time to try something new

 I watched this tiktok about a woman around my age, feeling like she was having a fresh start with a crazy dream and I commented about how glad I was to see her starting a dream at our age, I feel like I want to but I'm still not sure what my dream is. She replied! Saying I should try some things and see what lights me up. Wow, what a great human, going through it and still encouraging strangers on the internet. And she's right! A few videos later I saw an author I follow posting about how she started writing romance at 40. Hey! That's around my age! Writing is a thing that has always spoken to me! And I thought about commenting on her video, but I was a little too self-conscious. 

I love writing. But I don't consider myself a good writer - at least, not of fiction. Probably because the few times I've had to do creative writing assignments, I didn't get very good grades. I've gotten a perfect score on an essay midterm, you think I'd have a little self confidence! But I read people's social media stories, and some people are great story tellers. I just... use "I" and "just" all the time. Probably not in my creative writing but man, brutal to only get mediocre grades in the thing I loved doing. Maybe I should read a thing on how to write, or maybe I should just write a thousand more times. Probably the second one, sounds more fun. 

Reminds me of how I love to sing but I hate to practice. Practicing a piece of music isn't so bad. But ten to twenty minutes of warm-ups (which is like working out for vocal chords, it's important) - I hated it. Maybe I should write myself a silly warm-up song so I can make it fun. Because singing is also a thing I really love doing. Maybe I could write about a singer. Hah, like I know that life. But I guess I know things about it.

I actually have a story idea that I'm pretty excited about - I just started writing one day and my brain mapped out a little of the story and I was like, yeah, this story needs to be in the world. It might have gotten erased when my hard drive kind of failed though? It wasn't saved to a cloud (I have trust issues I think) so all my start-ups are gone. It was pretty fun to write what I wanted, starting a new story as often as I wanted. Just writing down what was flowing through my brain. No pressure to get a specific story or word count or writing style.... maybe I should do that again.

Oh another thing - I used to write short stories based on songs. That was fun. When I was a teenager, I even let my friends read a couple of them. My creative friend liked it, which felt good, but it didn't feel like it counted, since I didn't write the song, and mostly fleshed out someone else's work. I suppose I could lean into short stories, too. Ironically I don't love reading short stories, but I do enjoy writing them (when I was younger, I liked to write 'em angsty). 

What platform would I use? I shouldn't be paranoid about the cloud - this is property of our goojle overlords (that's how my kid says it haha). But I'm hesitant to use docs. Maybe I should anyway... sigh. I can't escape the artificial intelligence stealer. And then I could write on my kid's computer (that's what I'm on now) AND any other computer that has my account. I just... don't trust the cloud host. Oh well. Maybe I'll see what people generally use to write a bunch of nonsense. 

God I used to love journaling. Figuring out my thoughts. Maybe I should go into therapy or psychology or something. Huh I've never looked into being a psychologist. Hmmmm. 

Did I already mention that to find my dream, I have to actually DO things? Yeah that's tough right now. Most of the things I do are for my kids. Especially my youngest, she just sucks all my energy out (though we got to go to the park yesterday, and it was nice to be outside). But maybe if I'm doing something that's MINE, I'll actually have a tiny bit of extra energy to do it. Here's hoping.