This is my addiction. From Dr. Suess left in my crib to Madeline in the glow of passing streetlamps to Harry Potter at age six to literally anything I can get my literary paws on, I have been a word junkie since before I even knew my alphabet. Once I realized that those black and white scribbles actually meant something, I was dragged even deeper into the world of prose. I learned how to hold a pencil and began scribbling out terribly written stereotypical stories about princesses and castles faster than you can imagine. Now, these stories were absolutely terrible, possibly the worst things ever written, ever. But you couldn’t tell me that. I was hooked. And I still am to this very day. I often find myself reading until 3 a.m. without even realizing it or inventing lands and people until I am forcibly dragged away.

This is what I love. Words. I never want to have to sacrifice my precious words for a desk job or a “stable” career. I don’t really want to have a sane job, one where you put on a suit every morning without fail. I don’t want the routine. I want the frenzied typing in the middle of the night and to have go-to-work-in-your-pajamas-day be every day. I want to live and love and breathe these words and just let them explode onto the paper, hoping they turn out better than that princess story from third grade.

This is my dream. I dream about inventing people and listening to those voices in my head tell stories and live full and interesting lives or possibly die tragically young. I’m addicted. To putting words in an order they’ve never dreamed of. To reading hundreds of books every year and keeping track of them in a notebook like an OCD nerd. To living a literary life and loving every second of it. I don’t want to give that up. I’m not sure I could handle it if I did. I know that this isn’t the path to follow if I want to make a lot of money or to know exactly what’s going to happen from day to day, but isn’t that what makes life exciting? Not knowing exactly what comes next? It keeps you turning the page, just like I do when I should be sleeping because I have school the next day and it’s after 4 a.m. I know that not everyone will approve of a life spent making stuff up, but the people who matter will, and maybe one day even a perfect stranger will enjoy my words, those words I love so much.