Sometimes I feel like I’ve forgotten how to write.

And for someone who makes a living out of writing, this terrifies me.

Sometimes at the most random times in the middle of the day, I’ll allow my thoughts to drift into the deepest corners of my mind. And in those corners is the fear that I don’t know how to write; that I don’t know how to start a sentence. Or that I don’t know how write a paragraph with substance. That I have no idea how to finish an entire piece.

Sometimes in the middle of the night, while I’m up settling my newest little baby, I wonder whether I have anything else left to say.  I’ve been writing about climate change for 8 years now. I have written about oceans, waves, contaminated well water, droughts, rising water temperature, low lying land, loss of culture, loss of land, loss of identity.

All of this I’ve written about and so I’m at a point in my writing career when my mind wanders to the big question: Have I got anything left to give?

Last week I admitted to a friend that sometimes I would just find motherhood (and life in general) a heck of a lot easier if I also didn’t feel compelled to share the stories of Kiribati. I wouldn’t feel this disturbing uneasiness in my soul that we are not leaving a world behind that our children deserve. There are days where I actually wished I didn’t care as much.

Isn’t that awful? I hate that I just wrote that paragraph, but I have to. To share with you lovely readers and to figure out my own thoughts.

Of course I care. And I should.

It’s our responsibility to feel this weight of the world on our shoulders. Because it is a world that we are all part of, one that we reap the benefits of and one that we will then pass onto our offspring.

Life is busy, I get that. With a newborn and a toddler running around, to find the time to sit and write this, well….it takes a lot.

And yet, here I am. Writing. With a pile of laundry placed conveniently out of eyeshot, dinner leftovers sitting on the stove and I still haven’t showered.

I am writing because despite not writing on this blog as often as I’d like to, I realise that in the deepest corners of my soul, this is my life’s work. Writing, sharing stories, exploring culture – this is what I do.

This is what I love and it ebbs and flows. And once I bypass the guilt of not sitting down to write, I realise this is okay. It’s okay to slow down, live life, learn new skills, find inspiration in new places.

And just like that, I have written something for the love of it. It has structure, hopefully a coherent message and I have gotten to the end. I’m not even going to read back on this and edit it, because I really do need to shower.

A life’s work. Ever changing, never ending.