As a child I used to write till my hands hurt. Letters to myself, to my secretly beloved boyfriend (who did not know about this role), to my parents, to friends and to the world around me.

I would usually not publish these letters. Not that I was shy about my writing. It was so fluid, naive and genuine that I am sure people would find them quite entertaining. I actually felt that they were not worthy publishing. That was my world, who would be interested in it?

At that time there were no blogs, no social media. Personal exposure was not as natural as it is nowadays. It was a big thing to write in your classmates’ notebooks which were distributed at the end of the year before going on vacation. A wrong word and that was it.

Few years ago I went back home and decided to take a look at some letters. I could not find them. I have also written a book and saved it in a floppy disc. I had written more than 150 pages of a fictional story. That book had just disappeared.

Nevertheless one letter remained. One that I have sent to my mom. I read it once and could not believe I was the writer behind it.

I remember missing having my mom at home, as many other children did when suddenly we realised that mothers are also people who actually have another life than just loving us. My mom was an independent woman with a university degree and with professional ambitions. Nevertheless that letter just broke my heart.

Perhaps I did not know how to express myself or I was just brutally honest to her. I clearly wrote her that “despite being a strange woman and almost never being at home, I still loved her”. I don’t really understand the meaning of “strange” in this context, but that sounded to me as if I was searching for a word not to hurt her and could not hold myself telling her how far away we got from each other.

Past the shock of reading a letter of my old self, I realised that it could also be me exercising my polemic way of writing. As a child, I used to be very serious in the classroom and at the same time sassy in my essays. Teachers used to ask me if I really meant that way, if I was being purposely sarcastic.

For me writing was a game that came naturally. I could not stop myself using that tool to laugh about funny things I noticed around me. One could say I was being passive agressive with my writing, when actually I was just telling the world exactly where my shoes were pinching.

Once I started making more friends and trying to be accepted to the group of cool kids, somehow I stopped writing. Still I did it when it was necessary and put a lot of effort to be neither ironic nor sarcastic. But that was not me.

Then I went to university. There I learned to write scientific papers. Again I put my whole heart into it. It was good, though not my passion.

And now, during my sabbatical, I asked myself again what was my real passion. I read books, articles, did some vocational tests. My passion was just in front of me waiting to be filled out. It was a simple blank page.

As my mom had a passion for working in a big corporation, I discovered I have always had a passion for writing. She was strange. I am strange as well. We both found ways to express our common awkwardness.

In the end I did not become a writer. I was born for writing, but with creative breaks.

I deeply believe that if I would have asked that little writer girl if she could have imagined to stop writing as she grows up, she would have said “absolutely not”.

That was her lifetime passion and no one could tell her what to do or be in her own awkward world.