Why I’m A Writer (And Other Things That Keep Me Up At Night)
I don't know how to describe it. My brain is a computer. I don’t recognize my body unless I’m with another person. Emotions run wildfire through the circuits, and I've learned not to engage with the sparks. Real life scenarios require a minimum 48-hour processing period before I can make sense of what happened.
Television, music, books became my natural habitat early. My mother taught me to read at three because her intuition said I was ready. She was right. By nine, I was reading Jane Eyre and The Grapes of Wrath, hunting for clues about how the world worked.
I never fit the standard template. One best friend at a time, everyone else felt like static. I got screamed at, ignored, picked apart by the usual teenage machinery. I didn't even register as female until sixteen. By then I'd kissed two girls and three boys, fascinated by how families functioned. I studied films like End of the World, Wings of Desire, The Spirit of the Beehive and Welcome to the Dollhouse like field guides for human behavior.
1995: Angelfire webpage. The real beginning. Writing was the only way my thoughts could line up properly, the only language that translated my internal chaos into something coherent. Word games became my drug. I'd disappear for hours, moving letters around until they clicked into place.
Songs, I discovered in the last two years, are the ultimate word game. Forget the NYT Sunday puzzle, try writing something that's lyrically and mathematically satisfying to a deep feeler. That's the real Sunday puzzle.