how I became a writer, part 1, because Kristy asked me to write this down

Part One: The Decision.

Kristy Lin Billuni, the Sexy Grammarian, asked me to write a blog post that she could send new writers to for inspiration, since apparently I’m a Story.

So. Here’s my story.

[I don’t usually do trigger warnings on my work, but warning: suicide talk. Also, there’s a cliffy because this is my blog and I’m tired and will write more later.]

Once upon a time, a little girl learned how to read. That little girl was me, obviously, and the remarkable thing about me learning to read was the age I did it: two. I could read a simple book to my mother, who was a teacher, by age three. I don’t remember the title. It was a yellow book with paper for pages, not one of those thick cardboard books, and the sentences were three and four and five words long. But I could do it. I also don’t remember ever not knowing how to read. I don’t remember learning to read. I’ve always been a reader.

So, almost from infancy began my love of reading, which has shaped my life more than any genetics or exercise. I’d max out my library card on a regular basis. I still have my plastic orange library card with raised letters like an old-school credit card, from the former Thousand Oaks library site up on the hill. For some summer program, I’d be asked to read ten books and would read 100. At one point, I used to say I could read a book in an hour—meaning books for kids, like those by Beverly Cleary, Judy Blume, Madeline L’Engle, and others. I devoured books whole. Still do.

As a child, I wrote a little bit too. I was always making lists and scribbling in notebooks and drawing. I won a writing contest in third grade at our local library. It was a “write along with authors” contest, and the story had to do with a person discovering a dragon … and then cliffy. The child author had to finish it. I wrote about the “Dragon of Thoughtfulness” who just wanted to be kind. Guess I wanted to write against type.

I also found evidence of me otherwise wanting to write as a kid. My dad was a publisher, and I found a mimeographed pamphlet that had addresses on it where kids could submit stories. There are notes in it, in my childhood handwriting, of the places I wanted to submit. I wasn’t totally sure WHAT it was I wanted to write (a refrain that lasted decades). I just knew I adored books. I also had romantic ideas of what it meant to be a writer. Scribbling in notebooks in coffeeshops in Paris …

As a child, when asked what I wanted to be when I grew up, the answers varied, but were usually either: (1) a happy person; (2) a museum curator; (3) an astronaut; or (4) a children’s book author and/or illustrator. “Author“ was almost a given. Normally, I just said happy person though, since I figured I could do anything with that goal. (I sometimes got strange looks for this one because I guess it’s not totally measurable for success.) But it also created a problem, because I was TOO interested in everything. When it was time for college, I thought I could have studied anything and been happy—English, math, history, science. Whatever. I would have liked it. So, I decided to focus on what I liked to do—go hiking—and studied forestry, figuring I could become a forest ranger, but not otherwise having a clue what it meant to study forestry.

Once there, I realized that while I loved the outdoors, I also loved reading and writing and using my brain and my favorite class in school was an environmental law and policy course. So, I decided to go to law school. I had the grades and the drive. Why not?

Law school broke down my brain the way a baby’s mouth breaks down a mother’s nipple and reconstructed it again into something it could never return to. I don’t know how I used to think before law school, but I can tell you how I think now: logical, orderly, and systematically going through elements to prove something.

I got a job after law school in Sacramento, and I really loved that job. I worked across the street from the State Capitol. At the time, there was a bookshop on the corner, and I remember one day buying a pretty blank notebook that had a facsimile of a famous author’s manuscript on the cover, walking to a shaded bench in the shadow of the Capitol building, and starting to write a story. This was in 2000. The story was about a woman who opened her door to a knock, and Cary Grant was standing there. The plot was flimsy, but it made me EXCEEDINGLY happy to play with it. It petered out, but then I'd just write something else.

I moved from Sacramento to southern California (as per husband, there’s “no surf in Sacramento”), got a private practice job, and worked hard. I have a picket fence and two kids and throughout the years, dogs and cats. But I never gave up the dream of writing.

For fifteen years after I picked up that first notebook in Sacramento, I tried all sorts of things. I wrote poems and posted them on a now-forgotten blogspot website. I completed National Novel Writing Month four times. I wrote screenplays and even tried writing and illustrating a children’s book.

But nothing really ever worked. I took a few Writer’s Digest course in “how to query an agent” and a weekend class in screenwriting. I bought software and read how-to books. I just kept plugging away, but really didn’t show my work to many people, because when I did, the feedback wasn’t really good.

So, I kept my writing hidden. But I kept doing it.

[Here’s the part where it escalates quickly, in the Seinfeld yadda, yadda, yadda sense.]

Fast forward to 2014. After a series of events, I was suffering from acute depression and suicidal ideations. I couldn’t get the idea of killing myself out of my head. I was crying all the time, and I had very little motivation to do anything. I was also very, very burned out by trying to be all things to all people. Lawyer, mother, marketer, wife, me—and not doing any of these things particularly well. I would drive around and think about just tugging the car wheel over the edge. When I found myself actively looking for a railroad track to stop on, I called for help.

And I got it. Dear friends helped me. Family. Acquaintances. Total strangers. The suicide task force was called on me by my doctor, and no one left me out of their sight for a day or so. And then we decided that I just needed help, so I checked myself into a mental hospital.

Me. Straight A student, successful lawyer, with the picket fence and the kids and the wonderful family.

Strip searched.

And locked up.

I could tell you a lot of stories about being in the ward overnight.

But the key for this post is that I realized that the only thing I had ever really wanted to do my entire life was be a writer. After all, I’d been secretly doing it for fourteen years, with the backdrop of wanting to be a children’s book writer since I was a child.

This is also about the time my husband bought me my first kindle. And it was the time that Fifty Shades of Grey was blowing up the charts—the tail end of it, at least. With the curiosity from its popularity, then falling into the “what to read next,” I discovered that although I had gone my entire life without ever reading a romance novel, I ADORED THEM. I love love stories.

So, as part of my recovery, and armed with my new obsession with romance novels, I embraced my truth: the only thing I’d ever really wanted to do my entire life—at least at some level—was be an author. And so I might as well take it seriously. I decided to get professional help on how to be a published author.

This is where Kristy steps in. But maybe I leave that part for the next blog post.

The key for now, is that I made the DECISION. I was going to take the fact that I wanted to write seriously. I didn’t know what would happen. But I knew I wanted to explore it. And I knew I needed help doing that. I also knew that it would be key to my mental health recovery.

But changing my mindset to allowing in more creativity and writing, has made all the difference in the world.

[Okay, that’s all I can write tonight. I’ll write more of this story on Saturday.]

xoxo more later.