A little more
Why I write
As a child, I disappeared into books. Reading was escape, comfort, fascination, a kind of magic. I was amazed that words on a page could somehow build an entire world inside my head.
Then, in fourth grade, I discovered I could make the magic myself.
My teacher, Mrs. Beard, asked us to write a short story every week. Before long, my classmates were asking me to read mine aloud. I was hooked. I had always loved stepping into other worlds; now I could create them.
I've never been very good at seeing the world in black and white. People contain contradictions. We can be loving and hateful, brave and afraid, generous and selfish, sometimes all within the same breath. Every one of us carries an entire world inside us: our histories, memories, families, fears, desires, old wounds, hopes, instincts, and the stories we tell ourselves about who we are.
I've spent much of my own adulthood examining those stories and trying to understand which parts of me are truly mine and which were inherited, absorbed, or learned along the way. Maybe that's why I'm so fascinated by characters who are forced to do the same.
Writing lets me take pieces of what it means to be human, pieces of myself, pieces I recognize in others, pieces that hurt, and turn them over in the light. I can give them different faces, different histories, different impossible choices, and ask: What would this do to a person? Who would they become? What would they choose? And then I can put those stories out there for others to read.
Because beneath all our contradictions, I think most of us want the same thing: to be seen. To be understood. To recognize something of ourselves in another person and realize that whatever strange, messy thing we carry inside us, we aren't the only one.
That, more than anything, is why I write.
