I began really exploring writing in middle school. At the time, my sister was undergoing chemotherapy for a brain tumor threatening her vision, and I was having anxiety attacks multiple times a day. I felt hopelessly out of control, and every wave of panic made me feel like a failure. I hated the reality I was forced to deal with, and writing became an escape. 

     I never submitted to anything, never showed my writing to anyone. My form of coping only showed by the stacks of notebooks and loose papers that accumulated under my bed. After time, I discovered I had a talent for the darker subjects, and I wrote countless poems and short stories on murder, insanity, and mental illness. In a way, they made me happier, because in comparison to the worlds I created, my life was beautifully normal.

     I continued to see writing as a hobby, not as something I could make a living off of. Then, in high school I joined a writing club. We had weekly meetings discussing any writing related subject, and a lot of ones not related. And in the last few months, we published a book. I held our anthology in my hands, flipped through the pages and saw my name, my words. I went through that book with the people who encouraged me to do something with my writing, reading every word of the stories that we had become so attached to, cringing at the tiny errors, but laughing, because those mistakes were so genuinely us, and I felt a new inspiration to write, not just as a way to express my bitterness at the hand I'd been dealt, but as a way to narrate the beauty in the world, and the wonder. I could no longer see writing as a hobby, but as an absolute necessity, no less important that breathing.