Who am I?

I’m that person. 

The one who wrote a speech in high school about working to turn dreams into reality. How dreams are the beacons leading us forward, but we still need to grab the oars and row for all we are worth. 

I would not row. I would write.

My oar was a pen. I used it to write an essay that was published in the town newspaper. I nearly drained it of ink writing articles for the newspaper about my school’s basketball games. I filled spiral notebooks with my first novel. 

I am the one with stacks of notebooks and journals, lined and unlined, some large enough to hold a novel and some small enough to fit in my pocket. 

I’m the one who told everyone how much I want to be a writer, how I dreamed of seeing my stories published. They streamed through my head like movies. I could hear the characters talking. I walked side by side with them through their days as though they were friends living on the same block. 

I was a dreamer. 

But the pages of my journals were blank, and the stories I wrote reflected the unfilled pages of my journals. There was so much I had not seen! What could I write about when I had not yet lived? And a dream held out in front of a person like a beacon beckoning from the future, guiding them forward—what happens when they reach it? What comes after? Will the light be behind them? Is that the end?

I am the one who steered around the actual pursuit of my dream for so long that my stories faded from movies streaming through my mind to dusty daydreams stacked like piles of books in a used-book store. Those notebooks and journals? Filled with pages of ordinariness, when, as they say, life happened, and I felt as though I wrote with invisible ink. 

But I am also that other person. 

The one who blows the dust from the cover, wipes it with her sleeve, opens it. Seeking treasure.

It’s there, embedded in the pages like blossoms pressed lovingly into the fibers of the paper, the life in the words bringing shape and beauty to the stories written there.  I can see it, feel it, distill the light from the pages and offer it to others. 

The beacon flashing its beam into my heart and mind, luring me ever onward, is anchored—not at the end, but at the center of who I am.

I am the one. And I have a pen.

How about you?