slip-sliding away…..

I recently came across some personal artefacts from high school, which I finished almost 25 years ago. One was an itinerary from a Toastmasters session in Grade 9.

I was always a shy kid, and public speaking terrified me. And though I hated it, I was forced to go to that Toastmasters course, which was held after school on Friday afternoons (which is the worst time for any extra mural activity). In the end, though, I think it helped me – at least a little – with confidence and public speaking.

I also came across school pictures – both individual and class photos. And as I looked at those faces, I was able to name every single one of them. Which is strange to me, given that I never even spoke to some of them. But I guess being in an environment every day ingrains it in you, such that after 25 years, you still remember the names.

On occasion, I look some of them up online now, to get a glimpse of where life has taken them.

And I think back to those days – 25 years ago – when we were all young. When the school hierarchy of coolness applied, and I was anxious and uncomfortable being around them – especially when it was a social or informal setting.

For me, that feels like many lifetimes ago. It’s just another reinforcement of my perception of how long life is, and has been. It was such a different time. I was so different. The seeds of who I am now were there, yes. But it would take years before events transpired to move me onto this path.

For everyone else, too, the seeds of their current selves were also there.

And I wonder if any of them – as they existed in those freeze frame shots I look at now – I wonder if any of them, at that time, planned to be what they are now. Where they are now. I wonder if they envisioned their future, a quarter century later, as being what it is now.

In Grade 9, for our year-end class magazine which included a bit on each student, they jokingly wrote for me: “A breakthrough in communications…he spoke!”

It was at the end of my second year at the school, when I think I finally started speaking more.

Little did they (or I) know that 25 years later, communications would in fact be my profession. But, without technology, I don’t think it would have been so. Because back then, communication largely relied on speaking and confidence in front of people – which were two of my biggest weaknesses at the time.

There were no emails. It hadn’t taken off yet. And the Internet – in our country, at least – was still a nascent being…something on the sidelines of “real life”. How things have changed…

But with tech being what it’s become, communications became a viable option for me – though I would never have thought it.

I loved writing in my early years of school. The foundations of personal expression were built back then – at the start of my academic career.

But as I grew up, it fell away. By the time I got to high school, writing had been relegated to something I did only when forced.

In my final high school years, though, a revival occurred – though I didn’t recognise it at the time. I wrote stories – parodies of the antics of my classmates and teachers – and circulated them among my friends. And they drew interest at the time…though the content would embarrass me now. Anyway, looking back now, I realise that this was a sign that my abilities and passion for writing were still there. It just needed the right subject matter.

Not long after, at university, on Internet forums (remember those?), I would write paragraphs and paragraphs on topics that interested me. They were online discussions on message boards – years before social media. I even ended up writing album reviews for websites and a print magazine (which was kindly posted to me).

I also remember an early form of journaling from my late university years, capped by what I think was the first poem of my adult life, which captured an immense emotional experience which started in Summer School one year, then ran over almost a year. I remember just waking up one morning, finding a pen and paper, and just letting it all go. All of the emotion that had brewed within for a year just spilled out onto those little notepad pages. It signalled a personal ending of that episode for me. I think that was the point where I let it go and moved on.

But I didn’t recognise that the act of writing was the therapeutic mechanism which enabled it.

Following this, in a break between jobs, I did an exercise from a careers programme. It was a series of prompts aimed at finding your strengths and mapping out a career path. There were prompts about life – earliest memories, etc – and I just sat at my desk and wrote and wrote and wrote. It was strangely cathartic.

I never got to the career part of it. I just revelled in writing my personal history. Capturing my memories as I felt them at the time. And I think that was what opened the door to the early poetry and other writings which I did.

But I kept it all private, in a little box at the top of my cupboard. No one was to ever read it. I even put a note on the box asking for it to be destroyed – and never read – if I died. That sort of privacy was crucial in allowing me to fully express myself – without inhibition.

I kept writing privately, but I think the game changer was my entry to the world of blogs in 2006. I started this blog as a means of sharing my amateur photography, and never planned to write anything on it.

But the blog provided the platform to take my writing to others. Because in those days, there was no such thing as self-publishing. Nor did I ever envision publishing anything.

But, I now realise, that my path to sharing my writing was already well in progress.

Not long after that, I wrote my first poem which I showed the world. And the rest is history.

And it’s amazing to me to look back on it now – my whole life, but particularly the last 30 years – from high school until today, and see how writing developed in my life, becoming a companion I could not live without. (Not in a healthy way, at least.)

So, to go back to the question of those teenage versions of ourselves envisioning our futures: I wouldn’t have thought it back then. I had no idea at all.

But this is where I ended up.

And I wouldn’t want it any other way…