I used to hate the idea of being a writer. If you had told my little self that now i am writing and sharing my work online, she would have been mortified. I haven’t written my thoughts on a piece of paper for my own pleasure until i was 16. yes, you read that right: 16…It didnt even cross my mind to be an author, a word which i despised even more.

I know i dont resonate with many people that have started writing for their own pleasure in a younger age. I dont resonate with people whose dream has always been to be a writer or an author.

My little self would laugh at the idea of writing my thoughts in a piece of paper for my own pleasure, and i want to emphasises this: For my own pleasure. Writing to me has been just a duty. I would write only when it was accepted by other people, specifically by school. If i didnt have to write, i wouldn’t write. I used to be “the good girl”: The top of her class, always delivering assignments on time, doing what was told, listening blindly to the grown ups. Though i didnt write, I used to draw and paint during summer breaks, but to be honest it hadn’t been art, for i only followed the rules there too: “Don’t colour outside the border” or “draw realistically what you see”.

And i feel that for the longest part of my life, I hadn’t let my soul be free.

Yet, even though i imposed rules on myself that weren’t my own to begin with, my soul still found ways to leak its magic into the work i put…

We always had for homework an essay. In that moment, I would allow myself to be alive: To pour what my heart and mind thought. And because I wouldn’t allow myself to write every time, i would pour everything i had on that piece of essay, something for which my classmates complained about, for they weren’t much eager to listen to me reading 4 pages of my essays. Indeed, listen: The teachers i have had demanded us to read our work aloud. And i am so thankful they did. Because, that set my journey of storytelling before i even knew.

Yet, they never complained about how i changed my voice to give the essay some “colour”, or how i weaved sentences in a way that made them stay silent and keep their focus. I dont know if i ever made them feel seen or understood, though my intention has always been that. Even though writing an essay was a duty, I never wrote it with the cold language the duty required me to write it. I wrote it because i felt that my purpose was to make the listeners feel beauty… I have been a storyteller before i have been a writer. I didnt knew it yet.

One sleepless night though will stay into my mind forever. It has never occurred to me to not sleep for hours. I grew bored. And besides, as a little girl with a big imagination, i had grown to fear darkness, for it was the place where monsters came from. I needed to think of anything but that darkness and i dont know but it just happened…boredom is indeed the source of creativity and escapism is its fuel. And so a part of me decided to tell me a story. I was a storyteller to the world and that night i learned to be a storyteller for myself.

Years have passed and that story replays over and over again in my mind, together with plenty of others that have become a part of me. And to be honest, they burden me. It is such a burden to think over and over again about these stories to keep them alive. And my 16 year old self thought the same thing too. I have heard the story of a writer{one of which i will share another time}. She also had stories in my mind the way i did in the same age and at 16 she wrote for the first time those stories.

To me as a 16 year old who saw through the cracks of society of the “good girl” image, writing in that moment became my salvation to a heart that felt heavy upon everything i felt. I got my iPad and i didnt take it seriously… the writing of the story. But when i finished the first chapter…then i realised what i had done. I had become a writer…The one thing i didnt like was actually what my soul called me most. Once i allowed may self to feel alive, i took the courage to write. And writing became and still is my companion towards my healing journey. It is the companion to exploring my stories and the world of ideas and emotions entangled in my mind.

And from that age until now I have told myself stories through writing. Then, i decided to share them with the world, though, i have shared my story about this and how i still have to learn about listening to my own voice…

I tell stories because i want to make the world experience what i actually have to say. It is hard for people to listen to words, but perhaps they can be transported to the world where the words came from.