Last week I took down my box of journals and put them on an empty shelf beside me. It might seem like a small thing, but it felt significant.

My long-term project, my dream project, has been with me for years. The first time I wrote creatively was in a creative writing class, and on 25 October 2019 I wrote a note in my journal: Idea from creative writing class to write my memoir – exciting!

There it was. The seed of an idea.

The journals came down because the memoir is alive again. I wanted them physically beside me in my writing room. Not packed away somewhere. Within reach.

And then I remembered that this isn’t the first time I’ve tried to bring this dream to life. In March 2024, during an earlier blog series, I set myself a 90-day challenge to “Finish my memoir”. I think I believed then that the challenge was to finish the book. Now I wonder if the real challenge was becoming the person who could write it. Because look at what happened in the years in between.

I wrote blogs.

I wrote poetry.

I worked on research.

I experimented with creative projects.

I learned how I work.

I developed my Creative Operating System.

I learned to finish things, release things, and let things sit in a holding space without deciding they had been abandoned. I learned that creativity isn’t always a straight line. And, perhaps most importantly, I kept becoming.

For a long time, I might have seen these things as distractions from the memoir. Different projects I was doing instead of the thing I really wanted to do. But what if they weren’t distractions? What if they were preparation?

What if all those projects were quietly teaching me the skills, confidence, resilience and self-knowledge I would eventually need?

The interesting thing is that I didn’t know that was what I was doing. I wasn’t following a carefully designed five-year plan to become a memoir writer. I was following what was interesting. What needed doing. What I was curious about. What I couldn’t quite leave alone.

And somehow, all of it was taking me somewhere.

Back to the journals.

Back to the idea.

Back to the memoir.

But not back to the person who first wrote that note in 2019. I’m here as someone different. The seed was planted in 2019. I tried to force the finish in 2024. And now, in 2026, I’m beginning to understand that perhaps I couldn’t have written this memoir then.

Perhaps I had to live some more first. Perhaps I had to write all the other things. Perhaps I had to become the person who could write it.

So the journals are sitting beside me now and I’m not looking at them as evidence of all the things I haven’t finished. I’m looking at them as evidence of the journey that brought me here.

I thought I was trying to write a memoir.
All these years, I was becoming the person who could.