Same Ground

This morning began with the strange awareness that this is my last rest day. There is always something slightly different about the final day off before returning to work. The previous days feel like they belong entirely to you, but the last one already has tomorrow standing quietly in the background. Even when there is nothing urgent to do, part of the mind has already started preparing itself for alarms, routines, responsibilities and that familiar transition back into work mode. I woke up knowing I would be back at work tomorrow, but I wasn’t ready to think too seriously about it yet. I wanted the morning to remain mine for a little longer, so I opened Spotify and put on a ’90s mix.

I wasn’t expecting anything profound from it. I simply wanted music playing in the background while I enjoyed the last stretch of my rest days. But music has always had a slightly unfair advantage over memory. You can spend years forgetting something, and then a familiar melody begins and suddenly your mind knows exactly where to go. Some songs do not simply remind us of the past; they remember a version of us we had almost forgotten.

Before long, I wasn’t thinking about tomorrow’s work anymore. I was thinking about high school.

Not necessarily one particular day, but the feeling of that time. I remembered being younger, carrying notebooks around, still unaware of how complicated adulthood would eventually become. I remembered the version of myself who had already started writing stories long before I knew writing would continue following me through so many different seasons of my life. Back then, writing wasn’t something I analysed very much. I wasn’t thinking about whether something was good enough to publish, whether people would read it, whether the grammar was perfect, or whether a story had enough meaning. I simply had an idea, opened a notebook and started writing.

And suddenly I could see that notebook again.

It wasn’t some beautiful leather journal bought specifically for a future writer. It was an ordinary notebook with a celebrity on the cover, exactly the kind of notebook that somehow made perfect sense during high school. And I can still remember the Panda pen I used to write with. It makes me smile now because memory can be ridiculously selective. There are important things from those years that I probably could not recall no matter how hard I tried, yet somehow my brain decided the notebook cover and the brand of pen deserved permanent storage.

Maybe that is because they were part of something important before I knew it was important.

That notebook became one of the first places where I discovered how much I loved creating people who didn’t exist and then giving them lives complicated enough to keep me entertained. I wrote fiction stories by hand, page after page, allowing characters to fall in love, misunderstand each other, make terrible decisions and eventually find their way through whatever drama my teenage imagination decided to give them. There was something wonderfully uncomplicated about writing that way. No blinking cursor. No delete button. No endless editing. If I changed my mind, there would probably be crossed-out words, arrows, scribbles or something squeezed into the margin. The story simply continued.

I don’t remember every plot I wrote during those years, but I remember how writing made me feel. There was excitement in having a new idea and wanting to get it onto paper before it disappeared. There was something almost secretive about opening that notebook and returning to a world that existed only because I had decided to create it. I could make people meet. I could separate them. I could make somebody fall in love with the wrong person, give them heartbreak, make them laugh again and decide whether they deserved a happy ending.

Apparently, even as a teenager, I was already giving fictional people unnecessary emotional problems. Some things really do remain consistent. And then there was Kitchie Nadal.

She was one of my favourite singers during that time, and Same Ground became one of those songs that stayed with me. There was something about it that my teenage self found incredibly evocative. Maybe it was the emotion behind it, maybe the idea of two people somehow remaining connected while still being unable to meet each other in quite the right place, or perhaps I was simply at that age when every emotional song sounded like it contained enough material for an entire novel.

So naturally, I turned it into one.

I remember taking inspiration from Same Ground and writing my own romantic comedy with sadness woven through it. I wasn’t trying to reproduce the song’s story. I was doing what I think writers naturally do when something moves them: taking the feeling it leaves behind and asking, What kind of story could live inside this? From there came characters, situations, romance, humour and enough heartbreak to satisfy the dramatic instincts of a high-school girl writing furiously into a celebrity-covered notebook with her Panda pen.

Thinking about it this morning made me laugh, but it also made me unexpectedly sentimental.

Because I realised that girl was already becoming me.

She didn’t know it, of course.

She had no idea where life would eventually take her. She didn’t know what kind of work she would someday do, what countries she would visit, which people she would love, which people she would lose, or how many times life itself would become stranger, sadder and more beautiful than anything she could have invented in that notebook. She certainly didn’t know that decades later, on the final morning of a rest day before returning to work, she would hear old music and suddenly remember sitting somewhere with that notebook open, creating fictional heartbreak because real life had not yet taught her everything it knew about it.

We spend so much of childhood wondering who we will become that we rarely notice the small things already revealing the answer.

Maybe that notebook was one of mine.

Writing has changed enormously for me since then. The notebook became keyboards, laptops, phones and tablets. Handwritten pages became documents and blog posts. The stories became longer, the reflections deeper, and the subjects inevitably more complicated because I became more complicated too. When I was younger, I could invent sadness for fictional characters and close the notebook when I had finished. Adulthood eventually taught me that real stories rarely allow us that kind of control.

Life gave me experiences I would never have chosen as plotlines. It introduced people I could never have invented properly. It gave me endings I did not want, beginnings I never expected, unanswered questions, delayed plans, unexpected opportunities and ordinary moments that somehow became some of the most meaningful parts of the story. Perhaps that is why my writing changed as I grew older. The imagination remained, but experience gave it weight.

Still, underneath everything, I think the reason I write has remained surprisingly similar. I write because sometimes a feeling needs somewhere to go.

That was true when I was a teenager writing fiction into a notebook, and it is true now when I sit down to write about life. Sometimes there is an idea I cannot leave alone. Sometimes there is a memory I want to preserve before time softens its edges. Sometimes there is something I understand better only after I have written it down. And sometimes I simply enjoy the strange freedom of arranging words until they resemble whatever has been sitting inside my head.

Maybe writing was never just something I learned to do. Maybe it was one of the ways I learned to understand myself.

There is something comforting about discovering that certain parts of us survive every version we become. So much changes between high school and adulthood that sometimes our younger selves feel like completely different people. The things we worried about then seem almost adorable now. The friendships change. The clothes change. The technology certainly changes. The dreams evolve because eventually we discover what life actually requires from us. We become more practical in some ways and perhaps more cautious in others.

But every now and then, something reaches across all those years and reminds you that the distance between who you were and who you are is not as enormous as you thought.

For me this morning, it was music.

One ’90s mix opened a door I had not planned to visit, and suddenly there she was: my younger self with her notebook and Panda pen, writing stories because she loved them. I find something deeply reassuring about knowing she still exists somewhere inside the person I became. Life gave her responsibilities she could never have imagined. It made her stronger in ways she did not ask to become strong. It gave her losses she would not have known how to write yet. But it did not completely take away the girl who could hear a song and immediately imagine an entire story.

I think adulthood sometimes convinces us that growing up requires abandoning earlier versions of ourselves. We become professionals, partners, homeowners, travellers, parents, caregivers or whatever roles life eventually gives us, and slowly those titles can become louder than the person underneath them. We become so accustomed to asking what needs to be done that we forget to ask what once made us excited for no practical reason whatsoever.

Maybe that is why nostalgia can be useful when we don’t allow ourselves to live permanently inside it. The past is not somewhere I want to return to forever. I don’t want to become sixteen again. I like the woman I became, even with everything adulthood required to get here. But there is wisdom in occasionally looking backwards and asking what that younger version of yourself knew before responsibility taught you to overcomplicate everything.

My younger self knew that writing could simply be fun.

She did not need an audience before creating something.
She did not need every story to be important.
She did not need to know whether anyone would ever read it.
She heard a song, imagined two people falling in love, and opened her notebook.
There is something wonderfully pure about that.

Before we learned to ask whether our dreams were practical, many of us simply loved things without requiring them to justify their place in our lives.

Perhaps growing older should not mean losing that completely. We need practicality, of course. Bills cannot be paid with nostalgia, and responsibilities do not disappear because an old song suddenly makes us sentimental. Tomorrow, I will return to work. The alarms will return, the familiar rhythm will begin again, and this last rest day will become another ordinary date on the calendar.

But today, for a little while, I am allowing myself to sit with the memory.

I can almost picture the notebook again. The celebrity cover that probably looked much cooler to my teenage eyes than it would now. The Panda pen moving across the page. My handwriting filling line after line as I tried to figure out what would happen next. Kitchie Nadal playing somewhere in the background, Same Ground giving my imagination exactly the emotional fuel it apparently needed to create a rom-com that was probably much sadder than any romantic comedy had a right to be.

I wonder what I would think if I could read that story now.
I would probably notice every grammatical mistake.
I would probably laugh at some of the dialogue.
I might wonder why everyone was so emotionally complicated.

And knowing teenage me, there was almost certainly enough drama to sustain several television seasons. But I don’t think I would correct anything. I think I would simply read it.

Because the value of those pages would no longer be whether the story was good. Their value would be that they contained evidence of who I was before I knew who I would become. Every crossed-out word, ridiculous plot twist and overly emotional character would be proof that the instinct to write was already there.

Sometimes our earliest creations are precious not because they were brilliant, but because they were brave enough to exist before we learned to judge ourselves.

That thought makes me look differently at the things we loved when we were younger. Maybe some of them were not phases at all. Maybe they were clues. The child who constantly drew may have been learning to notice details. The teenager who spent hours taking photographs may have been learning how to preserve moments. The one who filled notebooks with fictional people may have been discovering that stories would always be one of the ways she made sense of the world.

Not every childhood interest needs to become a career to have mattered. Some passions simply become threads running quietly through our lives. They disappear beneath responsibilities for a while, then reappear years later in a different form. We may think we abandoned them when really they were growing with us.

Writing did that for me.

The stories changed because I changed. The girl writing romantic fiction eventually became someone who writes about work, travel, faith, loss, family, memory, ordinary days and all the complicated things adulthood places between them. But perhaps the impulse underneath it has always been the same: to notice something, feel something and refuse to let it disappear without leaving a few words behind.

And maybe that is what I love most about remembering this today. Tomorrow means returning to work, returning to responsibility and stepping back into the version of myself adulthood requires. But this morning reminded me that I am made of more than the roles I currently carry. Somewhere beneath all of them is still a girl who once believed a notebook, a Panda pen and a favourite song were enough to create an entire world.

I don’t want to lose her.

Not because I want to live in the past, but because she reminds me of something adulthood makes surprisingly easy to forget: creativity does not always need a purpose beyond the joy of creating. We are allowed to return to things simply because they once made us happy. We are allowed to write stories nobody asked for, listen to songs that transport us decades backwards and remember versions of ourselves without feeling embarrassed by how earnest they were.

Perhaps we owe those younger versions of ourselves a little more respect. They survived things they had not yet encountered. They carried dreams without knowing which ones would come true. They started interests that would quietly follow us into adulthood. And although they could not predict the people we would become, sometimes they left clues everywhere.

This morning, mine was sitting inside an old memory with a pen in her hand.

The music eventually moved on to another song, and the morning continued. Tomorrow is still waiting, and I will still go back to work. Nothing about my schedule has changed because Spotify unexpectedly sent me travelling through time. But something in me feels a little softer after remembering. Maybe that is the strange gift of nostalgia: it does not necessarily ask us to return to the past. Sometimes it simply returns something from the past to us.

Today, it returned the beginning of my love for writing.

And perhaps that is why Same Ground feels strangely appropriate after all these years. Life has carried me far beyond that high-school notebook, through places and experiences my younger self could never have imagined, yet somehow writing and I keep finding each other again. The pages are different now, the stories are different, and the person holding the pen has changed in almost every imaginable way. But somewhere underneath all those years, something familiar remains.