About Time

At last, the time is write (play on words fully intended)…

For many years, I identified myself as a traveler, a teacher, and a writer.  Yet throughout recent years, I moved further and further away from any semblance of the writing self.  This may not be entirely a bad thing.

Middle School Me used to fill notebooks with tales of fictional friendships and romance (while wishing for such friendship and romance herself).  Young Adult Me filled journals with her own friendship and romance woes (while wishing for fewer of both), adding musings about life.  Twenty-Something Me embarked on a career that took her overseas and back again…and overseas and back again.  She still filled journals, but did so more slowly; living the adventures took precedence over writing about them.

Six years ago, I stepped into a chapter of my life that could easily have sprung from one of the never-finished novels I started years before.  With mixed trepidation and elation, I realized one of my many dreams and moved back to England after living away for twenty-one years.  The plot development that followed included meeting the man whom I would marry three years later, moving to Seattle, marrying that man, and bringing a beautiful baby boy into the world – among many other subplots set against a background of teaching and travel.

While the dust of moving, marrying, and new motherhood settles in Seattle – where it will remain for the foreseeable future – I can take a breath and shift my focus.  The Me who left for England six years ago is not the same Me who writes today.  I\’m still a teacher and a traveler, but added to that is another T: I\’m now the wife and mother of two respective Tanners.  And what I need in order to remain Me in the midst of the many cups of tee I juggle is to regain the writing self.  In doing so, I step beyond my experiences to live them more completely.

The time is write.