Obsession into Joy

Last night as I went about cleaning my room I discovered my old notebooks sitting at the bottom of a bookshelf in my closet. I thought it would be a fun idea to take the notebooks out and see how many I have. So I devised a clever plan to stack them next to the dresser and count them. I piled them high and was surprised to find that I have 68 notebooks and a large three ring binder filled with stray pages. 68 notebooks is a far cry from the 25 notebooks I started off with in middle school, though my obsessions for writing began long before then. My father used to tell us stories about the brave and sometimes erratic adventures of Dr. Indiana Jones. Sometimes they would be silly like Indiana Jones had to use a cough drop to stop a coffin from attacking. Other ones were grand adventures like finding the ancient city of Atlantis or lost Mayan tombs. My father helped me develop a taste for oral storytelling, but I was not as strong as speaking aloud as I was putting words to page. By the 3^rd Grade I had read the entire dictionary front to cover. I loved words and if there was a word I didn’t know I would figure out its meanings. Hymns in church and scriptures also helped me develop a taste for words. Throughout elementary school I wrote short stories, but that changed for me in the 3^rd Grade when I had to learn cursive. My teacher found my handwriting atrocious and made me do drills again and again to learn how to write. This went on throughout elementary school until I was diagnosed at the end of the 4^th grade with Dysgraphia. Dysgraphia means that the muscles in my hands didn’t form write causing tremors and sometimes pain when writing, I write fast to avoid this pain. Trying to make my handwriting legible was a seemingly impossible feat, while it has improved over the years it will never be perfect. I love my handwriting because I can read it and no one else can. By the time I reached Middle School they felt something was still wrong and placed me in Special Ed class. At first I thought it was a mistake, but it turned out to be one of the best things. In Special Ed Class our teacher Mrs. Green was replaced with Mr. Rasch and he taught me how to write better than before. Had it not been for him I would not be the novelist I am today because he had faith in me when other teachers doubted. From there on I soared. I wrote my first novel in 7^th grade, my first musical in 8^th, and my first 1000 page book by Junior year in High School (no one ever told me that novels should be no more than 100,000  words, unless you’re already a successful published author). Yet after all the fantasy and science fiction I wrote I couldn’t put a word to page about my own story until now. It will be ten years in April that I’ve been diagnosed with Asperger Syndrome, what a perfect time to start penning the story of my life. Writing may be my obsession, but it has turned into a dream filled with the hope that one day I will be the published author my 10 year old self never thought I could be.