The thing I was really good at

I grew up the 8th of 10 kids — eight boys, then finally, when I was twelve, a sister. For most of my childhood it was just me and all those brothers, and it was made very clear, in the quiet way these things get made clear, whose interests came first.

Maybe it was just a case of majority rule. Who knows — but they went to football. I drove myself to music lessons. I was eleven.

I didn’t mind, really. Because music turned out to be mine. Properly mine, in a way nothing else was. I loved the electric guitar. I loved singing — though I never once had a lesson, and who knows if I could even sing. I loved loud rock music, the kind that fills up a room and doesn’t apologise for it.

Later, in high school, I studied music for a few years and found classical and other genres, and came to understand how much I also loved classical, country and rap. I kept playing long after I was the only one who cared whether I did.

Even once I had small children of my own, I’d still pick up the guitar. It was loud, and small children don’t always love loud, and somewhere in there I was told — not asked, told — that what I was doing didn’t really fit anymore. Did it.

So I stopped. Not “played less.” Stopped. Put it down and never picked it back up.

Here’s the strange part, the part I didn’t expect when I sat down to write this: I don’t really listen to music like I used to, either. Not just the guitar — something wider than that went quiet too.

I’ve thought about why, and the honest answer is I’m not entirely sure. I just know that somewhere between being the girl who drove herself to lessons and the woman who put the guitar down for good, I stopped. And I didn’t even notice it happening. It’s only now, at 64, when I look back, I see what I gave up.

I’m telling you this because it’s one of the questions in Not Done Yet — “the thing you were really good at” — and I don’t think you can write a journal that asks other women that question without being honest about your own answer first.

I don’t have a tidy ending for this one. I haven’t picked the guitar back up. I don’t know yet if I will. But naming it, actually writing it down, feels like the first honest step back toward whatever that was.

If there’s a version of this sitting in you too — the thing you were good at, before you got busy being everything to everyone else — that’s exactly what this journal is for.