Why I write

I remember writing my first ever story. I was 7 years old and had just started Year 3 at school – Beech Class (every class in our school was named after a tree).

Each student got an A4 mustard yellow exercise pad. We were tasked with writing a one page story. I opened up the first blank page, picked up my pencil and began to write: a title in the middle, underlined with a ruler, and line after line of text, all perfectly spaced (an early sign of my drive to overachieve, perhaps?).

My story was a simple tale about a girl who lived in the woods. It went over by a quarter of a page (another early sign of overachieving?!). I don't remember any other details – but I do remember that I wrote it in joined up handwriting, which I'd just been learning. I was really proud of myself when I got to the end. I had created a thing! I remember how easy it felt to put words on the page. How easily they just flowed.

When I got my teacher's comments back – undoubtedly something simple like "A lovely story" – I glowed with pride. This thing that had felt good to do was apparently meaningful to someone else.

There was no sense of competition with everyone else (which, even at age 7, I already felt a lot). There was just this thing that I'd created, and the sense of effortlessness that came with it.

That same effortlessness comes and goes around writing to this day, 30 years later. Often, I'm locked in a battle for weeks or months before I write something out, trying to figure out if it – if I – will be judged as valuable by the world around me. Will I be seen, appreciated, wanted, loved? Too often, I'm sad to admit, this stops me from writing anything at all.

But the seven-year-old in me? The one who wrote and read for the joy of it? Who fell asleep with Roald Dahl's "Matilda" in hand and would wake up with it on my face... she, I'm realising, is partly why I write. Because this life we live is so fleeting, each day a unique and unrepeatable gift, and amongst the many challenges we have as adults, there is something so pure about joy, about creating, about fearless self-expression and about the things that silently yet devotedly call our name.

Writing, for me, is and I suspect always will be one of those things.

There is, in me, an ache to create that will not go away. I can't numb it, avoid it or outrun it. It is always with me. I'd learn soon after this first wonderful experience that other things I create won't mean much to other people, and I'd learn that words could wound, that they could cut deep into your psyche and that you'd carry that pain around with you all day long.

But I also know that words can heal. That they can, when written and spoken with love, truth and boldness, change us and change the world. I also know that I feel most alive when I am creating, when I am daring greatly, when I show my messy, incomplete, complicated self to the world. Here I am! I often want to cry. I exist!

I know that this is true for lots of other people too - not just me. We live in a world full of dreamers, imaginers, those who simply *need* to express themselves to feel like they're fully human.

My hope is that the things I write weave themselves together to create "a lovely story". That my writing adds something good and true into the world. That it reaches people, wherever they are, and helps them know that none of us are alone here, however lonely the road may feel.

I want to live my life in a way I'm proud of. I want to know that I used my voice when I had one, and that I did what I felt called to in order to help other people find and use their voices too. That maybe – just maybe – my words help something heal. That they are a form of medicine.

This is the power art has. I know this, deep in my bones. And that is why I write.

(P.S. This is me, aged about 7. Shy, cute, awkward and mystical. Thank you for hearing and seeing her - and me - here.)