I grew up with a pencil in my hand and a journal open in front of me. Constantly, I was writing. I made up elaborate stories: some about girls solving puzzling murders, some about sisters who went on adventures with their horses, and some about my best friends and our daily drama.

When I wasn’t writing, my mousy brown hair fell into my face as I buried my nose in any book I could get my hands on, searching for different worlds to crash into and lose myself in.

Reading was my way of leaving the ordinary world of long division and fractions while traveling to a place where I could pretend I was anything but the little girl who talked too much in class and dreamed too unrealistically about the future.

My favorite pastime was reading a book and feeling the emotions the character was feeling. Authors made me cry for hours, laugh out loud and think about who I really was and the way I thought. I wanted to be able to make people feel that.

I began writing outside of class when my fourth grade English teacher, Mrs. Bobo, said my story was one of the best in the class. She told me I had a talent.

From then on out ,my backpack was filled to the brim with sheets of paper filled with scribbles and jumbled messes of characters falling in love with each other as the plot crashed down around them.

Of course, as I get older, homework and socializing get in the way of my writing, but these things have also helped it. Every time something happens to me, I take those emotions and pour them onto a piece of paper, the words falling from my fingers to the page filling it up with my thoughts. When it’s 3 a.m. and my hand is cramping from holding my pen too tight, I can see a glimpse into what I want to do for the rest of my life.

Writing is a way to express what I’m feeling in the rawest form. Writing is my thoughts directly on paper, fitting together to form something that other people can feel. Writing is also rare. Few people feel the urge to write and few see the world in word form, and equally as few are able to eloquently describe it. I often hope that I am one of those people.

As soon as I voiced my ambitions to be a writer, people began trying to change my mind. They tried to convince me that wasn’t what I wanted to be, simply because writing isn’t seen as an actual profession.

The most common reaction is, “But isn’t that a hobby?” Writing is not something you can do when you get bored. You have to spend hours staring at a blank screen, your fingers dancing across the keyboard trying to put your thoughts into words but failing so many times.

But then you get it right. A surge runs through you as the right words are suddenly there in front of you, perfectly conveyed, and everything is worth it.

I agree that creative writing may be a bad career choice. If no one likes your writing, you don’t get published. If you don’t get published, you don’t make money. If you get published and no one buys your book, you don’t make money. A thousand scenarios, each one worse than the next. But what if people like your book? Or love it?

There’s the what-ifs of course, but like so many others, I want to make the bad decision to be a writer when I grow up.