Can you remember just how long you’ve actually been able to ride a bike?

Do you remember how long you’ve known how to eat food without it ending up all over your clothes?

I couldn’t tell you how long either. I just know that I know how to ride a bike and I know that I am not a slob when I eat. That’s the extent of my knowledge on the matter. In the same way, it never occurred to me to wonder just how long I’ve been a writer. About half a year ago I had finally reached a point that I began to think like those around me; ‘It’s just a hobby, I was never into this’, but I was wrong.

There’s nothing worse than having been madly in love with something your entire life and feeling like you’ve failed and were never meant to have loved it in the first place. I’ve spent years and years trying to better my English (it wasn’t my first language till I was around 5), and through tears and frustration I managed to at least get it somewhere decent.

For the longest time the only memories I had of writing was when I was 9 years old and I’d received a gold pen (it was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen, I have a pen thing) for my writing ending up in the top 10 submissions that the principal had sent to a writing competition. I remember her telling me that my grade 4 teacher had recommended me and she told me that I needed to pursue writing. So I did.

At 16, when I finished high school my mother gave me time to work on my writing. For three years, all she did was give me time to write. It was the greatest opportunity I was ever given and I was struck by writer’s block. The most horrendous writer’s block I’ve ever experienced. So I ended up getting nothing done in those 3 years and ended up going to school to become a programmer analyst.

At 22, I finally put a pen to paper again. I was bombarded with so many amazing new ideas. New stories that were just begging for me to put them down on paper, but my writing no longer was what it used to be. Just like with anything else, you lose it if you don’t work on it. So I’ve been climbing uphill, desperately trying to get back to where I was and half a year ago I started to give up again. Maybe I wasn’t a writer after all.
I spoke to an old friend of my mother for the first time in 16 or 17 years and he asked me if I was still writing. I asked him how he knew that I had ever written anything and he said he remembered when I was a child (he knew me when I was between 5-7 years old) and said that I used to read Goosebumps all the time. That I had been writing my own Goosebumps stories. I had no idea that I had ever written a word before that writing contest in elementary. To find out I’d started around 5 instead of 9 was a huge piece of information.

Now I write all the time. Whether it’s only a paragraph in 2 hours or 2000 words in 1 hour, I write. I keep in mind that I’ve been doing this my whole life and that I will get what I want if I just keep going for it. And so that’s what I’m doing.

Many things in my life will change, but the need to tell the world about the worlds in my head will always be constant.

I am a writer.

May I never forget that again.