Goodbye 2015

This has been a challenging year. I have gained so much after a long struggle and a lot of work. My degree certificate has been safely gathered in.

 I am grateful that I started on this path, fulfilled a dream of working with supportive and encouraging Tutors like those at the Open College of the Arts. It has been fraught, difficult, challenging and wonderful.

It is that time of the year when, with the cold securely locked outside and the fires piled high with fuel you begin to look back; trouble is the path I chose is much longer than just this year. But in that spirit I have been thinking about the degree and those moments when I thought I couldn't do it. The poetry course was the main challenge - I find writing poetry restrictive and terrifying. There were moments (entirely of my own making) that I wanted to walk away and just take the qualification (HE5) that I had achieved at that time. How I got through that I am not quite sure but I remember thinking about advice from my Grandfather who always told me that when facing a hill you put you head down and so long as you take one step in front of another, regardless of pace, you have to get to the top. I think that is what I did - and when I couldn't move forward fast enough I read as much as I could.

Since the end of the final course and confirmation of the degree I have been exhausted, physically and emotionally. I never realized how much the studies had taken over my life until I got home one night and (my partner being on call and therefore not home for the night) I found myself wondering what to do.

The loss of my Dad in March was the emotional side. I feel the cliches of wanting another conversation, another (bear) hug or another bout of laughter with him as heavily as beast of burden. There is his voice in my head and I know how he would have reacted at my getting my degree - punching the air with his big right paw while laying in his sick bed. Then after a hug and a well done etc he would have fixed me with sparkling eyes and asked me "what now?" or "when you going to write a book then?". He always had his eyes on the future especially for his children.

So I am asking myself, as if he was still here, what would be my answer?

I have an outline to a novel for children (and even the idea for the second book) which made the majority of the project course. There's the title of the memoir of my life as a child growing up with an epileptic father, which has been in my head since I was around 15 years old. There is also a promise to be kept and a plethora of ideas, notes, half-ideas and scribbled observations which litter the papers/notebooks and files from each course.

My problem now is knowing where the start, what to start with; essentially putting my foot on the path again and starting in another direction. Now the creative life really begins - I said to my partner that I would like to get paid for a piece of writing in 2016. It was a joke...but then maybe not. Maybe that is my goal - not the payment - but the courage to get on with it and put my voice out there. Another hill, head down, one step, half step...