My Wild Heart Wants To Write: A Journey Back To Myself

“Chase your stars fool, life is short” — Atticus —

Istarted writing “books” when I was in second grade.

They were never more than ten pages long and each page rarely contained more than a sentence or two.

The language was simple and straightforward (as the prose of eight-year old’s tends to be).

They were typically stories about girls called Jessica or Veronica or other names I deemed much more elegant than my own, their beloved horses and the adventures they had together.

I continued writing through high school.

English was by far my favourite subject.

I loved both reading and writing.

It was home to me.

Like curling up in a cozy nook, it was when I was the most “me” I could be.

I also had a passion for the environment, for conserving wild spaces and saving endangered species and by the time I got to high school I was a full-fledged environmental activist.

After high school there appeared a fork in the road: choose one or the other but not both.

So, I pursued an undergrad degree in biology and environmental studies and left writing behind because that was the “responsible” thing to do, right?

In undergrad life was simply too busy to write anything other than the lab reports and papers that were required of me.

There wasn’t time to pour my feelings onto the page amidst my studies and trying to figure out what my life would look like, not to mention exploring my newfound freedom.

Writing was something resigned to a childhood fantasy; something frivolous. And I was trying to “adult” (with heavy, heavy emphasis on the trying). So, while I continued reading, I stopped writing for me.

Fast forward several years and a few degrees later and I was a climate policy researcher supporting vulnerable developing countries in the global climate negotiations.

Travelling the world, moving from meeting to meeting, perpetually exhausted and overwhelmed.

Writing academic papers and policy briefs but never anything that lit my heart on fire.

The more I travelled, the harder I worked, the farther I got away from myself. I was running, always running.

Reconciling what I had lost was simply too painful to confront.

And then the world stopped.

It got quiet.

I could no longer travel.

And while the work never stopped — travelling the globe from meeting to meeting became sitting in my living room moving from Zoom call to Zoom call — I had more time to contemplate.

Eventually I began to write those thoughts down.

I published my first blog on the website of one of the initiatives I lead — the Climate Leadership Initiative — over two years ago and then another and another. But only when I felt inspired.

At the beginning of this year, I committed to write two blogs a month.

But very soon that wasn’t enough.

I had more stories to tell.

Every day I thought of something I could write, could share of my life that was relevant to my work.

I felt alive again in a way I hadn’t felt in a long time.

Listening to my wild heart brought me here.

I’m not sure how often I’ll write. I can’t tell you that quite yet.

It’s new and scary but it also feels big and exciting.

I do know that I will write because I can’t not anymore.

In the meantime you can find blogs related to my work with young climate leaders from the global South here and blogs related to my work on global climate policy here. You can also find me on Twitter here. I’d love to connect with other writers.

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