I’m telling one of my friends about the latest crisis in my love life, and he says, “Is this the kind of thing you write about?” It’s not that my social dilemmas are that dramatic, it’s just that my phrasing struck him as writerly.

I write everything that happens to me, or at least everything that hits me hard enough to leave a mark. Some things don’t make it to paper (or computer screen), but I write them in my head. When I lie in bed at night, I take the things that bother me and I find words for them. The more something bothers, the more I rewrite it, until I can capture it with words. I tell and retell things. I make them funny. I find the words for what happened and how I felt. Writing my life, I’m in control of it.

I’m not sure when I started this. In college, I started my blog one dismal summer in Buffalo. In high school, my best friend and I went out for coffee every night, and I told him the stories of everything that happened to me, and it made things okay. In junior high school, I wrote truly awful poetry. Maybe I’ve always written and re-written my life, just like I’ve always wanted to be a writer.

This is what makes me think that I’ll always be somewhat of a writer, no matter how much my “career” goals change. I have to write. It’s something I just do, it’s the way I live. If I get stranded on a desert island with nothing to write with and no one to talk to, I’ll be making up stories about how much it sucks to live on coconuts and seaweed. It’s just who I am.