Once, I used to be a writer. Literally. I wrote with a fountain pen that often leaked, until people returning from the Gulf brought Hero pens as gifts. Many in my generation remember the delight of that ritual and, of course, the small frustrations that accompanied it. My earliest published stories were scribbled on wan, inexpensive paper so porous that the ink spread like an untamed mob. On those fragile pages flowed the ideas that became poems, stories, and my earliest features in print.
There was nothing dramatic about the way I wrote, nothing like the exaggerated portrayals in films. No paper balls flung to the floor in irritation, no drifting asleep at the desk mid-sentence, no tortured artistic frenzy. Just a young girl, a leaky pen, a stack of newsprint, and sentences written, scored, and rewritten until each thought was conclusively shaped in a final draft. The brain and the hand worked in collaborative sync, as if engaged in a steady, thoughtful tango that never missed a step.
I am not a writer any longer. Now I am a typist. That realisation unsettles me deeply. It gives me the strange feeling of having transformed into a machine that releases words from someplace entirely disconnected from my soul. The brain is still in its rightful place, of course, but it no longer shares its natural rhythm with my hand, which once sashayed across the page with fluid elegance. Now I jab at the keyboard, and that is far removed from the act of writing. In those days, writing demanded intention, restraint, and patience. The hand took its time to be certain of what the brain wished to record, and everything was approached with quiet deliberation, because a ruined page never helped the morale of a writer. It made her feel diffident, foolish, and occasionally defeated. So we planned, structured, mapped out the narrative, and only then began to write with full awareness of every sentence laid down. Not so now. The delete button may be the most convenient tool on the keyboard, but it has also made us careless. One can indulge in endless verbosity, not truly knowing where the sentence intends to go. And then, when it reads like sheer bunkum, one simply presses delete, as though those words never existed. Neither the brain nor the hand remembers the backstory of the empty page. Perhaps the delete button is merely a sleeker, more advanced descendant of the crushed sheets once tossed onto the floor. The crucial difference is that now there is no evidence of the attempts abandoned in frustration. I learnt my language the traditional way-through the dictionary and the thesaurus. I collected new words like old coins, writing them down, memorising them, and using them until they became my own. But I have put those heavy books away. They shaped me, yet now feel like relics of another age, out of place on an already crowded shelf.
Modern life has no room for such sentimental clutter. I also hesitate to call myself an author in a world full of writers from age seven to seventy. I barely feel like a writer myself, because I no longer truly write. Still, I miss the time when every story carried my signature and the rhythm of my long hand. So I will begin again. I will keep a handwritten journal, as my doctor friend suggests. Writing on paper, she says, sparks fading brain cells. It will be hard-my hand resists, my wrist aches, and nostalgia feels unfashionable-but I will try, taking small, hesitant steps back into writing.
The author is a Dubai-based columnist and writing coach; views are personal
