For five years, freshman Jessie Warren has been living in a world produced by her. Entangled in an elaborate world crafted by her own mind, Jessie continues to expand upon this intricacy by weaving webs of fantastical elements together to create an ever-growing world of her own.

Jessie writes and has been since her unrestricted fourth-grade imagination created this fantasy world. Still designing the elaborate story to this day, five years later, it’s Jessie’s only continual project—the only world she permanently resides in.

As for the rest of them, Jessie hops from world to world, place to place, and mindset to mindset on a daily basis. Picking up and putting down pages of elaborate extensions of her imagination, Jessie never stays in one place for too long—besides her continual five-year world.

“I find myself getting distracted, losing the inspiration, and not wanting to write about something anymore,” Jessie said. “I’ve been trying to find a time where I’m feeling really inspired [so I can] start writing something new and just get into it fully. I definitely find myself leaving some of my works behind and never finishing them; I start a lot of things that I can’t finish.”

No matter which world Jessie is in that day, one thing remains constant: the benefits of writing.

Due to dancing with her active imagination in fourth grade, and then putting those thoughts on paper around a year later, Jessie has devoted almost half a decade to a true passion.

“I feel like my mind is a lot of the time all over the place, so writing can help me pull my mind down and put it onto paper so I can understand what’s going on,” Jessie said. “My mind is very broad, and I think about lots of things all at once, so [writing] kind of [acts] a lot like [therapy].”

Considering herself to be a generally nervous person, Jessie uses writing—the worlds she has created with passion and talent—as her sanction and safe space. The very notion of being able to write when she is able to get a free moment grounds her in any particularly nerve-wracking situation.

“I think writing has definitely lessened how nervous I can be because I know that once I get home, I’ll be able to do it,” Jessie said. “It’s something that I look forward to.”

So, every day Jessie returns to her different worlds and dances between fantasy and reality, reducing her anxiety and raising her passion for putting thoughts to paper.

And while Jessie can call many branches of her imagination home, including the intricate five-year web, her true home is the act of writing itself.

“It’s nice to have [something] that I know I’m good at and enjoy doing,” Jessie said. “If I need someplace to go to relieve my stress, I know I can go to writing for that.”

The stability, sanction, and safe space that writing offers also stems from her mother. A writer who is “very put-together and good about controlling her emotions,” Jessie sees her mom with the same lens she views writing with: a stable force of guidance and inspiration.

Sometimes, though, the roles reverse.

“[My mom] has started writing more recently,” Jessie said, “and I feel like maybe I mentored her.”

Writing is Jessie’s passion; it’s the makeup of her mind and her heart and her soul, so she avidly talks about it to her close family and friends with light in her eyes and fire in her heart. Jessie’s mom listened to the way she passionately spoke about her hobby and fed off of that energy, leading her to create worlds of her own.

And so the two began to write side by side, pulling inspiration from each other, with entangled webs of worlds inside their heads.

“[My mom] is a big influence on my life and the way that I am,” Jessie said. “I feel like I definitely find inspiration from her; she also writes similarly [to me] in a journal kind of way.”

The support from her family motivates Jessie to continue advancing through her different worlds until she lands in one as substantial and elaborate as her five-year fantasy world. Jessie has the stability of not only writing itself, but her family, too, and that is what her home is: the worlds of her writing and the family that supports Jessie’s map of a mind.

“I like storytelling,” Jessie said. “I like coming up with things in my mind and being able to write them down. [The support from my family] definitely keeps me going; it definitely inspires me to write more. They’re so supportive of how crazy my mind is.”