I haven't always considered myself a writer. I was a creative kid. Always making things. My mom keeps a box of childhood things of mine and each of my brothers (macaroni boxes, cotton ball sheep, Sunday school coloring pages with purple-haired Jesus...that sort of thing). My box is definitely the biggest. I would spend hours in my room by myself listening to audio stories from Focus on the Family Radio Theatre. Even the memory makes me happy, brings back vivid images of Little Women, The Chronicles of Narnia, The Secret Garden, Les Misérables (which I was fully convinced was pronounced LEZ-MISERABLES and thought hilarious). I would lose myself in these stories while coloring unicorn fuzzy posters and suffering second degree blisters from my hot glue gun.

 

They say people don't change all that much. I think that's true. Though I think it's easy to lose touch with your inner child and forget how you were before you had to pay bills. I can still spend hours in my room by myself working on a creative project. I need to do it. I'm "lez-miserable" if I don't. I've tried my hand at many things throughout the years: piano, singing, acting, visual art. By now I've accepted I'm no performer. For a while I thought visual art was my thing; so much so I went to college for it. But...I don't know. I think I tried and tried, but never felt like I could communicate through my drawings. I felt limited. Unsatisfied. Even got mad at myself for having spent so much money on a degree I wouldn't use. But life is like that sometimes...nonlinear.

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After college I turned to healthcare. If you gotta make money, why not chose a field high in demand with good pay? I followed that path all the way through a Masters degree, and currently work at a big hospital in my field of study. It took about a year for me to become lez-miserable. Seriously? Another degree I spent so much money to get and I'm still unsatisfied? I have a good job. I make good money. There shouldn't be a problem. What is wrong with me? For how low I got, I think many people would have turned to medication. To each their own. But I couldn't shake the feeling that whatever was wrong...it wasn't me.

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That's just it, then. I lost touch with my inner child. An idea came to me. It was an image of a man eating his own stomach. Don't ask me to explain why. But I kept on thinking about it, kept on seeing the man. I tried drawing him. I couldn't get it...couldn't capture him. I tried to sculpt him from clay. No. That's not it. Frustrating. So frustrating. I spent about two years trying to bring this man to life. I never forgot him. I was convinced that whatever media I used that captured the man best was what I should pursue. The media I'm best at communicating with. Nothing I tried worked, until one night I decided to sit down and write about him.

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That's how I became a writer.