Meaning, I’d come home to my second job: attempting to become a published author.Īt this job, all that faith in “writing being simple” would evaporate and I’d be left to drily stare at the blank screen, waiting for the mystery- that I actually believed writing to be - to unfold. Tsk, tsk.Īnd then, I’d come home from my teaching job to face my hypocrisy.

Hands clasped behind my back, I’d stroll around the classroom, nodding and smiling encouragingly at those spindly, carefully round, teetering, and/or colliding letters forming in blue-lined notebooks, satisfied that I’d contributed to chipping away at the fear of the blank page that too many humans develop too early in their lives. Working-silence would blanket the classroom, but the hum of two dozen brains churning and depositing their contents was also palpable. This is when most students would sit up taller, let themselves open up to the page, and pour their souls out. What comes to your perfect, one-of-a-kind brain when you think about this idea you’ve chosen to communicate? It’s going to be special, I’d reassure them, my spoken cadence now taking on an evangelical bent, because no one else in this classroom, no one else in the whole world, no one else in this ENTIRE universe, has the same things in their brain as you! Just you! Writers, now empty your brain on that chosen topic, I’d say, my eyes positively gleaming at this point while I hyper-emphasized “YOUR brain”.

Love from Mecca to Medina by S.K. Ali