I grew up in Illinois, in a small town, and when I was in elementary school, I was a really anxious kid. I was afraid of a lot of things, and writing really made me nervous because I was afraid of making mistakes, and I felt as if every time I wrote, I was going to be making mistakes. I also felt as if I just didn’t have an imagination, so when it was time to write, I would get very nervous.
My mom noticed that I was having trouble, and so she really encouraged me. She got me a little notebook, and she told me to keep a record of the things that we saw when we were going on vacation, and that seemed like a really simple kind of task. So I was able to do it, and what I found was that I really enjoyed recording the things that I saw.
That little experience of keeping that notebook made me then want to write a little more, so my mother gave me a diary, and that diary really encouraged me to write down the things that happened to me in my life. And even though I was making mistakes in that diary, what I was writing was meaningful to me, so it was really motivating.
Writing in those little journals absolutely changed my life, and I didn’t think at the time that I would become a writer because I had never met a writer. I lived in a small town that didn’t even have a bookstore, so becoming a writer wasn’t an attainable goal in my mind. However, I always wrote when I needed to, so whenever I felt something big, whether it was sad or happy, I wanted to write it — about it.
I wanted to record it, and I think that that motivation never left. So as I grew older, in high school, I used my journal to process all the crazy things that were happening to me emotionally, and as an adult, I still keep a journal.
