I am doing Meredith Lewis Creative Challenge every day for December where she inspires us to do something – and write something creative. In today’s challenge, we are encouraged to get drawing our maps. It could be a map of our life, something we want to do, anything really.

I love maps but when the time came to think about what mine would look like, I struggled today. In fact, when I look at it, it’s a bland map and sometimes I think that I have led a bland life because I can only think of my life in terms of ‘jobs’ or ‘school life’. How boring is that?

Maybe I need to switch up my thinking a bit and instead of thinking like that, think of ‘experiences’ instead.

Maybe my map should have been a list of place names that were experiences?

• Bully Bay (horrible bullying at primary school)
• Sailor Uniform Inlet (you could never get me to wear anything else other than this as a 4 year old)
• Turd Rocks (the day some random drunk guy took a shit on my favourite tee-shirt of my primary school house)
• Queensland Island (moving to this northern state and hating every minute of it)
• Chemistry Cove (studying chemistry and really not understanding what the hell was going on).
• Sailor Bay (joining the Navy)
• Wedding Waters (getting married which was the best day of my life!)
• etc

Thing is I can’t remember many of the experiences in my life. The older I get, the more they seem distant and I’m forgetting them. So jobs and school will have to do for now.

If this creative prompt is teaching me anything, it’s how I LACK the story telling gene.

Funny that this was the prompt today as over the weekend, I had borrowed a book about maps from the Beaumaris Library (and yet to read it).