…you read your old blog articles? I do. I cringe so bad that I don’t even finish reading them. A few paragraphs are enough to make me close my Chrome tab.
I used to think of myself as an okay writer. I think I’m still riding high from my writing wins from high school – Jesus, that was more than a decade ago. At fifteen, I managed our school paper and I won a few writing awards. All that achievement got to my head! It made me confident that I was a natural, and that I needn’t write so much because my talent was innate.
Well, clearly that isn’t the case. The sobering truth is that talent should be nourished through constant practice. The part of my brain assigned to writing has shrunken to a nut. I’m back to level one in terms of skill.
I feel like this is a thing that happens to a lot of people. The older we get, the less we practice, and the less we do the stuff we used to love doing. There are too many reasons it’s commonplace (e.g. our education system, Pavlovian conditioning, ever-increasing responsibilities, consumerism, the system beating us to a pulp…), but it’s prevalent enough that the idea of passion has become a Holywood-esque dream. The world hammers us to becoming cogs in the system – uniform and utilitarian.
Is there a skill or a hobby that you love doing, but haven’t engaged in for a long time? What are your reasons for not engaging in it? I’m keen to know.
