I dreamed of secluded fame, of fresh-printed books still smelling of wet binding glue and Emmy Rettino Kegler (or any of the many pen-names I came up with) embossed along the hardcover spine.
I filled journals, notebooks, floppy disks, hard drives with short stories and poems.
Writing gave me control.
I didn't have to fulfill any requirements, follow any rules I didn't want.
I could make my characters speak only in five-word sentences.
I could leave out any words beginning with S.
I could use em-dashes and semicolons fifteen times in one paragraph.
I could break the line here,
or
here, or
here.
I could have my happy ending. I could decide how the poem ended. I could choose who lived, who died, who finally confessed their love and who walked away to start a new life.
I didn't have a lot of happy endings in high school.
I don't suppose a lot of people do, no matter what the storybooks say.
I didn't have a lot of control over my life. School, even after school activities, are highly dictated by rules and regulations and teachers and coaches. And I knew something was very wrong at home - something beyond how physically sick my father was - but I didn't know what. And for a very long time I thought there was something wrong with me - and writing was one way to get down into the isolation I felt, the differentness of me, and imagine a better world where I didn't feel so unlike everyone else.
Writing was my way of knowing that what I was experiencing - pain, heartache, inner turmoil, transition, fear, anger - was real. And it was also a way of asserting that I believed it was not the final reality of my life.
I wrote because I believed my life could be better.
I had a few things published - no big deals, just poems or short stories submitted to various teen publications and contests. I made my first $100 at fourteen from a writing contest, and bought a portable CD player with it. That was the last time I openly shared anything I'd written with my friends - too much of the rest was unfinished - too much of the rest was dark.
I didn't write as much in college. There was too much going on - too many friends - too many events - and then this beautiful, totally new thing with this beautiful woman named Kristi. Oh, and too much schoolwork, I guess. I'd come up with story ideas and jot them down, but I didn't feel the ache to write like I used to.
I didn't think of myself as a loner anymore. I didn't need to write to change my world, because my world was really, really good. So I stopped thinking of myself as a writer, and started thinking of myself as a pastor.
When I took up blogging, I was writing to chronicle my journey through seminary. I still didn't think of myself as a writer. I was just blogging what's on my mind at any given time.
So it was sort of a shock, several months ago, to have one of my newly dear seminary friends say:
"You're such a good writer."
I haven't been told that in a non-academic context in ten years.
I haven't been called a writer in a very long time.
