I never thought in a million years that this would be an important story to tell. My memory didn’t think it was important either and left it filed away in the not so easily accessible part of my mind. While building characters and understanding who they are and why they react in the ways that they do, I realize that all stories are important. They make up the stitching of us. They are the glue that holds us together and remembers our history even when our consciousness forgets.

When I was 10 years old, I wrote my first poem. I remember the assignment, to write an acrostic poem using your name for the first letter of each line. This should have been easy. I immediately had a choice to make, being a person who has a naturally long first name and a quite shorter nick-name that I regularly go by, do I let myself struggle with the 8 long letters of Victoria, or do I half the burden and go with Tori. I followed my gut and chose the path most difficult (I was apparently a masochist at a very young age and my gut was a bully that I listened to quite frequently).

Most kids were done with their poem in about 10-15 minutes. I had barely gotten started. Fortunately, after language arts was recess. I spent this entire additional 45 minutes brooding over this poem. There was a feeling or urgency inside of me. I had something important to say and this was my chance to say it. I was presented with an avenue and this opportunity was not to be wasted with any silly word beginning with the appropriate letter.  This was heavy. This need, as a 10 year-old, to choose correctly, to create something beautiful but equally meaningful was a profound burden. But, when I began to write, when the flood gates finally opened, it was sublime. There was an angst escaping and my hand couldn’t keep up with the words spilling out of me. (Now, I don’t want to disappoint you, but I’m going to anyway. I don’t have the poem in question with me. It is somewhere at my parents house along with all of the poems and stories that came after. I have the distinct feeling that if I read it now, I would be deeply saddened that it’s no longer the masterpiece I remember it being, so just let me be blissful in my ignorance of this faded memory of probably the greatest poem ever written.)

My teacher had noticed the scene of me laboring over this poem while the others released their volcanic energy, playing and running around as children do (it was extremely difficult to work under those conditions may I add). At one point, when I had began to reread, I could feel her over my shoulder. (I hated that, and I have continued to hate it up until adulthood.) I wasn’t done yet. I wasn’t satisfied. In my mind, there was more to do, I could make it even better, but she grabbed the paper (it was black construction paper that we were writing on in white chalk, so please explain to me how in god’s name I was supposed to be able to edit anything anyhow?!), she grabbed my hand and took me into the adjacent classroom, the other 3rd grade class, to make me read my poem to the other 3rd grade teacher. She was beaming and I was PISSED, but I was 10 and my gut told me that I should listen to her, so I did it. The kids in that classroom were also at recess, screaming and carrying on (again, not an ideal environment for my first reading), but I read it, and hated every uncomfortable feeling that shot through me as I did so. When I finished, I looked up to both of these teachers looking at me, and then at each other. They began to gush and tell me about the reaction their skin had to my writing (apparently it got bumpy like a freshly plucked goose, weird) and I was confused.

At 10, I didn’t understand why I had this need to take the assignment so seriously, and I didn’t understand why it was such a big deal to my teachers that I had. I didn’t know about the strange power of words, a magic that has always been closer to me than the similar power one would possess with the mastery of any other art form. I really thought it was no big deal, I wrote a poem. I used metaphors when I had no idea they were called metaphors. I represented myself as a violet (my mom liked those) and described myself dancing in the wind and longing to be free and lifted from the soil and blown high up into the sky, and although I remember not being completely content with the poem, I remember the relief wash over me when the words came out.  This full body experience unlocked something inside myself that day, and it was a big deal.

It was a pivoting point, and although I know of stories that others have told me about my predisposition to story-telling at a young age (which I think is probably just a nice way of saying that I was an excessive liar as a child), this is my one story in my own memory that I can trace this desire all the way back to. This one belongs only to me and it was that one tiny, baby step, the feeling in my pit that I had no choice but to follow, that sent my whole life down this path of writing, of creative masochism, of searching to make myself better, but it all stems from the need for that feeling, that flushing, cleansing feeling that happens when you get it out. I think writers nothing more than addicts, writing and writing just to get to that high… probably.