Sticky notes held the majority of my writing between the ages of six and eight. Each time I visited my dad’s office I would hide notes in his desk drawers, underneath his bulky black keyboard, and on his brass picture frames. I found the idea of him reading my notes sometime in the future, without me physically being there, exhilarating. Imagining him stumbling upon my hidden yellow sticky-notes and processing my carefully chosen words made me feel omnipresent, as my words could be places that I was not.

​

    With age my sticky notes morphed into cards. Every Birthday of a family member, Mother’s Day, Father’s Day, what have you, was a perfect excuse to use my writing abilities to describe my appreciation for the people in my life. For each card I would anguish over if they read well, if I had put enough time into them, and how the words sounded when read together. The cards I created were a direct reflection of my ability to write, an abstract representation of my love for the people in my life. The permanence of the cards is what pressured me to perfect them. My dad would read my cards and say, “It’s perfect! Don’t worry, they will love it no matter what.” But I didn’t want the recipients of my cards to love them “no matter what”, I wanted them to love them because my words were special and had meaning behind them. 

​

   Once I entered middle school my writing turned into homework and started being graded. During those painful years of puberty, unrequited love, and awkwardness my love for writing was put on the back burner. The only refuge my writing and I found during those years was through my diary. Hunched over the white desk my sister left when she started college, I would write about my day thinking, “My diary might be the only way I remember my childhood. If I get Alzheimer’s and forget everything, at least my diary will remember.” The permanence of my words, once again, motivated me to write. Every detail about my day was important to me and thus had to be written down. My diary entries from those years consist of details some people would find pointless such as: after school we stopped at a garage to get mom’s oil replaced, the mechanic was named Ray and spoke in a horsey, rough, chain-smoker voice. 

Details about my everyday life, however, were not deemed important when I entered high school, a time when five paragraph argumentative essays were the only form of writing I did. It wasn’t until I began college that I was urged to question what writing meant to me and learn about how writing could be done in different ways to accomplish different things. One class, specifically, served as couple’s therapy for me and my writing. Each time I went to this class my writing and I got closer, and the passion between us grew. The class was English 325, Art of the Essay, taught by a young, lanky, sarcastic lecturer named James Pinto. 

​

   Although English 325 encouraged my writing and me to try things that initially made us uncomfortable—role playing, new techniques, letting others give us feedback—we left the class with a newfound bond and voice. Writing personal narratives taught me that some of the most interesting writing can be about seemingly mundane topics and everyday occurrences. I began writing to process complex emotions, to connect my past to my present to my future, and to make sense of things that only writing can make sense of. I learned that it’s not necessarily the topic of writing that determines how “good” a piece of writing is, instead it’s the way a writer uses words and specific details that brings pieces of writing to life. Mark Doty’s poem, entitled A Display of Mackerel, at one point describes the scales of dead Mackerel as looking like “the wildly rainbowed mirror of a soap bubble sphere.” The poem itself is about dead fish, but is transformed into a visceral and thought provoking piece through words.  

​

   My relationship with writing is one that, like any relationship, needs constant upkeep. If I neglect writing for a while, when I return to it we need time to catch up, to jog our memories about how we work together, and to find our voice again. It is easy to fall into the trap of thinking I don’t have time to write, that my writing is bad, or that no one will read it so why write anyway. I am not going to claim that every time I write I learn something new about myself, or have a revelation about how beautiful the written word is. In all honesty, I often find myself slouched, at 2am, cranking out an essay for a class with frustration and hatred towards writing. For all those painful moments of writing, however, I have a few content, naturally flowing moments which I use to remind myself why I write. 

​

   By looking back on my writing I am able to recall things that my memory alone could not remember without a prompting. Without my diary from middle school I might not remember what that mechanic’s name was or how his voice sounded, details that have the ability to relive past experiences. My dad still has those sticky notes I hid for him; though time has passed, the notes haven’t changed. Writing has allowed me to be present in more than just my body ever since I was little. Like a message on a sticky note, my writing can be posted in places that I am not, can convey abstract ideas, and can serve as a key to the past. My writing will inevitably outlive me, and for this reason I will continue to write.