again.

I wrote when I finally opened up my eyes properly, for the very first time. I wrote to capture every moment and every ounce of beauty of this world that was being snapped away mentally in my mind. I wrote for God. I wrote to God. I wrote with God.

I wrote when I felt like the me I had known for so long was being tortured and dragged away to be locked up and hidden away forever. I wrote as a brand new life grew inside me; a life I felt I wasn’t ready for, but a life that was ready for me. I wrote in order to make sense of the battling emotions of a brand new world of motherhood; I wrote for the new meaning of love it brought into my life. I wrote when I upped and left an old life behind and travelled oceans and seas to build a new one. I wrote when it all just became too much; I wrote because the words that fell from me, through my pen and onto the paper helped to ease the pressure that was building inside. I wrote when I just didn’t know what else to do. I wrote because it’s all I could do.

I wrote.

I write.

It’s what I do.

And how ironic it is that I feel like I can’t truly put into words what words mean to me.

They just are. It just is. As naturally as breathing. Words. The only companions that have been with me from the moment I was born and will stay with me until the moment that I die. Words. The language of my soul.

Words.

Without which, I could never truly be me.