I found out, regrettably, not that long ago that my writing doesn’t have to make any sense. 

I was feeling real, authentic, and painful emotions, so I wrote something real, authentic, and painful. And when I was finally done and reading it over I realized no one would ever be able to understand it besides me—and I loved it.

I wasn’t overexplaining or compensating for an audience, or a grade, or validation, I was writing, and suddenly a love and passion I didn’t even realize I had lost flooded back to me. My brain unfogged, and my soul healed.

I have always loved writing, but I never remembered why until that moment. 

I finally felt the warmth of a trapped flame, a flame that’s been desperately trying to spark and lead me to where I needed to go all along. The same flame I tenderly cared for in my youth, but let blow out accidentally as I aged. The same flame that with its very last bit of kindling sparked an idea in my head that maybe I should write for my school’s news site after all—that I should just keep writing even though I didn’t know why yet.

And as the flame came back to life, it took over. Although I was the one writing, my words were telling a story of their own. Their main message: remember when?

My words asked me, accusatorily, if I even remembered the stories I had written in second grade, if I recalled how profound, and important, and special they were despite them not being very good at all. I began to remember my conviction that I would one day be an author, all before I even knew the proper use of a comma. 

The stories about my main character, Quin, a little girl I lived vicariously through, make no sense when I read them back now. A young me, though, was convinced that this hasty, barely cohesive series would win me my Pulitzer. 

This, of course, was all the convincing I needed that my writing never had to mean anything. It never even had to be good. I’ve never been a good writer, I’ve only ever been a person who has something to say to herself, and is finally getting the chance to. 

I’ll never be able to make the promise that my writing is good, or profound, or important, or special, but I can promise that it’s real. Because I now know that it’s only ever had to make sense to me, and, finally, it does.