Remembering This

As I’m writing this, it’s been three days since the Mildura Writers Festival ended and it keeps resurfacing in my thoughts. I think I’ve just about summed up how much I loved the festival, but I felt the need to sit down and write about the feeling I’m experiencing now in the wake of the festival. Above all, I feel creatively nourished, and spiritually reaffirmed.

 

I can’t imagine a version of myself that isn’t a writer because writing seems to overlap with virtually every facet of my life. It is the lens through which I view the world, the perspective I assume when I am meeting a friend or seeing family or sitting in class or watching the news or scrolling through my news feed or taking an afternoon walk through my neighbourhood. I think that writing fiction, though I am not directly writing about my own experiences, is my way of tracking my own narrative, of making sense of my life. Any given project that I am working on is inevitably a zeitgeist of my preoccupations and the stimuli influencing me throughout the era in which I am writing it. The writer in me is constantly awake, and he is constantly excited.

 

I believe there is something deep inside us that registers when we are heading down a path that simply isn’t the one for us. I have felt it once, and it forced me out of my comfort zone and onto a new path which immediately just felt right. And I feel reaffirmed in the afterglow of the writers festival because that deep sensation of alignment has been particular prominent the past few days. It doesn’t mean that everything is going to be easy – but it does mean that it’s going to be worth it.

This is the ethos with which I am walking into the future. I’m just excited to see where I go from here.