Tackling Personal Essays
What I Gained From Entering the Medium Writers’ Competition
I was surprised
I expected writing these essays would be a toil. Put off writing them for a while. Procrastination is a favourite pastime of mine. But I needed to get my homework done. Once I got going, I found myself almost happily immersed in the past.
My journal, albeit electronic, has kept me company for almost two decades and keeping it up-to-date has always been a bit of a chore. Useful for checking dates of events, keeping reminders of forthcoming events, and looking up my dogs’ birthdays. What it is best for is ranting. No one can get to it, apart from me, and it’s a great place to work out negative crap. My poor partner has no idea how often I’ve called him every awful name I could think of. Better than to his face, though. And it helps me to see how often I am at fault.
So when I embarked on the stories, I thought it would be like my journal — a recalling of events. But it wasn’t. I went deeper into memory. I conjured up the past so vividly that it put me right back in those situations. It wasn't easy to return to the present, and for a while, it felt as if I were existing on two tracks — then and now.
My first essay on MWC ‘space’ was about a weird sensation I used to have as a…
