Why I Write

My Story

I started writing to physically mark that I was here, breathing, and existing. I didn’t realize it at the time, but I needed to know that I was real when reality felt like a foreign concept around me. Truth was another language for adulthood that my childhood self didn’t yet comprehend. I was still learning to understand the guidelines of life and what it meant to be human. The rules of what was and wasn’t real, what was true or wasn’t, were owned by my father, and my mother, sister, and I had to adapt our definition to his to survive him.

As a child, I was read to by my mother before I could even comprehend the words being read back to me. I had a little bookshelf by my bed before I had my first training bra. Unlike my father, my mother tried to out-nurture the weight of his abuse with powerful words of affirmation, love, and admiration. My mother hugged my sister and me with “I love you”, and “you’re so beautiful” as a counter-weapon to the cruelty she couldn’t shield us from against our father. It was her way of surviving, too, as she endured the opposite power words had, their evil, leaving more bruises for far longer than any of the real marks that were left behind ever did.

My parents had just gotten a divorce when the Scholastic book fair of the early 2000s provided me with my very first diary. It was even equipped with a lock and key where secrets could be kept. My mind finally had an oasis to escape to when the thoughts that overflowed inside became too much to bear, and I needed someplace else to retreat to. After my mother escaped my father, he started leaving his mark on my sister and me, and our stepmom in the years to come. The diary was my way of remembering that I was more than a punching bag for his words and his fists. That I was still here, even when I dissociated far away, when I heard my stepmom’s cries, and the lock of their bedroom door at night.

There was something so refreshing about the kitten and puppy on the cover of the journal, a sense of peace in the hue of the purple cover I was fond of, that lured me to start writing in that diary. From that first page, I became addicted to the notion that my brain and I were our very own pair, that no one else could touch, influence, or hurt. I was constantly compared with my sister, as a twin, and this journal was my way of removing myself from everyone else. It was just me, myself, and I. Like the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, writing was my own religion. The rule of threes in literature, already finding its way to me. It gave me faith in an otherwise hopeless time. One year after I had had the diary for a while, a local author came into my elementary school to talk about his books. I barely remember what he looked like, and I couldn’t tell you his name or the name of his books now. However, I do remember him vividly explaining how weather can lend itself to foreshadowing in a plot, that you can manipulate and control narrative with metaphors to create a compelling story.

It was from this day on that a seed was planted in me, that someday, somehow, I knew I wanted to become a writer. I was so fascinated by this other world one could create; another reality all my own. However, even as a fourth grader, I knew this wasn’t a practical path, so I shoved it deep down inside alongside all the other dark secrets no one else would know, until I, too, forgot my dream. Yet despite myself, I found myself drawn to storytelling in multiple media anyway. I fell in love with theater and movies in school. I took drawing classes. I excelled in the arts. I always had my highest grades in my English classes, though, year after year. I wasn’t fooling myself, despite my best efforts.

When I began writing more creatively for school projects, I started letting the little voice in my mind speak louder and louder to me about becoming a real author. Her whisper was quiet at first, but she wouldn’t shut up. Every time I tried to shove the idea back down; she kept crawling back out to remind me of our dream. In middle school, I joined a poetry club during our lunch period and poured myself into it. I worked hard to read hundreds of books each school year, and read so much, the library was more familiar to me than my own bedroom, at either of my parents' homes. After my dad left, reality felt even more uncertain. What was real and what wasn’t, which truths were the truth, and which were just lies I didn’t yet realize were lies? I escaped into books.

When I got diagnosed with cancer as a teenager, I wrote so much and for so long each day between treatments that I began to worry I had developed arthritis at the ripe age of 15, documenting every scan and every doctor check-in throughout my healing experience. It was my way of screaming without a noise ever leaving my lips. It was my way of saying that I am here and I am real, and I have a voice that deserves to be heard. It was my way of saying, I’m not ready to go quite yet. I started documenting all my experiences more seriously after this time, once I was in remission, as I grew more serious in my academics, and started checking off classic literature from my reading list in school.

By the time I majored in English and Creative Writing in college, I had made up my mind. Somehow, someway, directly or otherwise, I would become a real writer. I wrote pieces about the college experience for an online magazine I was in for a marketing club when I wasn’t writing ten-page papers almost daily for my honors literature courses, and soon I was writing creative prose and essays. I wrote countless pages worth of material for my honors thesis before I graduated, and I fell deeper into the world of writing and realized I belonged. I did a writing retreat in Ireland and went all over the UK to study poetry, drama, and literature when I studied abroad. I shadowed my drama department in the field of dramaturgy after discovering my love for research, playwriting, and the ways this work lends itself to the stage. I wrote throughout the last two years of college, when I fought severe chronic illness, almost dying from Ulcerative Colitis. I wrote when I had to get disability accommodations for my college classes, while I healed, living permanently without a colon.

Even after college graduation in 2019, I was still in denial that it was worth the risk to leap to take writing seriously fully. So, I stayed in school and focused on my passion for theater, in a state of denial that this was somehow a more lucrative, traditional endeavor to get an M.A. in Theater to teach college drama than a path in writing. However, my main passion in theatre has always been tied to the techniques that stem from the process of writing. The act of research, dissection, connecting symbols and metaphors, and creating through stories. I realized after Covid that I no longer had the luxury of denying myself from the path I had been on all along. Life can end as you know it in an instant; there’s no time to waste. I was meant to be a writer, so in 2022, I was accepted into an MFA program for writing. I was fortunate enough to have a family who believed in me, and strong teachers who encouraged me early on in life to finally help me leap in the end, my twin and my husband being some of my biggest cheerleaders to date.

When Covid shut the world down when I was wrapping up my master's in theater, I re-discovered that drive to write like my life depended on it, because it felt like it did again. Trump took office during my twenties, and the world as I knew it continued to get pulled from under me. Gaslighting and reality became two opposing forces that never seemed to stop growing apart in their power, which made writing feel even more necessary for my sanity. I wrote a master's thesis on the impact of COVID on theatre and finished a full first draft of a manuscript of my fiction novel by the time I completed my MA and MFA degrees. I wrote for an online magazine for years, for theater, called the theatre times, and interviewed artists from all over, from Ukraine to New York on Broadway. I worked at a local University during this time to set foot in the world of academia, even if it was indirectly through the fundraising and operational side of things.

I was so relieved I finally followed this path in the end when I graduated in 2024 with my MFA, that I stopped living in denial and finally took my writing seriously. The program allowed me to solidify my knowledge and continue to make connections in the literary sphere since my undergraduate years. After graduating, I wrote poetry and attended open mics, began networking, and wrote more fiction often. I read hundreds more books in my twenties and traveled all over the world. I kept my day job, but I continue to write often and feverishly day after day. Now I am here, still writing, still working in academics, just trying to follow my dreams despite delusion, despite myself.

It feels like a calling. Maybe that’s just my way of staying in my delusion, but I’m told the ones that “make it” have to start with believing in themselves. Truth is, I think I’ve always known that the writer’s life was my destiny; in the end, it’s always been up to me to tell my story. I know I will, because I already have, and I remember every day that I am real, and that I have a voice that deserves to be heard.