My problem is that I think I need therapy writing therapy. Or a licence to be poetic!
My role has been Mum and Grandma, and all that that entails, since I was 22. My teaching career was exciting, stimulating and very hard work. Retirement was good but I couldn’t just stop, so I became a bookseller, did a lot of charity work and was a support worker for uni students. I didn’t know what it was not to be busy.
But writing is what I like to lose myself in, and there’s the rub!
Time spent on my writing projects feels like an indulgence, a guilty pleasure. I feel as though there must be something I should be more gainfully employed in, or someone else I should be supporting.
So much of my life has been a hectic battle, that it’s a struggle to switch off and just write. Poetry is my favoured field. There are so many ideas, thoughts to be captured. How do I find the will to be selfish? If selfish is the word for doing one’s own thing.
Being raised Catholic doesn’t help.
Mea culpa, and all that.
ANNE STEWARD Magdale, Honley