Day 28

Day 28:

It's now been almost a month since I started this project. In recent times, I haven't really been sticking with daily things for that long, especially through adversities like not being here for 10 days. In that sense, I think I've been doing rather well. Since coming back, I have also noticed that the quality of writing seems to have gone up slightly, at least, in my head it has. Yesterday's poem had a nice rhythm to it, and I found it easier to find ideas than it was when I started this.

Each piece is subjective, of course, and there are still many things that I'm not doing perfectly. I still find myself doing this as one of the last things in my day, for example. I have developed the nasty habit of putting it off, leading to scrambles to write something, which of course leads to less good work (what do you think this is :). But, more basically, I've begun to realise just how much English I've actually forgotten from school.

I'm not long out of the education system really, but I have to admit that I don't remember quite a lot of what I learned. I'd struggle to name all the subjects I took at GCSE, let alone the subject material. Through this and my work (which has also begun to involve a lot of writing stories), I'm repeatedly amazed, and somewhat embarrassed, at the things I'm not sure of. Things like grammar; the correct use of punctuation like semi-colons, the meaning of certain words, basic poetry forms etc. This is bearing in mind that I got a 6 in English (I think, I'd need to check, and that number shows how recently I actually took them). 

I suppose that the moral of this story is that you really do 'use it or lose it'. I didn't do much writing or mental math for a while, and my ability to do it has diminished. Like, a lot. It will take time to get back up to and ascend beyond that level, but they say that recognition is a crucial step, so this is definitely the right path. If you have a skill, especially if you think you take it for granted, keep working on it. If you don't, you might find that you don't have it when you come to use it.