“You are what you eat.” An all too common phrase said by my mother to get us to eat healthy when we were younger. Ever since I can remember, words have been my food. I hungered for pristine novels and still warm and freshly printed papers. The crisp black curvature of words which contrasted with the pure white area that housed these creations.  I loved reading and writing stories and my childhood revolved solely around these two pastimes.
The only memories I have of my earlier days is the forever I spent in my written world. I think of it all as one endless summer spent curled up in my treehouse with my very sophisticated maroon speckled composition notebook, my rainbow fountain pen that brought all my dreams to life, and my plastic white thinking cap. Here, in my safe place, was where I would get up at dawn and experience a thousand different worlds until the sun set when the light sucked my writing world away from me until the next day. I traveled to places unimaginable during that summer. I rode a camel through a sand storm in the Arabian Desert, I discovered a starfish kingdom in the deepest point of the Caribbean, and I sailed to the top of the Eiffel Tower in a hot air balloon. I led an army of gingerbread men across melting icecaps in Alaska and taught Kung Fu on the tiptop of Mount Everest. I was unstoppable. This written world consumed me and I’d do anything to be back in that place again.
However, life soon ripped that written world away from me. School started to get serious and took away my ability to imagine and be my unique self. Math problems had to be done a specific way, using one formula. English papers had to be written according to rubric. Science experiments had to follow exact instructions and measurements. The other students in my school started to become more judgmental and unaccepting of what they considered to be “weird.” I was that weird girl who wore a big white headband everyday and jotted down every word and story in my fat bright purple notebook with my model 40 ball point pen, the only one that slid smoothly across the lines. They spread rumors about me, saying my headband was to hide the frizziness of my tangled dark puce colored hair and my notebook was to cover the uncontrollable amount of freckles that splattered unattractively across my nose. Because there was no one who shared my love of literature or would accept my uniqueness, I basically had no friends.
I ate lunch in the guidance office nearly every day. I enjoyed this because I was free to be alone and this was the one time in my day that high school allowed me to entertain all the ideas for stories that I had floating around in my head. Lunch was the only time I was able to organize these thoughts and catch them on paper before they floated away forever. I was spacey like that. Thoughts easily escaped my mind unless recorded quickly. And I liked the guidance office for doing this because the constant clicking of the secretary’s keys or the telephone ringing with important news created a humble buzz. The buzz made the office workable and quickly became a symbol of potential for me. It was a soothing 45-minute daily escape from the school world that I didn’t belong in.
In high school, it seemed like everyone was always talking about the future. Everywhere I turned, conversation seemed to be limited only to talk of college, majors, and student loans. My problem was that everyone was focusing on the future while I was still stuck desiring the past. Unwillingly, talk of the future began to change from simple conversation in school to thoughts that seeped uncontrollably and constantly into my brain. I was so anxious about discovering a plan for the rest of my life, one that would make me feel like I belonged more than it seemed I did now. What if I never found a place where I could completely be accepted? What if I just wasn’t the type of person that was fit to be welcomed by anyone?
So I worried. And like I said before, I was spacey. And when spacey combines with worry you get complete chaos. Like a tornado trapped inside your head, you just wish you can let it blow out of your ears but you know it will never cooperate. This tornado created it’s damage in my fat bright purple notebook. It clouded my thoughts and my creative stories wouldn’t come to me easily any more. All I could write about was research I’d done on colleges, pros and cons for different majors, and subjects I was learning about in class. I had to admit to myself I had writers block. But not the overcome-able kind I usually came across, this was the real deal. I called it dream block.
Ever since the days of my written world, I’d always dreamed of writing novels and becoming an author when I grew up. But, high school killed my imagination of dreaming about my future job just as much as it did my freedom to be creative. People told me insensitively that writing novels was a horribly unstable way to live life, that I would never be able to support myself, let alone a family, and that I would run out of ideas to write about. So I believed them. I let that dream sail out of my life because I allowed other people to decide my path and place limits on my potential.
Basically, all was hopeless with me. Everything that I thought made up the person that I was was turning out to be untrue by everyone else’s standards. Until the day when I went crazy and poured my heart out to Miss Techno.
I barely even knew her name at the time. She was just the secretary in the guidance office who I’d see every day and think nothing of it. We were acquaintances, I guess you could say. That day I walked in to have my peaceful lunch and the buzz didn’t sound the same to me anymore. The once motivating noise now only brought feelings of jealousy and longing to my ears. Because the clicks of the keys and rings of the phone were all created by people who knew where they belonged in life. In that moment, the clicks and rings that they focused on were each their clear callings. They knew they were in the right place.
I couldn’t face it anymore. “WHERE IS MY PLACE?!” I screamed as I sunk into my chair under the window. I know looking back on it this sounds like an overly dramatic moment, but trust me it was not. It was the first time I was able to let the tornado that made up my thoughts escape. For the first time, I got to feel the little relief that someone other than my fat purple notebook knew my feelings, even if just my acquaintance secretary Miss Techno hearing my insane scream.
After about thirty seconds of contemplation on what I should do, I looked up at her desk and then forced myself to meet her eyes that I’m sure had been long held in their puzzled gaze. The crazy thing was that the judgement I expected to be in that gaze was missing. Instead, it was replaced by compassion. I went over to her desk and asked her if I could tell her about everything that was making up my tornado. So I did. I told her the story from the beginning, a similar story that I’m telling you right now.
She took it all in for about a minute, snatching up the floating ideas she had in her head that she needed to make into words. At least that’s what I guessed. And then she said this that I will never forget: “Lucy you can be unstoppable in this world, too, but only if you choose. In every situation you come across in your life you will have decisions you have to make, with multiple choices to choose from. You must know that the absolute first choice you need to understand and make right now is not to allow other people to interfere in your choices. Because that’s what makes them your own. You are so creative and so intelligent, it would be a terrible thing to let someone else tarnish your dreams and ambitions that make up who you are. I say chase after your written world of now.”
To this day, I am still eating up words but I have never come across another group of words that have filled me up more. For a while I had no clue what she meant by my “written world of now” but as I got older, I believe I figured it out. I don’t know if she knows it, but Miss Techno altered the course of my life in a drastic way that day when I went crazy. The second choice that I decided to make that day was to become a secretary, just like her. Partially because the clicks of the keys and the rings of the phones that had comforted me and provided inspiration for so long could now become my permanent place. Partially because I would be able to surround myself with the warm printed papers and the familiar curvature off words every day in my job. Partially because I saw potential in myself and in the ability I knew I would have in this job to share Miss Techno’s words with kids who I knew I would find just like me. But mostly, the reason why I decided to become a secretary is because it is more real than any Arabian Desert, deep water Caribbean, dangerous mountain climbing adventure could ever be. This secretary desk is my new writing world.