Lola’s POV: Destiny, Blocks and Curveballs

To say that my week has been hectic might be the understatement of the century.

If you’ve been reading me for a while now, you already know that if there is one thing I believe, and live my life by, it’s that “everything happens for a reason.” The events that follow, once again, reassured me this is so.

For the longest time, I’ve had to listen to those who have repeatedly asked: “So, when are you publishing your next book?” Courtesy reminder: when I published my first photo essay, I was 14 years old, and had no plans for a follow-up. Still, to others, I guess it seemed as if this new outlook on life, and the lessons I’ve learned in this chapter of my life I like to call “Lola 2.0” warranted a sequel. Nonetheless, I’ve struggled thinking I have not lived enough to have earned the right to publish such book, but needless to say, I decided to give it a go.

I’ve been tackling this beast for a while now, but this week, I hit the most significant writer’s block of my life in the middle of a nightmare called Chapter 3. I fell into an extended period of nothingness in which I didn’t even look at my written work and began to steer away into different routes. Then suddenly I had a magical moment of written goodness. I realized that when I let go of what I had been trying to force for so long, and I let my creative juices flow, they pointed me in an entirely different direction, and I loved it. This breakthrough doesn’t just happen in writing, but it can occur in all aspects of life. When you stop forcing something that is perhaps not meant to be, something new is always going to come out of there! I ended up writing something I would have never imagined I had the power to write. I had been so focused on appealing to my age group, and dwelling over “what would older crowds think?” that I was ignoring a good chunk of creativity that had has been a part of me for so long: poetry.

I started rapidly writing on my phone’s notepad, and as my acrylic nails tic-tac’ed away on the screen, I was wondering why I had never done this before. The words flowed faster than I could type and I was genuinely happy that I could get my message through in sweet, rhythmic lines, that could change the future forever. All in all, I finished writing in less than an hour, and a couple of hours later my work was copyrighted! You don’t have to follow the plan all the time, because sometimes, life has other plans for you and those you can’t resist or fight against them. There’s no negotiating with destiny. I can assure you of that.

So, still in my pajamas, I concluded my ever so productive day. And while I questioned my morality some zillion times before copywriting (mostly because I felt like I had sold my soul to the devil of literature, since this is not what I usually write at all), I asked myself: “Dr. Seuss made a living out of this, right?”