photosynthesis ( or its respective aliases mari's farm or glashaut photo diary ) has been a photo diary for almost 9 years now if i am remembering correctly. until now i've been okay with it being just that, a visual documentation about my life. and while i'm pretty bad at keeping up ( i'm still posting about happenings from half a year ago, dude! ) and often only post once in in a week mostly, i have this idea in my head that tells me i need to mix things up a little, to let the blog be more of an outlet, instead of a purely chronicling device. i want to incorporate writing more, because when i was a kid i loved doing just that, all day long, and even when i eased into teenagehood i always imagined myself as a writer. i neglected writing in all those years past, as i started my apprenticeship as a saleswoman in 2005 and then moved away from home in 2009 and began my adulthood in a foreign city. i had less time to write because work was demanding a lot from me, i had to prove myself to my environment and pushed back my desires and wishes for a long time. even now i still have trouble to voice my needs, to imagine myself doing creative work instead of a more practical one. this sounds so pretentious, i know, since i still work a retail job i am not exactly happy with and am searching for a way out of this mess, a search that didn't bear any fruits yet. but i needed to begin with something, anything, so i went back in time, thinking about what i loved to do when i was kid. there was the time when i wanted to be a singer, but of course i discovered that my voice was not beautiful enough to get more into singing. i still love music to this very day, it's a life fluid for me, something that enhances my life and helps me get through dark and tiring times. i am okay with not being a singer these days, i accepted that my voice is not exactly pleasurable. there was another time i wanted to be an actress, but i dismissed this profession pretty early, a lack of beauty and talent helped me with realizing that this desire was unrealistic. so i ditched it fast, as fast as i ditched a profession as a painter ( for similar reasons - minus the beauty perhaps ). there were two things, though, that were a continuing part of my life: photography and books. photography stayed with me and it's my main creative outlet and the one i could manage to keep up well, even if it was just for this little diary of mine, nothing that touched more than 2 people. photography is some kind of storytelling, too, at least i thought of it this way.
words and stories fascinated me since i first learned reading at the age of 5. i'm pretty sure i wrote my first little story around that age, too. being a writer was probably the one and only thing i ever wanted to be for a longer amount of time and i was also encouraged to stay on that track by my parents and teachers. i had fun writing short stories, or developing more elaborate ones. i don't know what exactly happened that i gave up on that dream, but it was around the age of 18 or 19 that i slowly started to let go of it. i'm sure a reason was and still is the fact that i've been a part of the workforce since i was 16 and to be working in a retail environment slowly stripped me off my ability to fantasize as i experienced a daily reality check - if you want to do your job well, you need to focus on the tasks at hand and not steer off into a different direction. i also started to develop a general dislikening of society and humans, something that is actually a vital part of writing, because writing is all about humans, all about their experiences and adventures. i also questioned everything i was doing - which is often the reason why people stop pursuing what they want, i guess, right?
whenever i sat down to write something i couldn't find words, i couldn't find a story and it felt like all i could manage was some kind of fan fiction. i also felt like an impostor. i read good books all year long and it slowly dawned on me that i would probably never reach the level of ingenuity my favourite authors had. and then at one point my brain stopped fantasizing and conjuring up stories, sentences, words. i couldn't come up with anything anymore, my inner well ran dry, as dry as skin turns in winter. i couldn't fix it with skin lotion anymore. this was around the time i moved to wiesbaden. and it stayed that way until the present.
but now, as i'm still desperately searching for a life purpose, i want to revive this well. i want to start writing again. and maybe intertwine it with my photography ( that i'm pretty sure is not the most overwhelming in quality and execution and probably one more thing to work on ). one thing i always got frustrated with was the way i couldn't tell a proper story about the things i've seen and the places i've been. it's always been more of a description, an objective explanation of things i've been seeing and experiencing.
since i'm out of practice for years now, i decided to start a little project, which is inspired by rookie's weekly writing project 'creative prompts'. the project's basically a practicing task to get creative, they provide a subject to work on and you can send in what you created, may it be photography, art, poems, or short stories. i think it's a nice way to get started on writing again so i figured i'd try myself at it this year. i probably won't succeed in a weekly manner, but i hope to do it once a month at least.
so here's to a new start and rekindling my love for words and writing!
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