I just do.

      I’ve been writing since I was in first grade, maybe earlier, I’m not quite sure. My most vivid memories are from throughout lower school, when we learned to write by copying down what our teacher would write on the blackboard. We wrote down full stories from The Old Testament, as well as fairy tales and fables. We learned about the Norse gods Frigga and Odin, and the Egyptian gods Osiris and Isis. We learned all of Aesop's fables and then some. If you remember hearing a story as a young child when you were being tucked into bed, I probably wrote it down in a large booklet called a Main Lesson Book, a collection of giant unlined paper bound in black spiraling. We created our own illustrations. We wrote in colored pencil, but never pink, never yellow, never green. It was always blue. Later, we switched to fountain pens made of wood.

      I wrote a lot, but it was never mine. I could never call it my own. It was borrowed, it wasn’t new. It wasn’t me. Sure, we did it because we were learning how to write, how to become real people who knew how to write. But it had nothing to do with creativity. I had to follow.

      And I wanted to lead.

      For me, leading meant writing for myself. Writing things that I wanted to write. Not copying down the story of Cain and Abel from the Bible, or the story of the Fox and the Hound. These were already written by those who existed before me.

      No.

      I wanted to create something of my own. And I did. Well, kind of. My first short stories and poems that I wrote were fantasy based, about magic and fairies and wizards. I took a lot of inspiration from Harry Potter. It was here that I began to lose myself in my writing. It's like I transported somewhere else, to a different dimension. But it's different for other things. For instance, if I’m writing a paper on Milton’s Paradise Lost for an English class, I need complete silence. Complete and utter silence. No talking, no whispers, no zippering and unzippering of backpacks. No keyboard clicks except my own. Nothing. Just me, my computer, and my copy of Paradise Lost. And if I’m writing about something that I’m not passionate about it, it’s not great. But when I’m writing something like a short story or a poem, that’s when it all changes. Just the other day, I wrote one thousand words of a creative essay in less than twenty minutes. I become removed instead of choosing to remove myself. It’s like a rush. I don’t hear anything or see anything until I feel that my piece has been complete.

      I used to stare at my finished Main Lesson Book and think really? This is it? But I now know that it’s not.

      It’s so much more than that.