Why Writing is My Life

I started writing when I was only ten years old. It was a poem that I wrote while I was sitting in my closet alone, listening to music. No, I wasn’t being forced to sit in my closet. I liked to sit in my closet. I liked the comfort of the small area. I still like small areas and feel more secure, but that’s a different story.

I found that writing brought me comfort so I started writing every day. I wish I had kept every piece I had ever written because I would love to read it all now. But, that first poem, I’ve always kept it and will cherish it always. But I always write for myself and it is such good therapy.

I was born disabled. I didn’t know it until I was in my thirties. I know that sounds weird, but I’m glad. I was born with club feet, they were corrected with surgery when I was 11 months old. I was teased terribly due to the scars on my ankles in elementary school but I survived — enter writing in closed spaces.

But, as a child, my family farmed. I would walk behind flatbed trailers and throw hay bails up on the trailer for my sister to stack and I work the never-ending-garden with my ankles throbbing. I would run track — not on the team as my parents wouldn’t sign the papers because the doctors had told them not to, but the school still made me run it during gym class. I would play sports in gym class. You know, I was a typical student — a typical student that tried to overcompensate and push myself over the limit so the other kids had no reason to tease me because of my club feet. Then, I’d go home and I’d find myself a quiet corner and write through the pain.

In my junior year of high school, my great-grandfather was dying. I was closer to him than I was to any of my grandparents and that is saying a lot because I was extremely closet to them all and actually still have one grandfather still living. But, I still had to go to school. I sat in class each day, mainly ignoring teachers with tears streaming down my face. He was dying of prostate cancer so this was a months long venture and one of my teachers knew this was going to be a long journey so she had an idea. She decided to do a class project.

Each day, for the first 20 minutes of class, we had to write in our journal. It was an upper-level English class, so it was an easy work-in. We could write about anything we wanted to write about. We could even say anything we needed to say as long as we kept it clean. For the entire year, until March 23rd, my journal was filled with my emotional roller coaster of fears of losing Pappaw Dock. Why March 23rd? Because that’s when he died. We were allowed to write in the journal outside of class too so I wrote in the journal constantly. That teacher knew every minute detail about the feelings and emotional roller coaster that I was on. So, that year, I learned to journal.

My sophomore year of college, I submitted a poem for a contest. Yes, I know, everyone wins and then you have to buy the book, pay to have your bio published, etc., etc. but, I don’t care. My name was in print. A poem that I wrote, by myself, on my own, all alone, was in print with my name. My bio is not in the book because I was a college student and couldn’t afford all of that but I do have a copy of the book and I love it.

I continued to write for myself. I have some psychiatric issues that I will tell you about in time, but I continued to write for myself to help me deal with those things. I don’t handle loss very well, so when there is a death in my family, I almost always take to the pen and paper or to the keyboard for a time, and I try to always write for mother’s day and special days for my family.

So, just for the curious, I found out I was disabled when I was in my early thirties when I asked my foot doctor if she would be willing to sign the paperwork for me to have a disabled car tag because it was getting really hard for me to walk from the back of the parking lot, get all the way through the grocery store, and get to the back of the parking lot. She said, “You don’t have one!” That’s when she informed me that I have been legally “disabled” since birth. But, you know what, I’m glad I didn’t know that, because I had one hell of a childhood.

So, that’s why I write. I write to be happy. I write to show others how to be happy. I write to bring joy to others, to educate, to encourage, to inspire, and to let others know they are not alone. I write for me and you. So, I hope that when I write it brings some value to your life as I know it brings so much value to mine.