True Love

I am in love with writing. It is a lifelong love affair that began when I was nine years old, when my father first taught me how to connect sentences into logical paragraphs for my composition assignments in third grade. From that day on, I was hooked for life.

I wrote a lot during my student days. In high school, I was a senior editor for The Electron, the English-language school paper of Quezon City Science High School. In college, I took up journalism for my undergrad degree. On the side, I must have written a couple of dozen short stories, a novella, a handful of essays and a few poems, not to mention my handwritten journals. None of these will see the light of print, unless I die famous and someone takes it upon him- or herself to show the world how frivolous I am as depicted in my early writings.

But I barely wrote anything noteworthy after graduation from the university.

Well, there was this screenplay that I submitted to the 2001 Film Development Foundation scriptwriting contest, and a few fanfics as well. But after college, my writing was limited to monthly and annual reports, project proposals, minutes of meetings, business letters and other office documents. That went on for about six years of my life.

What happened to make me stop? Basically, it is economics. I just wanted to write, but it was pressed upon me that I need to eat, too. So I took a day job in corporate communications and tried to do more "creative" writing on the side.

That didn't work, obviously. So the last six years or so saw me plodding through the bare bones of existence. My hands were in corporate communication, but my heart isn't there.

Last year, I got so fed up with being half-alive that I quit the day job. To hell with it, I declared. I can write, I am trained to write, and I believe I do a fairly decent job of it. So I turned my back on corporate communications and started blogging.

I thought it was going to be an easy ride. Turns out, it was not. I have not written anything for so long that I have almost forgotten how. I was rusty. And to this day, I feel like I am still trying to get some groove going.

In terms of economics, I am getting by. Not as much as I used to earn from the day job, but we're working on it. It still pays the bills, and I am trying to learn how to market myself.

I love writing. I will remain in love with it for the rest of my life. I promise never to abandon it again, for richer or poorer, in sickness and in health, till death do us part.