Come hear me read my most awful teenage angsty stuff!

My friend Becca is planning a Literature Month for her church, which is actually one of the coolest churches you’ll ever see. She asked me to send her a writeup about how the written word elevates, challenges and supports my humanity. I didn’t exactly do the assignment properly, choosing instead to write about how my writing does that for me. Here’s what I told her, and hey, buy a kid a diary. You never know where it might lead.

Writing for the exercise itself started as a recreational habit (recreational writing, I’d like to note, is not unlike recreational drugs, but it is cheaper) in grade school. My aunt (who was also my godmother) bought me a diary with a lock — we all know now how easily picked those locks were, but for a young girl developing her own identity, the idea that some physical place existed where I could put my most secret thoughts and feelings? Well, that enchanted me. From a really young age, too, my head had a lot of voices in it and I learned quickly the best way to quiet the chatter was to let the voices have it out somewhere. That diary allowed the voices to have space. As I grew older I realized I didn’t need to allow the voices to construct my reality, and I had an easier time with that when the voices had a physical manifestation.