2008: I'm Coming Out

I have always been writing, ever since I learned how to write. I made my first journal at 8 years old, and started writing freelance for national magazines at 14 years old.

But, writing has always been a guilty pleasure, if not a guilty secret altogether. Family and friends saw it as a "hobby"; I treated it as my life-preserver, if not life-saver during the darkest moments of my life. Still, I believed what other people thought and said more than I believed what I thought and said of my writing and my own life.

So, along the way, for most of my life, I publicly announced I wanted to be a doctor, then a nun, but ended up first, a businesswoman, then a wife and mother, then a teacher, then a single parent and reborn woman reclaiming and reinventing herself and handcrafting her life on her own terms this time-- this last occupation starting only in 2002, after I heeded the louder rumblings of my soul around the year 2000, when I also decided to get serious with my creative writing dreams, wrote my first tentative fiction, attended my first creative writing workshop and had one of my first fictions published in a U.S.-based popular book collection at that.

In short, I traveled all over, took many detours, only to finally give in to the tugs of my heart and come back to my first love and passion, creative writing, at 32.

It has been a wonderful journey since then, and I never regret following my heart in this path. In the last five years alone, I have been granted three more fellowships to prestigious and highly-competitive national writing workshops, won 2 national awards for my children's stories, and lately, signed my first Contract with a U.S.-based publishing company for the publication in storybook form and international distribution of another one of my children's stories.

Still, I have always been half-in, half-out with my writing-- teacher, researcher, entrepreneur, and mother by day, then writer only in the depths of the night, when everyone else is asleep and I can finally unclothe my self and just be me, sitting and watching and writing with my mind, heart and soul.

Writing has been like a devoted, faithful lover all throughout my life, frequently spurned or set aside for other more "important" things and pursuits, yet the one thing that also consistently saves me from my self, and keeps my spirit alive and the fires inside aflame.

It is time to give this lasting lover its due and make it my husband for life now, and declare it so for all the world to hear and see.

It deserves nothing less.