Finding my voice

So, I'm doing this free eight week online course called Find Your Voice, by Kristin from rukristin. It's about telling your stories and finding your story telling voice. Today I'm sharing a post loosely based on some of the prompts from week one: 'What is storytelling to you?', 'What are your favorite stories?' and 'What are you looking to get out of the workshop?'

I've always been a reader. 

Apparently my love affair with books started when I was about 18 months old and got a library card. I loved being read to, and later on I loved to read books myself. I remember an evening, I was six or seven years old. I had to go to bed, but was not at all tired. Sneaky as I was, I managed to snatch my flashlight with me on the way to my room. I had just started reading a new book and my plan was to just read a bit until I got tired and fell asleep. I read the entire book that evening (unfortunately I cannot remember which book it was). As a kid I mostly read books written by dutch writers, such as Dick Bruna (when I was very little), Annie M.G. Schmidt, Guus Kuijer, Thea Beckman. I also loved everything Ulf Stark has ever written. 

As an only child with divorced parents, I could experience life in a 'real' family through the characters I was reading about. The characters were my brothers, my sisters. I could feel what it was like to have your dad around all of the time. During my teenage years I devoured books about love. I was desperate for my love life to begin, but as long as that didn't happen, at least I had the books about Georgia Nicolson and The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants to keep me company. 

I've learned so much through stories. About how other people interacted with eachother. About what I wanted in life. About other worlds, with different rules. I could NOT stop reading The Hunger Games (I was commuting to the lab when I was reading this series, and I would just keep reading while walking from the train to the bus..), the Banned and the Bannished series, but most of all Harry Potter. My love for the Harry Potter books deserves its own blogpost, perhaps a week-long series. (just kidding. I think.) 

So yeah, stories have been a big part of my life. I just never wrote any of my own. And that's something I want to change now. I have no intention of writing fiction, although I have enough imagination for three - ask poor Imre. The stories I want to tell are my own stories. Our stories. I want to have a record of me at this age. So that someday, when we're all grown up and stuff, our kids can get to know their parents a little better. And I can read back and remember what life was like when I was living in Eindhoven. I want to learn how to keep those memories, without turning in to a traditional scrapbooker. Sure, I'll want to include photo's. I want our kids to see (and I will want to remember myself...) how fabulous I looked when I was 24 ;)

So that's my goal for this summer. Find my storytelling voice. Write about me. Find a creative, crafty way to document my life, without being a traditional scrapbooker. 

I've started this blog as a way to share my photos, but over the last months I found that I like to share some personal stories here, as well. It's scary at times, to share personal stuff, but scary in a good way. So here's to a ton of personal stories on the blog this summer. Let's go!