I’d played Chinese checkers, colored, and solved the word jumble in The Daily News.

“Nana?” I was spending the weekend at my grandmother’s house in the Bronx. “I’m bored.”

She looked at me. Then, she walked to the round table in her living room and opened the drawer. She pulled out a royal blue spiral notebook and a sharpened yellow pencil with a red pencil top eraser. “Write me a story.”

I wrote twelve pages that afternoon. It was exhilarating. Words, giving birth to the thoughts and ideas inside my head, came out of me like water from an open fire hydrant. My hand cramped to keep pace.

Those pages were the beginning of my relationship with writing. I have a relationship with writing. It’s why I write. Early on, we had a lot of unproductive time together. I was afraid, inhibited. My writing was weak. But, the more I exposed myself, the stronger my writing. Like couples prim and proper on first dates, after some time together, they will belch and swear.

Writing is the only place where I can hear the only voice that matters: my own. Even my internal dialogue—“Your jeans won’t fit if you eat that,”—is silenced. And in that silence, I can be introspective and make sense of what doesn’t make sense to me anywhere else. I write what I think and what I feel. I am visible. I am my honest self. And my honest self is my most interesting self.

 

[maxbutton id=”3″]