As in any life, there has been family crises’ and deaths of loved ones that have had profound effects on my development. Through thick and thin, however, I find that I have been very fortunate to have felt true support from my family and friends and believe that I have grown into a person that trusts myself enough to do what is required to accomplish my goals.

When people tell me that I am a good writer, I never believe them but I write quite often. Most of my writing, however, is an array of useless facts and quirky statistics. Did you know that the average person swallows over six spiders a year? If you did, then I find it oddly comforting that I’m not the only one trying to find a way to wire my jaw shut at night. There are 86,400 seconds in a day and I spend them writing, thinking, and hoping to solve the new mysteries that conjure up in my head. Ask my journals if you don’t believe me: filled with chicken scratch and horrible attempts at poetry, they prove the perpetuity of my inquiry. When I was eight, I found out that the world is approximately 6,588,000,0000,000,000,000 tons. My dad soon grew sick of my inquisitiveness and told me to write everything down. Soon, my pink barbie journal became the place in which I express my deepest thoughts, concerns, and dilemmas. Most of my ideas slip out of my mouth unintentionally so I figured that this way, they would be written down rather than preached out loud.

Consequently, my truest insecurities, most personal interests, and best and worst memories lie between the margins of my fuchsia Barbie notebook found in the bottom of my underwear drawer.

A joy that painters find in messy pastels, I find in words. With one stroke of the paintbrush an artist makes a permanent mark, unable to erased or deleted. With a pen or pencil, however, I can create something magical just by the choice of one special word. When I found out that I had a stepsister who I had never met, my pencil tore away at the pages of my beat down book. When I watched my sister fall in love and get married, I recorded every feeling that I had in my book. Thank god for John Loud, the inventor of the ballpoint pen, without whom I may have imploded and instead of journals, cluttered stones and clay tablets would take up closet space. I wouldn't have survived in earlier times, where writing what you felt wasn’t always acceptable and practical. That’s probably why hysteria and mental illness struck people; they were incapable of releasing their brainwork in any other way than speaking. I can’t imagine a world that’s starving for ingenuity; I know I would have been among the “crazies.”