The reason why I write

Writing has always been my therapy... and much more effective that the child psychologist my father took me to see at 13 and the clinical psychologist I saw when I was depressed in the Island Behind God's Back.

This blog was created to help me find my voice back in 2006. I always knew I had something to say, I just didn't know what it was or how it would come out. As I grew, my writing grew more open. I wrote less in parables and turned down the volume on self editing. I realized that there was a correlation between key stroke and heart that the mind had no place in interfering especially one like mine that was so hung up on appearances and appropriateness and all those things we are taught that make people dignified.

I just started to write. I stopped thinking and I just let the words pour out of my heart and I shared them here.

I haven't advertised this blog. It is semi-anonymous. I write with a pseudonym so that the mind doesn't get too threatened in all this open heart conversation.

I know that it may come across as a little out there sometimes... and sometimes I hide behind what appears to be a flair for the dramatic, but essentially, this is me. This is the me that I am revealing to myself and I am letting you in on it as it happens. When you read my blog, you are witnessing my life, and consciousness as it unfolds.

This blog is my stream of consciousness. My posts are not pre-planned... they just flow. I start a post not really knowing how it is going to end. This is indeed my loose interior monologue This is why my writing has been so therapeutic. I write not only to share, but to reveal to myself.

Over the past year, as I came to terms with being a newlywed, I found that I had very little to say. My writing was more expository than exploratory. I wrote to keep you up to date, to tell you I was alive, but few were the moments when I would just lit my heart rip. Funny enough, the same thing that seemingly silenced me, is the very thing that is giving me back my voice.

Marriage for me has been a journey into self. I thought it was the journey of two people trying to walk together but it is way more than that. It is about getting into you and then walking together with souls bare towards the light.

I have never been more myself in any relationship and I don't think I have been more myself even when I wasn't in a relationship. It's like I am finding out more about who I really am as i find out about my life partner. It is a blessing... he seems to hold up a mirror to me and I to him. We help each other see ourselves.

We have spent more conversation hours in this one year than I may have for all of my previous relationships combined and of course, we almost never talk about the weather.

As I continue to grow and my voice continues to gain strength, no doubt my writing will reflect this. I will not write for shock value, but I will write as my heart wishes to express. For me, it isn't what comes out of my mouth that reveals my heart, it is what comes from my pen.

The sky is about to fall: the prologue

I got married eight months ago today. I remembered just now at 8:52 pm when I glimpsed on the date for the umpteenth time for the day. I am more concerned about not missing my youngest sibling's B-Day than remembering my monthly "anniversary." We did it for the first five months. ESC would write me these cute notes, which then tapered down into SMSes and just fizzled out altogether. I have to keep track of bill payments and whether we are running low on toothpaste and milk and clean socks. Who has time for another reminder?

I think I have Married People's Writer's Block. I came up with the term in my usual self-diagnosis. How else can I describe the fact that I just feel I have been self-editing ever since I got married? (Maybe that is exactly the problem: "Writers block caused by self-imposed self-editing resulting in chronic constipation and blockage of energy and writing channels")

It's weird. I just seem to not have much to say. I look back on some of my older posts and I marvel at the writer I once was. Now, I feel like I write about the arcane and mundane and my entire existence has become so much less than sensational. Yeah right, who am I fooling about being slightly mysterious? Ha!

But when did this blog become mindless recounts of days spent as opposed to something much more meaningful? This is not a "Today I walked a mile in red hooker heels" kind of blog. It's a "Hooker heels were made for a gal like me." The difference? One statement is descriptive, the other, narrative.

I like to tell stories, not just facts. It's just that I am coming up dry these days. Maybe it's time to switch expression media and delve into photography. Whatever it is, I just need to get my shit together because I am the writer of a Twentysomething blog about to turn 30 in less than two months and I better find my voice and say something meaningful soon because in case you haven't already noticed, the sky is predicted to fall on August 9!

A new way to think about creativity

I got this from a writing group based in Atlanta that I am a part of. Harlem Mama took me to a meeting last year and it felt good to be among like minds.

This is for everyone with a book or any other creative project in them.

A new way to think about creativity

I got this from a writing group based in Atlanta that I am a part of. Harlem Mama took me to a meeting last year and it felt good to be among like minds.

This is for everyone with a book in them.

The other side of the lake

I started a dance camp on Monday (yesterday) and it has been challenging me to the umph degree. Its 3 hrs Mon-Fri... and it is serious work!

That mirror wall does not lie. I don't know how I got this badly out of shape, but I certainly don't like it. I am trying really hard not to be too tough on myself. As much as I have lost all of 8lbs in my first two weeks home, and look to lose another 17, I know it is hard work. It's just that when reality kicks in, it kicks in, and I just want to get my old body back. But, having said that, I am giving myself permission to enjoy dance class and to go through all the headwork it takes to grapple with the state I have found myself in.

Easy Skanking Chef is proud that I am dancing again... and is encouraging me to find a dance class in Dubai so that I can continue.

I wish I could write more, because I certainly could use the creative release, but I just cannot seem to be able to.

The grass is not always greener on the other side of the lake.

The woman and her all-consuming passion

For the past 6-8 weeks, I have been sort of taking serious lessons in photography.

It started with research into the imaging system that best suited me and then it took on a whole life of it's own.

Seriously, I cannot remember when any one thing has excited me so much...especially without direct stimulation.

I haven't put my forefinger on a shutter of an SLR since the Cricket World Cup in the Caribbean. That was 2007 I believe. It was the camera of my Guyanese media friend, and I missed a lot of great shots at the opening ceremony in Trelawny, Jamaica because it was the first time I was setting hands on that camera and with the low and fast fading light, shooting from the stands was iffy. I managed at a later date to get a fantastic portrait of him, which he prides as his best ever. We are not as friendly as we once were, but that photo stills a frame of a bond that once was. Such is the power of photography.

My learning curve has been spiking and will spike even further when I get my hands on my baby. I have already named him. Che Mandela Fidel Obama Manley. A big name for a rebel who will revolutionize my earthly and ethereal existence.

I have always been in love with photography, but I had managed to push my love aside in the chase for all things more practical. Long before I got involved in the television business, I used to watch movies and search out the names of Directors of Photography and look at how each shot in a well-shot feature was a beautifully composed photo.

I am in perpetual wanderlust. I don't fantasize about sex anywhere as much as I do about photography. Thank heavens Easy Skanking Chef does not read this blog. Then again he could say the same about food.

It is amazing how life is. It's almost as if I tucked this part of me so far away that I only had faint memories hidden in an old hat box in my closet.

When I jumped off the corporate ladder, it was to pursue much of the same but only on my own terms and to integrate broadcasting more. I set up a communication firm to do PR for clients and get back into broadcast programming. No where did photography factor.

The same about writing. I knew there was a book in me, but had no real idea that I had a voice, much less stylings that anyone would find remotely interesting.

But something really started happening deep down inside me when I started writing this blog. And the more I wrote, the truer I became. Writing was my conduit to the inner me- the trench through which the longings of my soul poured out from sub-conscious to conscious.

It also shifted all the energy I put into long emails to my ex boyfriends...which looking back were desperate attempts for an audience for my self-expression. I hardly write those anymore, and not because I love any less.

The combination of isolation and opportunity on this Island Behind God's Back has encouraged me to write more and to explore who I really am underneath it all. Ironically, though writing on this blog and my radio show are my only creative outlets, I am feeling my creativity in a very profound way.

As hard as things are, and as rough as they get sometimes, I do think this relationship presents a real good synergy for both ESC and myself. We are both inspired.

And I have gotten happier...just being me.

There will be more photos on this blog once I can Che in my hands. I promise. I have been following the tutorials on him... because it's one thing to get a man, it's another to put him to god use. Until then, there will be a helluva lot of sheer orgasmic fantasy.

Communicating through writing

It is a joy of magnanimous proportions for someone to visit my blog and say:

"Hi! Was curious to see who was actually following my blog so I got here. But now I'm just honoured! I love your blog, it's a fabulous read. You write really well. I can identify with this post so much. I'm exactly like you in this respect. In fact, I used to be painfully shy as a kid and people who know me now find that hard to believe. I do love my time with myself but I agree with you when you say "...I am too curious about life and people to be permanently withdrawn."

or

" 'Mostly to observe and maybe to partake, but still observing through participation.' - that could be me talking."

Eespeciallly when those two persons are writers of blogs that I myself like, and whom I have never met. The first person is the writer of the blog The Cloudclutter Chronicles, an Indian writer, based in Bombay (now Mumbai for the rest of the Non-Indian world). You need to see for yourself why I am such a fan of hers.

The second person is the UK Based author of blog Razor-Blade Life, who is amused by Jamaican expressions and idioms, and writes about her family life. I met her through another blog on which I made a comment, and she thought I was a "he" and the rest is lost in funny gender obscured history. I follow her blog too. She doenst even know that her Bolognaise and Carbonara post made me cook thin spaghetti with meatballs in a rich tomato sauce.

I also have to mention commentator Michelle Frost, Scotland-based writer of Crows Feet and brand spanking new author of First Light, who articulates so well, the struggle of being true to who you are. I follow both her personal blog and that dedicated to her new book. Michelle, I will read that book as soon as I can get it shipped to me on this Island Behind God's Back!

So I am meeting my fellow man (or woman) through blogsphere. Not a bad place for like minds to "link up." For so long this bog has been a secret shared only with close friends and family... it's good to share it now with others.

I hear that stats show that most blogs are wirtten by well-educated people who often have another source of income and happen to be men. I disagree. It could just be that I have always unknowingly had a thing for women writers (even though there is a space reserved for the Derek Walcotts and Gabriel Garcia Marquez's of the world). Women just feel more and write in a way in which you actively share that experience. So yes, I have been consumed by the profundity of good male writers, but they have never made me cry.

A woman's lot is a unique existence that only other women or their very feminine, sensitive and sometimes gay male friends can appreciate. As we say in Jamaica "Woman luck deh a dungle heap and fowl come pluck it out." It means that we have been given shit luck as women sometimes, just the remnants of things that men don't want, and on top of it, the chickens rummage through the garbage to take away what little we have been given.

That does not say that we are any lesser of the sexes, but that we have a unique burden to bear. Every woman can identify with this. The burden of nurture and nature...and sometimes, societies and families that impose one more than the other.

But we transcend cultural and parachial borders, the plural experience of womanhood. And as writers and lovers of the arts, we find common ground that dumb separatist people cannot identify with in their advanced stages of myopia.

So, thank you for coming. Thank you for sharing. My heart is full.