The October Project

I always thought there was something wrong with me as a kid.
When I was young, I fancied myself an adventuress.
I watched She-Ra, I thought I was invincible and bulletproof.  In my imagination, I was this warrior princess, I was Link.
But it was important to me that Link be female.
And I'd play Zelda 2, and watch Link walk away, and it always looked to me like he had a pony tail in the back...
And thus the legend of Linka was born.

I played this extravagant game of imagination and role play.  I played it until I was 12... much too old for such a thing.  It involved all my child hood heroes, Ninja Turtles, Link, Zelda, Mario...  And Lizzy and Kristine and I would run around their backyards slaying imaginary evils.  If our parents came out, we decided to keep the game secret, we didn't want our families to know how old we were, still living in our imaginations.
It was a sad day when my girlfriends didn't want to play these games anymore.  They'd moved on to hair and makeup... but here I was stuck in this imaginary land, with a cast of characters.
This was the work of my childhood, and the thing that made me the writer I am now.

Always the echo of Mr. Rogers in my head.  How he said if you are having a hard time dealing with something, you can imagine it all better...  The freedom and someone just saying "YES YOU CAN." was liberating, in all my attempts to appear normal to my family and friends.
I sat at the family computer, loaded up Q&A, (this was before Microsoft Office) and wrote pages of text.  I have since lost the files, but the stories all live within me, and I can pull them down at a moments notice.

My childhood was not turbulent in the traditional sense, I had a few close friends, I was made fun of a lot, but it was never what I would call terrible.  I had a lot on my plate.  Still, there were things I did not understand, that I couldn't wrap my brain around.  I felt through them as I wrote, allowing myself to feel emotions I'd never felt before.  This was the summer before 7th grade.

This is important because, before that point, I hated to write.  The schools would send home this packet on the last day of school, encouraging us to use our writing skills during the summer on vacations and at times when we had nothing else to do.  I would immediately shed the book into the trashcan, dusting my hands off as I walked away to demonstrate my disdain for being told to write.
Then there was Mrs. Fischer, who was my 6th grade teacher.

At the beginning of the year, she handed us a green folder and said "this is your journal, once a week I will ask you to write in it, I will read what you say, and I may respond in some way.  If I respond, address my question in your next journal entry."

Now is the point I should mention that I have a disorder called Dyspraxia, which means basically not only do I have a hard time managing socially, but my handwriting is awful.  Back then, even more so.  There is way more to the disorder, but for now, we'll just leave it at this: I still have an old journal of mine from this time, and I'm telling you, the first 10 entries cannot be read, even by ME.
So, you can imagine the first couple of entries went just swimmingly.
I would write something, Ms. Fischer would have a question or two, next week, I would find I would have to respond to her question.
THIS PISSED ME OFF SO BADLY.

I'm thinking, "Ok lady, you gave us all of this time to write about what we want to, and now I've monopolized twenty of the thirty minutes you gave us to answer your stupid fucking question."
Yet every week, in her immaculate red handwriting, there she was challenging me.
"You went to a Marching Band competition, why were you there?"
"Why were you so upset with your mother?"
Finally, I was so tired of answering her questions, I wrote this journal entry.
I took the full amount of time to do it, too.
I wrote, and I made sure I answered every possible question the woman could ask me.
I thought "HAHAHA I'll show you lady!"
And I received a plain "you look nice today" on my journal entry. YES!  Score one for the students, woo hoo!
and I did that every week... then, it sunk in about halfway through the year.  "I like this.  I feel challenged for the first time in my life." and even though after writing my hands would ache for an hour or two afterward, (dyspraxia basically causes you to choke up on a pencil or pen really hard, to the point of white knuckles, it's not on purpose, as a dyspraxic, you really can't feel the pencil.  This in turn causes your hand to ache after a marathon writing session).  I understood the purpose of the entries.  I was playing into her hand but you know what?  I was ok with it.
I tried SO HARD.  I applied myself.  It was the first time I really had to try at school.

And so, that's how I discovered that I'm meant to be a writer.