A journey to find peace

That awkward moment when you have a bunch of homework but instead write a personal essay for fun.

550 words about words, you can’t beat that.

I was once told that no one is born writing; with this statement I beg to differ. I was born writing. I did not have a pen in my hand, nor a word in my head, but I trust that I was writing. As soon as the words were in my head they were formed into stories. An ongoing narration of my own, and a fictional account of the story I longed to live. I would lie in bed at night and write new scenes, scenes of a girl a few years older than myself. She grew with me, and the youngest I can remember her being was 5, though I trust that I dreamed her much before that. When I was four I had plenty of words in my mouth and words in my head, but I yearned for the words on paper. I pined for these written words that I saw everywhere, hundreds and hundreds of pages of things that I could know, if I could only read them. I begged my mother to teach me to read, and she complied that very day. She gave me a workbook, designed for homeschooled children to learn how to read, and I finished it in a day. At the end of that day, I came to her in tears. “I still can’t read.” I told her, aching with the sorrow of failure. My mother smiled and hugged me and said that it did not happen in one day, nor would it happen in one workbook. She began to work with me and teach me, and very soon – though not as soon as I’d hoped – I was reading on my own. I learned to write my name in cursive so that I could sign my very own library card, and the library became my second home. I was at home among the words, and though I still did not write much on paper, the writing in my head intensified as I better learned to develop stories. The girl in my fictional story continued to grow and change, and soon she was seven years old and I had read all of the books in the children’s section. I moved into the juvenile fiction section, and I was learning new words and writing those words into both my story and the story that I wished to one day be my own. Soon the girl in my head was nine, then eleven, and I was moved on into the young adult section of the library, and into new libraries in different towns. I was thirsty for words. When I was fifteen I began writing in earnest, on real paper with black ink pens and the newly found sorrow and love in my heart. The more I wrote on paper and continued to write my own story in my head, the less I wrote the other girl in my head. I played over old scenes with her but she slowly stopped growing. One day, when I was nineteen years old, I realized that this is because my story has merged with hers. I am now the character than I invented before I could read. I have been writing since birth, and I have written myself into existence.

♥ Feb 27th at 3PM / tagged: writing. / reblog / 58 notes