My passion for writing was born out of my love for reading. When I was in elementary school, my favorite activity was going to bookstores and browsing the shelves. I could have easily spent hours among the rows of books, smelling them, running my fingers along the covers, and finding a little nook where I could begin my journey through the pages of a book that interested me most.
I would do this thing with paperbacks where I’d bend them, relishing the feel of the supple binding in my hands. There was such an allure, a power, to the written word that deeply fascinated me.
My first memory of truly falling in love with writing came from when I was in fourth grade. I went to a writers’ camp the summer after that school year, and then in fifth grade, when we were learning essay writing and the five-paragraph format, I wrote six paragraphs instead of five. My essay was on the four seasons, and I organized it so that each body paragraph was dedicated to a specific season. As far as I was concerned, I had to write six paragraphs so that I could include every season. Though, if I had been required to only write five paragraphs, winter would have surely been on the chopping block.
As I progressed through middle and high school, writing and I seemed to part ways. I no longer told friends and family that I wanted to be an author when I grew up. Instead, I told them I wanted to pursue a career as a psychologist.
Enrolling in three English classes and not a single science class my senior year of high school was definitely an indicator of what was to come. Upon attending orientation for college, I got to schedule classes for my entire freshman year. I was delighted that I could take a creative writing course as part of the general education requirements. My declared major at the time was behavioral neuroscience, so I thought the class would provide a nice, creative reprieve from all the biology and chemistry I’d have to take. And it did, but it did much more than that.
Chemistry, which had been the bane of my existence since high school, got the better of me that very first semester. I dropped the class a month or so into my freshman year, and changed my major to psychology.
Meanwhile, I loved my creative writing class. It was the only class that I never wanted to miss. I even enjoyed the seven-or-so minute walk across campus from my dorm to the building where the class was held. Finally sometime in October, as the crimson and amber leaves fell, I did too. I fell in love with writing all over again, and changed my major one last time…to writing.
Nothing like validation from God
For a long while, if I would have been asked to pinpoint the approximate time I realized my deep desire to write, I would have provided an answer along the lines of “when I was about nine or ten” or “in fourth grade.”
One summer during college, my parents were cleaning out our garage and found some bins of old school projects and crafts that belonged to me and my sister. In one of the bins, they found an “All About Me” poster I had made when I was in second grade. On the poster, I had said that I wanted to be a veterinarian and an author when I grew up. So evidently, I had developed the love of writing before the age of ten.
At the time (and still to this day), my perspective of that innocent little poster I had made when I was eight is that it was validation from God that whatever I do in my life, it should include writing. Now, I am not sure when exactly I first discovered that I actually liked to write. I believe that for me, the love of writing has always been innate, as natural as breathing.
But is it really a gift from God?
My simple answer: yes. I am unable to drive and I can write from anywhere. My writing ability fits perfectly into the confines of my inability to drive.
God knew what He was doing. He created me with an eye disease, which rendered attaining a driver’s license impossible. For now. But writing is not impossible, and is something that I can do. Therefore, His purpose for me, which I believe is to write, is wrapped up in His plan for me that includes limited vision. The juncture where purpose and plan intersect is far too coincidental (in my opinion) for it not to denote God’s presence and power.