For me, writing is where I make sense of the world. I write almost out of compulsion because that’s how I’ve taught myself to deal with the stress of the world. As I’ve grown in my writing through schooling, reading, and good old-fashioned trial and error, I’ve come to realize that my strength lies in creating narratives of my life. I write about myself, but more than that I write about the life and events that are all around me. I am mining my own history for meaning and value. In this way, writing is a therapy for me allowing me to examine myself and my life as if I wasn’t the one who lived through it. But I also want to share. My writing is not meant to be a personal diary or an inventory of woes, instead I want to share who I am and what I have learned from my experiences because that is the only way I know how to speak my identity into being. For me, every time I put pen to paper, or finger to keyboard, I am letting slip pieces of my identity and experience. Not only in my poetry, personal narratives, and prose, but in my critical essays, my twitter jokes, and the notes I write in classrooms. I write for myself, firstly, for that shy girl who spent so much time alone so that others can see her, to know she was valuable. I write for all the little shy girls and boys, all the quiet kids who didn’t see themselves in books and on tv. I write to validate who I am and through that I hope to validate someone else’s existence or at least by showing them who I am on paper they might have the courage to make themselves known. My writing is the work of being human: time, effort, reflection, analysis, and appreciation.