A Train Ride without my Apple Pencil

“There is no such thing as work-life balance. Everything worth fighting for unbalances your life,”

Alain de Botton

Not long after I published my memoir, I caught up with a childhood friend over the phone. Our conversations always run long—never less than an hour—a mix of laughter, life updates, and quiet reflections.

Somewhere in the middle of one of those calls, he said something that stopped me for a moment, “I still remember you used to love drawing,” he said. “You were really good at it when you were little.”

It felt like he had just handed me back a forgotten part of myself. Then, as if to seal the deal, he suggested I create a series of animal rescue picture storybooks.

That idea lingered in my mind, and soon I began sketching again—random things, whatever came to heart—just to find my rhythm, my art style, my voice in lines and colours.

For months, I worked with Autodesk’s Sketchbook on my Surface tablet-laptop, and it became my comfort zone. Then, about a month ago, my daughter, in her quiet thoughtfulness, offered me her iPad.

“You’ll do even better with Procreate,” she said.

And she was right. Since then, the iPad has gone everywhere with me—cafés, parks, train rides, waiting rooms—a silent companion that always kept my hands busy and my imagination alive.

When I commit to something, I am relentless. There will be no work-life balance, everything else gets tossed into oblivion. And that’s exactly what happened. I drew day and night, letting the world shrink to the size of my screen.

But today, I’m travelling without it.

The train hummed, the scenery glided by, and my fingers fidgeted for the Apple Pencil that wasn’t there. I felt oddly restless, as though I left behind a piece of my creative self.

So, I opened a book instead. Remember my Kindle? I’m still going everywhere with it. And just like that, I was reacquainting myself with another love, reading.

Maybe that’s what today is meant to be: a quiet reminder that creativity doesn’t only live in lines and colours, but also in the words that once made me dream.

It’s funny how something as small as leaving an iPad behind can pull us back into balance. I realised that every obsession, even the creative kind, can blur the edges of life until there’s room for nothing else.

Today, I’m learning to pause, to draw when I can, read when I can’t, and let both feed the same soul.