The first time I learned I could tell a story was not on paper. It was at a sleepaway summer field hockey camp in my teens.

That week, an opposing team found humor in turning the lights out on a locker room full of me and my now-unclothed, afraid teammates, with showers on high blast and high-pitched screaming filling the pitch-black room. I told the story of what happened once to a small room of upperclassman, about the naked, running, disposable-razor-wielding, wall-grasping, scrambling freshmen, and just like that, a wildfire of storytelling ignited in the dorms. I was dragged from room to room by upperclassman. In each room, the story grew, and so did the laughs, and my passion for drawing people into my imagination.

I wrote little things for years after that. Then, eventually, like most, I laid the pen down.

It wasn’t until decades later when I met my husband that I felt like that teenager again. The one with an overactive imagination, a head full of ideas, words that meant something again, and a need to turn them into more.

I spent years believing I had set writing aside. Now I think it was waiting for me, quietly and patiently.

And when I write now, I feel that younger version of myself close by, still running from dorm room to dorm room, adding details, eager to tell someone what really happened when the lights went out.

I know people want credentials, titles, and I was a former this and that in this section. Authentically, this is why and how I got here; the middle of my story is for another time.