I don’t remember the first time that I started writing. I remember loving music, wanting to be a singer and a dancer (both which I realized that I was neither good at). I have my old writing books from school—the ones that teachers made all the students write daily to practice sentence structure. I remember the books that I carefully selected from the library each week, piling up to a stack in the twenties.

But what I remember the most: the explosions of creativity I had when I was 8 or 9. The images, dreams and nightmares that crossed my mind to create landscapes of stories. Every moment I experienced then inspired a fictional story. There was the quirky girl captured in mystery of a death on the subway. Then there was the story of the kidnapper and the sisters that tricked him.

In my early teens, I lost the desire to write fiction. I was drawn to memoirs…and what we call creative nonfiction. The honesty and truth of reality was mesmerizing and magnetizing. By my early twenties, I was swept into the world of blogging and journaling. More than a decade has passed and I am still writing. Every day.

This morning, I wanted an answer for my deep need to write and I found it:
I’m trying to capture in language the things that I see and feel, as a way of recording their beauty and power and terror, so that I can return to those things and relive them. In that way, I try to have some sense of control in a chaotic world.

I write, because it’s my way of self-expression. Sometimes I say that it helps makes things unreal…and to make more sense. Each piece is art. It’s this is how I view the world.