The journey of a pen

 THIS WEEK’S WINNER

MANILA, Philippines - Rachel Ramos-Abadiano is a lawyer engaged in private practice. A wife and mother to a four-year-old precocious girl, she dabbles in writing and has published articles in a women’s magazine.   She also maintains a blog.

For as long as I can remember I have always loved to read. There were times when I would be cooped up the whole day in the house with books as my only company. 

I do not know how this love affair with the written word began, but I do recall that my father exposed us early on to the joys of reading. At a time when most girls my age were reading Nancy Drew, I had already known about the exploits of Jason Bourne in The Bourne Identity. But, I must admit, I could hardly understand most of what was in there. I only knew that the hero was an amnesiac spy.

In time, my taste evolved but constant always was my predilection for whodunit novels. I read the books of Agatha Christie, Mary Higgins Clark, Perry Mason, and so many others that kept the identity of the antagonist hidden until the very last pages. The harder it was for me to guess who it was, the better I thought of the book. In time I came to know the habits of Monsieur Hercules Poirot, the hero with the fancy moustache of Agatha Christie in her mystery thrillers and imagined myself in his shoes. But, try as I might, I could never guess who the killer was amid all the red herrings strewn about. 

 On self-analysis (Freudian slips aside), I guess it was because I was so shy then that I took comfort in reading. Books, in a way, became a substitute for socialization, a skill I sorely lacked back then. I spent more waking hours reading then being with people. Books became my refuge and my world. However, as I grew older and had more friends, as I enjoyed their company more and my shyness slowly dissipated, I came to read less and less, a comfort blanket that had outlived its usefulness. It was at this time that the desire to write bore fruit. While this desire would dim through the years, the words of my high school English teacher who is now the president of a state university would sometimes ring in my head: “Try writing, I can see that you have it in you.” (Or words to that effect; embellishments could be due to my rosy memory.)

I started with poems of a few lines. But as I read them I would just laugh at myself. They sounded too cliché, corny and sometimes downright ridiculous. But, silly as they may have been, those first attempts at poetry taught me a very important lesson: that writing must come from the heart. It was in those instances when I was truly honest that I was most satisfied with what I wrote. It was also when I was down that I could wax almost lyrical in my words. Truly, it is in the pathos and ethos of extreme emotions that one can make his most wonderful creations. Is it any wonder then that Van Gogh, Ernest Hemingway and Picasso wrote and painted their masterpieces on the edges of mad genius?

But I am no Hemingway, not even a whisper close, and in those early days when I decided I wanted to write I encountered so many difficulties along the way. I remember in college, the reaction paper I was required to submit took so long to finish. I could write but writing lengthily was simply hard for me. I was confined to a few paragraphs; anything longer than one page took tremendous effort. I carried on this way. I could author passable, and when inspiration really struck, sometimes good prose that was never longer than a page, until the day that would change my life profoundly. No, I was not struck by lightning. I joined the ranks of lawyers. Right, there’s no evident connection there (see, I’m starting to write as if I’m making a brief). 

The legal profession soon instilled in me the discipline that was sorely lacking in my literary forays. There were deadlines to meet and briefs and pleadings to be filed and one page just wouldn’t do it. I was also exposed to the profundity of the justices’ language in their decisions as I made my research for relevant jurisprudence in my cases. The fluidity of the language of their rulings guided me to arrange my words so it came in one smooth flow of a read. More importantly (there I go again, this looks more and more like a pleading), I was not now writing for myself but for a client whose fate (well, partly, of course) would now depend on how well I could plead his case in court.

I now had an advocacy and, like the wind that turned the mills around, it spurred me on. From one-pagers, my pleadings came to be as long as 30 pages. The words just kept coming and from trying to squeeze in as many as I could, I now had to rein myself in or I stood the danger of being redundant, or worse, boring, which brings me at last to the reason why I started to write again and how it came to be.

Pleadings are fine and briefs (think “bikini” principle: keep it short and brief but big enough to cover the subject matter), for as long as they stay true to their name, does me great service most especially for my profession. But there comes a point when you start to long again for the freedom to write solely for yourself, for the sheer pleasure of having your thoughts expressed as finely as you can with no considerations other than the satisfaction of reading what to you is a reflection of your heart, mind and soul. 

So I began to read again, this time with the maturity of my years, and unlike my juvenile days of just plain enjoying the text and the story, I came to empathize with the characters and in most instances recognized some of the emotions that reflected my own.   Writing soon beckoned, the kind where jurisprudence, laws and legal argumentation were hardly mentioned, the kind where, instead of law books, my only references were my heart, life and my imagination. 

My love affair with my “childhood sweetheart” had come full circle.