Writer.

I’ve known that I was going to be a writer for a long time. But I don’t know when I actually became one.

I’m not exactly sure what specific moment solidified the concrete at the base of this statement, but let me grab a chisel and I’ll take a stab at identifying it.

It could have been that time when I was 5 and I stole a roll of quarters from deep in my mom’s purse, from deep in her closet. I stole the quarters to buy pencils from the .25 cent machine in the office of my elementary school.

Or maybe it was the time I colored letters on the wall in permanent marker, just to practice my penmanship.

It could have been one of those times before I learned to read when I would make up my own stories to go along with the pictures on the pages.

Or it could have been the time when I actually learned to read and I discovered that I absolutely adored it. The times when I would visit the public library weekly, to check out the allotted 30 books, to read them and return them the next week.

Or maybe it was when I started volunteering at the public library when I was in middle school, because I couldn’t get enough of the way the books smelled, the way the pages felt beneath my fingertips.

It could have been the time that my story about meal pills won first place in the Reflections contest in 7^th grade.

Or the time I did my honors world history project on the printing press in 9^th grade.

It might have been the SAT words like genuflect and extol, egregious and gregarious, that captured my interest in the beauty of cacophony and euphony.

Or maybe it was penning the captions at the bottom of the pictures on all the yearbook layouts I edited.

Sometimes I believe it was the valedictory speech I gave at my high school graduation that sealed the deal.

But then it flourished in the late night poems I scribbled in my journals.

And then, as much as I hate to admit it, I think the brand on the blowdryer that permanently set the concrete in place, was blog.

I started blogging. And people started reading.

And now I consider myself a writer.

Simply because I can’t stop stringing words together. The words plummet out of my fingertips and onto the placid page before I have time to harness them.

But why should I put a leash on them?

I’m a writer. Deal with it.