blue

You know, I don't even think I know how to write anymore. It's the weirdest thing. I've always written, since the age of around five or six. At first I was an incredibly slow starter. At around the age of five or six even the kids who would later turn out to be massively less intelligent than me were leaving me far behind, I could not read and I could not write. I wholeheartedly blame this on the fact that I was born deaf, with holes in both my eardrums. Until the age of ten I attended speech therapy and used to pronounce the word 'flag' as 'slag', much to my elder brother's amusement. Apparently before we broke up for school one summer my teacher took my mum to one side and told her that if I did not catch up with the rest of the class soon she would recommend I be taken out of school and put into special education.

That summer mum sat me down with some notepads and pencils and basically taught me how to read and write. From that point I just ran with it. Within two years I was second to top of the school reading group, second only to Becki Daniels and Carly Avery (the former who is now a primary school teacher herself, the latter a travel agent). Also I would write books, massively inspired by/ripping off 90s CITV kids show Knightmare, which I was obsessed with, and my teacher would print them off page by page, then put them in the school library.

Since then I have always written. But lately I have stopped. Not only have I stopped but I swear I've forgotten how to do it. Maybe I'm just more aware now, definitely I am more self critical about almost every aspect of myself, this is probably a knock on effect of that. It's just very sad that I've sacrificed one of the few things that used to define me for mediocrity.