Ten Years Later: Returning to the Craft I Left Behind

It’s been over a decade since I last called myself a writer. I remember waking up in my dark room, sweating, not knowing what time it was. As I fumbled to find my glasses, and, as a 20-year-old mass communication student, instead of focusing on my studies, all I could think about was work—that I couldn’t write another line about the ‘Arab Spring’ the stress, the fear of missing deadlines, and the burning question in my mind: Why am I doing this? It’s definitely not for the pay. How could I write something that hadn’t already been written, probably better than I ever could? What sort of original idea could I bestow upon this world? That was what ran through my mind the day I decided to put down the pen.

It’s been just over ten years since I put down the pen, and life has always felt like something was missing. Writing to me was a form of escapism, the tool that allowed me to live, disregarding how ugly the world around me really is because instead of hearing gunshots and sirens, I would hear waves, seagulls, and siren songs. Instead of being a prisoner of my room, I would turn the ceiling into a clear blue sky where a blue-haired mermaid waved to me from a distant rock.

In the years without writing, the closest I came to that feeling of creative escape was through playing Dungeons & Dragons with friends, where I could once again build worlds and live inside stories just not with a pen in my hand, but through the characters I created. I found myself absorbed in their backstories and imagining how they would react to the evolving plot, and that reignited the missing creative spark; it made me go back to a time when I struggled writing dialogue, and I often thought, What if I knew about D&D back then?

While D&D allowed me to fill my weekends with some necessary joy, life did not slow down; I graduated and found a job in public relations, but Egypt’s worsening economy pushed me to my limits; the pain in my joints became so unbearable that I had to stop working in a typical office job altogether. This, combined with the growing pain in my joints, made me start to see myself as a quitter, not just for abandoning writing but for walking away from PR too. What else was I going to quit? The stress mounted. Eventually, my body gave up on me too. Diagnosed with osteoarthritis, I knew the typical office job wasn’t an option anymore.

As they say, “When it rains, it pours,” and while I might have some options in digital marketing, now, with remote work on the horizon, I’m left with one burning question: Do I still have what it takes to be a writer once more?