First off, I never would have imaged that two degrees and 30 plus years living my life I would be working from a cubicle. But that is another story, for another day. For now, let’s just chalk it up to me living in one of the most crowded cities in the world where there’s not much real estate in most buildings for even managers to have their own offices, let alone “lowly” contract workers like myself.
Anyway, the other day I was looking up at the ceiling, above my cubicle walls, and I remembered being a small child, laying on the top bunk of my and my sister’s bunk beds. I would stare at the ceiling in the dark and imagine a make believe world, all the characters that lived inside and, most importantly, their stories.
I’m not sure whether it was a way for me to escape – only God knows what I thought I was escaping from – or just that I had a crazy-active imagination. Whatever the reason, I have always made stories and I have always been very “in my head”, thinking about things and trying to figure out why they are the way that they are. It is why as a child I wanted to become a writer and as an adolescent I wanted to study psychology. My sense of justice took me in a slightly different direction, namely, law school. But I have slowly found my way back.
Words are powerful. They can be persuasive, they can cause confusion, they can create joy where there otherwise would be none, and they can demand retribution. Throughout my life words have taken me places. My words have gained me acceptance into spaces I may not have been allowed to enter and they have caused rifts in my interpersonal relationships. My lack of words when I’ve felt especially introspective has brought me to face significant changes in my life; changes that were a catalyst to me struggling to find the right words to decipher what was really going on. Those are the times that writing helped me to find these words and eventually find myself.
Whether I am thinking them, screaming them or writing them down, words have always been there for me. As I go through yet another change in my life, I have come to realize that words are my saving grace and hopefully this blog is the spring to action that I needed to create my own story. There was a reason that that little girl had so many words and ideas floating around in her head. Now, I have the opportunity to turn them outward and as I do I will continue to discover the world around me and my purpose in it.
