And pretty quickly, believe me.
In retrospect it appears that I have had an ongoing relationship with manifestation from before it was called that. We used to call it wishes back in the nineties when on one New Years Eve, exactly at midnight instead of kissing my current boyfriend, I went outside of the chalet where the party was and screamed at the stars in the night sky. “I want a great love. I want to feel a great love, Universe! I am ready!”
Lo and behold, not even a year later, I was head over heels with this guy from a different country with a totally different culture and religion that I knew next to nothing about.
As it often happens with great loves, they either tear you apart, or you manage to jump on their back and somehow ride the bumpy dirt road leading to the turquoise ocean. In my case, I rode the bus to Istanbul to meet my love eye to eye.
It’s no surprise that I fell in love with the city, too, so I stayed. And here I am 20 years later, the universe delivering once again, this time even more simultaneously. But let me backtrack a bit.
We married a year later. A year that almost beat our relationship to death using as lashes our inability to communicate, the differences in expectations, and mainly because yours truly was going nuts sitting at home jobless.
It’s just that, as a journalist who doesn’t speak the local language, it wasn’t viable for me to find work. Besides, I was sick of being a reporter and wished to change careers. Mind you, that was not a common thing back in the early 2000s, at least in this part of the world.
I prayed to all the gods I didn’t believe in to find a job amongst people and get out of the empty house. My new husband had a full-time job selling plastic raw materials to businesses. It was a couple of months later when he threw the idea of becoming an English teacher at me. Me? A teacher? I couldn’t have imagined it in a million years.
First of all, I had a monstrous stage fright since a horrible experience in a theatre play during my freshman year at high school. Somehow, I had made myself believe that I could wing acting. However, as soon as I got on that stage in front of the whole school, I blanked out all my lines and ran off it. This would keep me awake for many a night to come. Second, yes, I spoke rather good English, but I wasn’t sure I knew enough to teach the language. My pronunciation was quite Eastern European, and my self-esteem in that regard was very low.
Nonetheless, I needed a reason to join the society again, so I signed up for a CELTA course. I tamed my inner demons by persuading them that I’d just do the course, and if teaching was not for me, at least I’d have made some new friends living in the same city as me.
It turned out that I loved to teach. Yes, there is a performance element to it, but you are the one in control, the wizard of knowledge, the almighty person in the classroom. So, I became an English teacher, and my career was quite satisfying. Due to the country’s specificity and the language teaching sector, I was able to teach a variety of ages and different aspects of the language. I taught very young kids – a class of fifteen 3-year-olds, this was one of the toughest jobs I have ever done. I managed to work at the preschool for about 9 months, and it felt like a huge achievement that I didn’t blow my brains out every night. I gave lessons to teens, which taught me the power of discipline and how to reason with unreasonable people. I taught young adults, my favorite age group. It was incredibly satisfying – my students were the most clever bunch of beautiful minds. They were studying to be future doctors, after all, and loved learning. And finally, I worked with adults who mostly wanted to get better at speaking, but to be honest, they never put in the effort, so they ended up improving with only minuscule amounts.
After a while, I inevitably got bored again, so I decided to resurrect my creative writing aptitude.
It took me a year to get back to something resembling professional employment as a writer. I did some pro-bono work for a few months in a couple of places, then started getting gigs. I wrote blog articles for businesses in the healthcare industry.
Meanwhile, our place got robbed, and my son started high school. So, I was angry and had some time on my hands—two essential ingredients for conjuring something up. That’s how the idea for a book was born.
And here comes the latest contribution of our main character in this story – her holiness, the Universe. Wouldn’t it be nice, I thought, to have time on my hands to write my book? I have it all planned out—almost chapter by chapter. I know who my main characters are, what drives them, what bugs them, and what will happen to them. Being a teacher means you have to write a lot of lesson plans, and I guess habits are as difficult to get rid of as they are to form…
So, this New Year’s Eve, I wished for time to write all the stories I had in me. What do you think happened? Five days later, I got sacked from my main writing gig.
Thank you, Universe!
I wonder what I should ask for next.
