A Place Where I Had A Voice

Before writing was ever a goal, it was an escape.

I was an introvert kid, the kind with a whole conversation running in her head who let maybe two sentences of it out loud. Rooms full of people made me smaller. But a blank page had no room limit. On paper I could go on and on and on, and nobody interrupted me, and nobody moved to the next topic before I was finished.

So I built things there. Fantasy lands with their own rules and their own weather. Inventions that solved problems nobody had asked me to solve. I gave myself a superpower and then invented the trouble that required it. I traveled, though not the suitcase kind. I mean the kind where a girl who hadn't been many places could stand in the middle of somewhere she made up and know every street on it.

For the longest time, I saw writing as nothing more than an outlet. A place to speak up when I didn't feel like I had a voice in person. Out loud, I felt like what I said didn't matter. But on my paper at school, it mattered. It was being graded. I was a high achiever, so it clicked fast: this is something I could be great at.

Mrs. Thomas, my honors English teacher, and Mrs. Caffrey, my honors history teacher, are the ones who whipped me into shape. They gave me structure, taught me to outline before I wrote, and drilled the importance of timing. Because I loved writing, I could go forever, so they made sure I learned to be detail-oriented and concise at the same time. That tension has never fully left me.

When Writing Stopped Being Fun

In school, writing was where I was careful. I took my time. I was detailed, and I tried my hardest to address every single point. My problem was always over-explaining. I wanted to leave nothing unsaid, which meant I said a lot.

Then came higher education, and with it, essays. Season after season of them. Prompts I didn't choose, arguments I didn't care about, formats that flattened whatever voice I'd built. Somewhere in there, I fell out of love with writing. It stopped being the place I went and became one more thing due Sunday night.

If it weren't for my journals, I'm not sure that love would have survived. Journals were the one place still mine: ungraded, unassigned, unread. That's where I kept writing even during the years I would have told you I didn't write anymore.

Working in the behavioral health space, I started seeing the same thing on a much larger scale. It wasn't just me. Writing is one of the quietest, most powerful coping tools people have. Something happens when a thought moves out of your head and onto a page. It becomes something you can look at instead of something looking at you. Journaling helps people notice their triggers and see patterns they'd have sworn weren't there. It slows a spiral down long enough to interrupt it. It gives language to feelings that had only been pressure before. I watched people work through grief, anger, and fear in notebooks and actually get somewhere.

At the beginning of this year, after a few humps of my own, I wrote an article to encourage myself. It was about how much of our conflict and frustration in relationships comes from wanting to change other people instead of being willing to examine ourselves, and how we reach for control over outcomes and situations to avoid confronting our own fears and insecurities.

I finished it and realized I had written something that mattered. That lit a flame under me.

The Turn

I sat down and tried to reconnect with the things I loved as a child, and writing was sitting right at the top of the list, waiting.

I started where I always start: with a problem that needed solving. An everyday one. A human one. And I thought about the dark.

I was terrified of the dark growing up. Genuinely. When I turned that over as an adult, I finally saw what had been happening. Nothing in my room ever changed when the light went off. The shape by the door was a shape by the door at three in the afternoon, too. The fear was never in the dark; it was in what my imagination did with the dark once I gave it room. Those stupid little fears we carry are nothing more than gassed-up figments of our own imagination.

That became The Night I Got Brave. I wanted it to be relatable, because I wanted a kid to open it and see themself. But I also wanted to show how a fear gets exacerbated, and how we feed it until it's bigger than the thing itself. The message isn't "don't be afraid." It is completely normal to be afraid. The message is that we are bigger than the thing we fear itself. That's what I want the next generation to have.

What I Write Now

I write all kinds of things, and I've stopped worrying about staying in one lane. Here's what I've learned: all writing is finding a problem and getting to a solution, in whatever way you see fit. Fiction or nonfiction, picture book or essay, the job is the same. That reframe made writing fun again and gave me somewhere real to put my creative side.

Practically, it started with short essays about overcoming, and the book came together right around the same time. I also wanted, for once, to stick to a goal. To finish something. To set out to do a thing and actually do it. Watching it come to fruition has been nothing short of a blessing.

What I won't do is put something out just to say I wrote a book. Whatever I make, I want it to shift someone's outlook or hand them something they can actually apply, learn from, and grow with. If a reader closes it exactly the same as they opened it, I didn't do my job.

That's why I'm here, and that's what you can expect from this blog.

My children's book, The Night I Got Brave, is out now on Amazon. If this story resonated with you, or if there's a little one in your life who bargains for one more minute with the hall light on, grab a copy here. And if you've already read it, please like, share, and leave a review. Reviews are how small books find the kids who need them.