I, like George Orwell, was a very lonely child who adults tended to ignore. My sisters all lived with their dad; my father was a workaholic, and my mother had a handful of serious medical issues and was mostly bedridden. I think the writing started in my bedroom with my barbie dolls. The only companions of mine when school was out of session. It was long before I’d ever put pen to paper, but all my barbies had first and last names, families, intricate backstories, conflicts within themselves and others, and most of all goals. I’d play with them sometimes for weeks from sunup to sundown. It was nothing like barbie was marketed as, sure I’d brush their hair and change their clothes, but I’d probably be safe to say that’s where the similarities ended. They threw each other down the stairs, got highspeed chased by the invisible cops that only I could see, killed the monsters under my bed, died and came back to life. They were knights and villains. Crooks and heroes. They were as real to me as any of my classmates at school. It wasn’t writing in a physical sense, but it was world building and escapism all the same.  

The pen to paper started when I wrote my first story in second grade. It was called ‘The Gold Bird Flies South’. It was about an obviously golden winged bird named Goldie (clever I know) who did not fit in with her family of cold loving cardinals. She’d wanted to leave her nest and dreamed of flying to Mexico to live out her days soaring through the warmth and letting the sunrays catch on her golden wings. She eventually escaped the frigid Arkansas winters and made it to Mexico after a series of bird hardships, fell in love with a crow who was a bit of a bad boy and hatched one egg, a daughter of silver wings named Silverbelle (the name was an ode to my grandmother whose name is EulaBelle and a spin on the classic Christmas song ‘silver bells’) As a sad twist of fate to Goldies story, Silverbelle wanted nothing more than to escape the heat of Mexico and live somewhere in the snow. Goldie was now faced with the choice to stay with her heart’s desire in the warmth or follow the one she’d loved most to everything she’d left behind. I left it to the reader to make that impossible choice for her.  

My third-grade teacher was the first to tell me I was good at writing. She said she could hear my voice when she read what I wrote. I’d never thought of myself as much of a writer, but I remember thinking it was the best compliment I’d ever received. That may have been the day I swapped my dolls for the pen permanently. By the time I was in my senior year of high school I had written almost a whole book before discarding it because it was overall badly written and a knock off the popular teen fiction books, I was fond of at the time. In my adolescence I was reserved in a different way than I am now. As the black sheep of the family, I used to walk a constant line between who I wanted to be and who I was expected to be, not satisfying anyone and ultimately robbing myself of any happiness I could have experienced. My characters were the opposite of myself. They were wild and they felt too much acted on their instincts and would have had any adult reader constantly wondering where their parents were. I wrote because I had no control over my own life. I wrote because it didn’t feel like hiding. I wrote because I needed an escape. It was wholly mine and I tethered myself to it the same way I had my barbies so long ago. 

As an adult I find myself more like Joan Didion in the way that I am also plagued with pictures in my mind, but my writing has slowed to a pace my seventeen-year-old self would be horrified of. Though my heart still lies in creative writing I’m a bird who never got free or at least found freedom to be an impossible goal. Though the circumstances of control in my own life have greatly improved, my new cage is quite different. Bigger. It’s the outside world that scares me. I watch the news too much and spend a lot of my time doom scrolling. Digesting what I can of it. Getting angry and scared and perhaps a bit bitter. A different mass shooting what seems like every day. Coral reefs dying. Microplastics in our bloodstreams. Billionaires and their talk of space and colonization that only the extremely wealthy can afford. I wish I could leave it all alone and go back to the barbies and the feeling I got when writing about golden birds. I could pretend I don’t see it, the people begging for money on the streets in the town that I live in. The headlines of Missouri criminalizing the homeless sleeping on public property, so close to where I live. The library in my own town having its funding cut in half. Maybe in a more peaceful world I could build a home for the images running through my mind. Maybe if I was a more peaceful person, I could close my eyes to it. But the fact of the matter is that I am not a peaceful person, and the state of the world in and of itself is not peaceful, and that simple fact claws at me. I write because I wish so badly that I could change the circumstances for others in a way that creative writing cannot help me or anyone else.  

Maybe you think that is a fools errand, but as it stands right now journalism is the only path for me. I write because I care so much for the world around me and when I look around or talk to people it seems like no one is listening and if they are they don’t see what the big deal is. What do you mean? We are all going to die. “We’re all going to die anyways, what is your point? Why are you being so grim?” Don’t you see what we stand to lose? The art and the culture. Children aren’t laughing in the streets anymore. What happened to us? What happened? What happened? What happened? We need a liberator? We can figure out how to liberate ourselves if you just realize there is a problem. There is a problem. There is a problem. There is a problem. I find myself so often wanting to grab people by the shoulders and shake them. Screaming “listen to me listen to me listen to me.” “Humanity has always been this way,” people say to me. “You’re lying to yourself.” As the whole yes, maybe, I’m not sure that’s such a long existence. People have found a way to make it work. I write because I have so many questions.  I write because I am not helpless, naïve maybe? I write because there is a better way. I write because there are things I wish to change. I write because I can’t do that single handedly.