'B' for boredom, blogs and books!

When I was 10 my dad gave me a diary and asked me to scribble in it…any old nonsense, he said and I wouldn't have to show it to anyone. That idea really grabbed me, that secrecy bit. So day by day I started. At first it was drawings, doodles, even pictures I liked. Then each year got a little complicated. Growing up, secrets shared, first crushes, giggly school friends, the first Harold Robbins (OMG they actually write this stuff!!!), boys, dreams, heroes, nightmares, fantasies, fears, anger, resentment, joys…everything came to be chronicled and by the time I left college I could give you a little detail about each day of my life from age ten…..Amazing. And crazy. I had this little cupboard (locked, of course) in my room at home where I stored these diaries….and I would guard it with my life….the keys were well hidden and in my custody even when I was away in college.

Then, one day before I got married I opened that cupboard and spent the better part of the day sitting in front of it. Some of it made me laugh, some made me cry and a lot made me shudder at my own naiveté and idiocy!!! So I burned it all. Dragged out every last bit of loose paper and let it burn. Today I sometimes wonder why I didn’t just seal it all in a carton and bring it with me……but years of my life were gone. I do not know why I did it. Was it to safeguard my own privacy or was it just a ploy to hide what a jackass I could be? And now that I’m older and it has ceased to matter what people think, those are the pages of my life I miss…the humdrum days of a girl growing up slightly confused, slightly crazy and more than slightly rebellious.

No, I don’t think I was either unique or newsworthy but that life was mine.

                

          And later, much later, when I sat with a pen in hand I often found my uninspired writing: “…..went to court and came home…clients in the evening…conference at 8” and wondered why I wrote. Wasn’t all of that in my Court diary anyway, and who the hell cared? Years later if I read that diary would I enjoy sifting thorough pages of a routine existence? Ah but that’s it. It’s our monotony that makes us who we are. And more often than not, back then, it made me bored and crabby and difficult to live with.

          So I started writing. On this blog for friends and any stranger who cared to pass that way. And that is what inspired my first book, "A SLIVER OF MOONBEAM".

             Boredom can be very creative, don't you think?