Why I write

​  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 a dysfunctional childhood of abuse and oppression. Writing helped me to read between the lines. 

The writer and her twin. Melissa is on the right. This is 1998.

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 wheels, let alone a bike. My mother hugged my sister and me with verbal “I love you's” and “you’re so beautiful." She used words to nurture in us affirmation, love, and admiration as a counter weapon to the cruelty she couldn’t shield us from at the hands and words of 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. 

Melissa, first grade, 2003.

My parents had just gotten a divorce when the Scholastic book fair in the early 2000s gave me my very first diary. It was even equipped with a lock and key to keep secrets. 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 as a child. 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 has already found 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, and how you can manipulate and control the narrative with metaphors to create a compelling story.

Melissa and her twin, summer of seventh grade, 2010.

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 across multiple media. I fell in love with theater and film. I took drawing classes. I excelled in the arts. I always had my highest grades in my English courses, 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 so much that 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 lies I didn’t yet realize were lies?  I escaped into books.

Melissa, between freshman and sophomore year of high school, 2012.

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 about my academics and started checking off classic literature from my school reading list.

​ 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. That is, when I wasn’t writing ten-page papers almost daily for my honors literature courses. 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 traveled all over the UK to study poetry, drama, and literature while studying abroad. I shadowed my drama department in dramaturgy after discovering my love for research, playwriting, and how 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. 

Irish Sea, 2019, final semester of college during study abroad.

  Even after graduating from college in 2019, I was still in denial that it was worth taking writing seriously. So, I stayed in school and focused on my passion for theater, in a state of denial that this was somehow a more lucrative, more traditional path to 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 writing process—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. I was fortunate 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, with my twin and my husband being among my biggest cheerleaders to date. 

Fontbonne University, MA Theater Arts, 2020.

When COVID shut the world down while I was wrapping up my master's in theater, I rediscovered that drive to write, as if 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 kept getting 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 completed a first draft of my novel by the time I finished my MA and MFA degrees. I wrote for an online magazine called the theatre times for years and interviewed artists from all over, from Ukraine to New York on Broadway. I worked at a local University during this time to take my first steps into the world of academia, even if it was indirectly through the fundraising and operations sectors. I kept exploring opportunities and expanded my career into business writing, communications, and related fields, in addition to university work. 

Melissa, age 27, 2023.

 I was so relieved that I finally followed this path 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 with my Master of Fine Arts, 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 went to new places for book research. I continued developing the draft of the novel I completed during my MFA. I joined the Writers' Guild and participated in workshops, retreats, and book fairs with other local authors. 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.

Melissa, 29, 2025.