What made you who you are today?

I wrote down my first story at age five. We were given one piece of small, double-lined paper to fill. I needed nine more. I grew up lonely but for the words. I wrote poems, stories and journaled, while also dancing, singing and believing the world was fair. I wrote, then directed a well-received play. Then, while still a teenager, I discovered that fairness was a childhood fantasy. I wrote nothing but university assignments and journal entries for nearly a decade. After, I blogged for a while, mostly pop culture stuff. But I was not a writer yet.

I did not call myself a writer until after my baby died. I birthed her alien-shaped, 174 gram body on my thirty-third birthday. After the shock dissipated, I wrote. And wrote and wrote. Words came cascading through my fingertips, waves upon waves. I responded to trauma with typing, and so after thirty-three years of uncertainty I was certain: I am a writer. Once I was a writer, the writing came. The faith it would return, the itch for it to return, replaced panic it was gone. 

I was certain: I am a writer.

A year and a day after my daughter died—Christmas Eve—we checked my daughter’s grandmother, my beloved mother-in-law into a hospice. I took the majority of the time at her bedside. I spent Christmas Day on the couch in her hospice room alone editing a completed novel draft. Mom was still eating so we thought we were in it for the long haul and I was a writer and writers write. She died the morning of New Years Day.

Alone.

A couple months later, I was pregnant again and the writing stopped, the only time I began to lose faith in it coming back since I identified as a writer. When my son was three-months-old I attended my first workshop in five years. I went on to take more. More and more. I did not want to wake up when my son left my nest empty having not written. But he developed less and less. It was my dream for a decade to apply to Simon Fraser University’s The Writer’s Studio. As we approached an assessment for autism and picked my son up early and crying from preschool every day, I took the risk and applied. As I got my acceptance, he got his diagnosis. Then I was engrossed in both The Writer’s Studio and my son’s therapies. I graduated from The Writer’s Studio’s 2020 program.

Writers are resilient.

We return to the words again and again. My hope is that you see your own story in mine, or perhaps my writing helps illuminate the life of another. I am no longer alone because I found others who shared their words. Perhaps because the words were always there, I was never alone. The power of story connects.

Come share in my stories.