Good Enough?

When I was young, somewhere between the Marine Biologist stage and the eventual decision to become an Engineer, I wanted to be a writer. I remember creating my own newspapers for fun and thinking I would be a journalist. Even at primary school my imagination would run wild. At one stage I was obsessed by the books of Anne McCaffrey and would write stories based on that world and those characters. Maybe it was at least partly because we had just moved to a new 'town' school on the edge of Auckland, maybe it was the early stages of puberty, or maybe it was a general geekiness, but I didn't feel like I fitted in. And I'd much rather be inhabiting these fantasy worlds inside my head than the real one outside of it.

I was good at school which was fortunate. But I was devastated one day to have had real feedback on a creative writing piece I did. Unused to criticism at school and overly sensitive to it at home, I overreacted. I thought my teacher didn't like the piece. That it, and by extension I, wasn't good enough. And that was that - the joy of writing and sharing it had gone.

It was, of course, replaced by what felt like a dirty secret. I still wrote, escaping into fictional worlds in my head which spilled over onto paper.  My sister certainly knew about this habit, and potentially my mum though she probably didn't know just how much time I spent doing it.

As I moved through my teenage years my brain seemed to change. English was only a subject I was averagely good at and I don't think it was until my last year at high school that I really figured out that an essay had a defined structure. Maths, I was good at. Physics and Chemistry also. After watching the film The Abyss and identifying overly strongly with the lead female character I decided to go to University to study Engineering.

I remember clearly running into that same teacher from primary school at the supermarket one day. "Are you still writing? You used to write the most fantastic stories!"

It's always interesting in retrospect seeing how those key moments build up to be part of an identity. But sad, too. I wonder what, in a parallel universe, I would have been if I'd been able to listen to feedback and see it disconnected from myself.

I threw out my teenage writing in a clean out during University, horrified at the immaturity of the writing and the overly personal nature of it.

So now I'm writing to take it back from wherever it was. That regardless of it being good enough, it quite simply is my writing. And that's enough.