Eight fucking years

I woke up this morning with the urge to write. I have grabbed every spare five minutes today, thirty seconds before racing out the door to work, twenty minutes at lunch time, and hopefully later tonight after the food and clothes mending is done.

I can't even begin to explain this. It's like a piece of me has been missing for the last eight years, and in the last two days it came back. Once upon a time I was a writer, and stories were my reason for living. I would wake up impatient with ideas, characters, sentences, scenes.

Then I lost it. Bam. Maybe not quite overnight, but certainly quickly. I still wrote, because I bought into that idea that you use it or lose it. But everything was flat, paint-by-numbers stuff. I didn't feel it, it didn't excite me.

I did a three year degree in creative writing, and I couldn't write. My third year creative project, I wound up presenting it to my two lecturers at the end of the year. They asked me how I felt about it, and I said - honestly? It's crap.

This was identity so it died hard. I was a construct built around a passion that no longer existed. It took me so damn long to give up. Days of hacking at words, pulling teeth painfully. A dozen, two dozen stories abandoned after a page or two.

And sometime last year, I don't know. It all went. I stopped. I was done trying. Last year was crap. I didn't actively listen to music - ever. I didn't read books. I didn't play games, except half-heartedly. I filled my life with money, work, housework, budgets, and crap TV.

It will have been worth it. I almost cried this morning. It's bad writing, don't get me wrong. I am not the next Hemingway or Pynchon. That's not the point.

It's like I got a piece of me back, a piece of what made me alive, what made me Suzie. I laugh randomly at work now, because I am imagining a scene and someone says something that makes me laugh. I am doodling, not in a bored, random way, but in a way that makes me happy.

How can I explain this? Eight years and I've been just a shell of myself. Now, suddenly, I have my snail back.