When I was in fourth grade, my mother had become very sick, and she died when I was a fourth grader, and that had a huge impact on my life. I didn’t know how to deal with all of the emotions that I had. I felt scared, and I felt anxious, and I felt sad, of course, and I didn’t feel as if I could talk about it with anyone.
So I kept all of my feelings inside of me, and for about a year, I didn’t know what to do, and then when I got to be a fifth grader, I came home from school one day, and I picked up this little notebook. It was not a fancy diary. It was just a little notebook, and I started to write again, but I wrote in a different way. I didn’t write what happened to me. I wrote how I felt.
And what I discovered was that as I was expressing my emotions, I would begin to feel better. Writing is a wonderful way of trying to let out some of the things that are inside of you that are huge, and for a child, it can be a wonderful way to learn about how to express these big emotions that are really too big to talk about sometime.
So once I started writing like that, I never stopped, and I just kept filling up notebook after notebook after notebook.
