Author’s Note: This was taken from my Personal Insight Questions for University applications. I thought it would be a good thing to share on here too.
Reading from a young age took me away from the drunken screaming matches of my constantly uprooted home and into a world of glittering magic. As a girl, I wanted nothing more than to immerse myself in the little worlds I built in my head. Rather than playing at recess, my friend and I would sit on the grass writing. One of the first stories I ever wrote transported us into another realm where I was no longer a victim of abuse, but a bow-wielding hero prophesied to save the world.
My passion for literature began as a troubled teenager watching my animated English teacher rant about the Flammarion engraving. With an awakening curiosity, I marveled at the pilgrim who had peered through the veil into the firmament. He made a crude drawing on the whiteboard of a man looking through a mirror in order to indirectly see the sun. This was the function of literature, he said, to see the Truth without becoming blind. This moment imprinted itself onto my mind, propelling me into a future of intellectual fervor.
During the following summer, I found an escape in Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own from the volatile arguments of my crammed home. The brooding winds of the West Yorkshire moors in Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights resonated with my own. Tim O' Brien's Vietnam in The Things They Carried filled me with the poignant trauma that is found in the atrocities of war. Within these pages, I found abundant truth and companionship.
My innate love for storytelling carried over into later years, and although the magnitude of my stories made it difficult to finish anything, my characters were with me at all times.
It wasn’t until I had been nearing the end of my two school years at community college that I realized I had always been training myself to be a writer. The admiration I would feel at the sound of a poignant passage was my inner voice instilling future lessons. Perhaps one day, I thought to myself, I could make someone feel seen in the same way Holden Caulfield or Jane Eyre did for me.
During the summer of 2024, after receiving loving encouragement from my partner, I declared myself a writer and began my journey. I started small, writing a 100-word micro fiction story about feminine rage in a religious, patriarchal society. As I continued, my word count grew larger bit by bit. I then found myself working on a 2,600-word story about a young girl trying to escape a house surrounded by an all-consuming void.
My imagination surprised me. I wasn’t conjuring up the same comforting fairytales I once did in my youth. These stories were unmistakably dark, gothic, and steeped in melancholy—even with the threads of hope I weaved into them. Each one felt like I had ripped my chest open, letting all the contents spill over in whatever way they must. It’s just as Ernest Hemingway once said, “There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.”
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this is so beautiful!! im very glad you decided to start writing, your stories are a gift :)
"to see the Truth without becoming blind" wow :'o