Swimming in the sticky sunlight spilling through half-open windows, I sat on the linoleum floor of a third-story classroom building in L.A. and watched the wind caress the palm fronds outside, a notebook open in my lap. I was 11, away from home by myself for the first time, and I was falling in love.

To the 11-year-old me, that classroom was magical. I sat with 10 peers in a circle of desks, discussing books our professor assigned. I filled my notebook with short stories, poems and creative journal entries, and shared them aloud to my classmates. I knew by the end of those three weeks that I never wanted to leave. I wanted to be swamped in the magic of that classroom for the rest of my life, where I could let the dizzy buzz of creation carbonate my blood every day.

Afterward, I threw myself into my new ambition with abandon. I read voraciously. I stuffed my Google Drive with half-finished narratives. I started observing the conversations around me in order to make the dialogue I wrote more realistic, cataloging the behavioral tics of my friends to elevate my characterization skills and transforming every sight I saw into imagery in my mind. 

But while I single-mindedly chased my dream, I couldn’t speak it. I kept it a secret, and when classmates or teachers asked what I wanted to be when I grew up, I lied. Pursuing a career in the arts and humanities is stigmatized in STEM-dominated Silicon Valley; unconventional dreams are deemed childish and discouraged by the people around me. I was ashamed of my desire; ashamed, too, of my cowardice. How could I be a writer if I couldn’t even admit it out loud?

Instead of questioning the path I’d embarked on, I dug in harder, enraged with myself and my surroundings. Writing in the Epic trained my attentiveness to the stories around me. I finally found the community of writers I longed for when I joined Vertigo Magazine, and would grow to foster that community as editor-in-chief senior year. I wrote and read and wrote until my shame shrunk enough to swallow, and the words “I want to be a writer” could surface instead.

Except that statement wasn’t entirely true anymore. I didn’t want to be a writer — I already was one. I’ve spent my whole adolescence writing, a dream I’d settled on when I was 11 and too young to know myself, a dream that had caused strife between me and the people I loved. Despite that, I can’t fathom an alternative.  There is no way for me to live but like this: constantly vigilant for inspiration, scribbling stanzas on the margins of my math homework, pouring over fantasy worlds on long afternoon walks. On good nights, I am sleepless in the grip of imagining, eyes wide in the dark, and I wake the next morning buoyed by fantastical dreams.

Next fall, I will be across the country, pursuing a Comparative Literature degree at my dream college. The years after that, I will be at grad school or trekking the globe or scrambling for a steady salary to pay my rent. I will be somewhere else, I will be someone else too, but I will always be that little girl in a sun-dappled third-story classroom, breathless with wonder and falling in love for the first time.