Anecdotes and Alchemy

  "Paper has more patience than people." — Anne Frank A year ago, I wrote about why I love reading. I did not realise I was writing my way into something else. If I trace it back, it does not start with passion. It starts with something much simpler. In second grade, I made a messy comic strip. The drawings were uneven, the story probably made no sense , and I still remember showing it to my mom and saying I was going to be a writer one day. It sounded like one of those random things kids say, but it stayed somewhere in the background. For a long time, writing showed up in small ways. Short poems for school competitions, random bursts of creativity, nothing consistent. I liked it, but it was not something I thought too deeply about. It was just something I could do. That started changing in eighth grade. Writing became something I looked forward to. Every time there was an opportunity, I took it. Not because I had to, but because I wanted to see how well I could express som...