Personal Narrative: You Ll Change Your Mind

"You'll change your mind."

I was ten years old when I stood up on a stool in my kitchen and announced to my family that I wanted to be an author. This was the response I received.

In the years that followed, my spare time was filled with hours of reading and writing. One day I was a witch in the world of Harry Potter, the next I was a biophysicist in one of Michael Crichton's fascinating worlds of science, and shortly thereafter, a galactic warrior or inquisitive youth in one of my own works. My life's events were an array of endless colors, and I painted pictures with my words using the colors I chose. Poetry and prose enabled the expression of my most shallow desires, my most poignant realizations, and my most hidden questions.

Even as a child, my thoughts multiplied into stunning branches of ideas, each more complex than the last as they grew from the core of the tree that was my imagination. The notions arranged themselves into stunning pyramids of coherent phrases, eloquent and profound. But when the words came out of my mouth, they tumbled and slipped, vowels and consonants lost somewhere in the back of my throat as my tongue struggled to maintain pace with my mind. I felt an immense powerlessness.

Writing was my only weapon against my villain, my struggle with speech. When my elocution was weak, my fingers were able to convey exactly what I wanted to say, exactly how I wanted to say it. Writing connected me with others, allowing for a fuller understanding of each other.

Whenever I confronted conflict, my ability to write became my solution. Writing gave me the ability to compartmentalize my thoughts, reflect on my actions and that of those involved in the discord, and shift my language accordingly. Too many times have the words tumbled out of my mouth before I understood their ramifications––too many times have I wanted to snatch them out of the air and rearrange them, remove them, and replace them. Writing provided me with this power, and in due course, conditioned me to be comfortable outside of ink and paper. My mind and mouth began working as one unit as I wrote what I wanted to express in my brain's