My Origin Story

This week I’m starting a new challenge. Yesterday an email appeared and asked me to join Gabriela Pereira’s DIYMFA Book Club. All I had to do was click, and before I knew it I was part of something. Then, before I knew it, I was being challenged to write about my writing “origin” story. I love a good challenge, so here goes.

I was never one of those reading/writing kids. In fact, I never really liked reading until I became an English Literature major in college. And that almost happened by chance.  I wasn’t very good at my first few choices for majors and if I’m being honest, chose English Literature because the handsome professor made it much more exciting.

I liked using words like motif and genre and found writing papers to be pretty easy. The only hard part was typing them up in an age before computers. When I graduated, I put my writing aside except for the few words I strung together on proposals, press releases, and advertisements.

Reading took a wayside to watching television and shopping as I relished my post-college free time. Life was great and my mind deserved a break after the hard work I had accomplished at school. But just before I turned 30 my dad had a stroke that left him severely disabled. He died eighteen months later and I finally started to see things in a different way.

I found that words were the only way to process life. I stopped watching and began to write about my dad, my large family, and the seizures I had hidden from everyone until they revealed a brain tumor that had to be removed just after graduation.  I thought I had learned everything I needed to know while I was in college, but I finally could see how much learning there was to do in life.

Writing helped me see myself and the world so much more clearly. Today, I do it every day that I can and narrate the world around me when I’m not.