I didn’t set out to become a writer. That would’ve required a level of foresight I simply didn’t possess at age thirteen, when my primary concern in life was avoiding P.E. and pretending I’d done my homework while still damp from the printer.
Writing sort of… happened. I remember the first time I was told I was “quite good at it.” It was by Miss Taylor, my slightly terrifying English teacher who wore red lipstick like it was war paint. She’d handed back one of my essays, gave me a look that was somewhere between surprise and suspicion, and said, “You’ve got a voice.” I assumed this was a polite way of telling me I talk too much.
Which I do.
But the idea stuck. Writing became this quiet outlet — a way to process things I didn’t know how to say out loud, like how I found school both wildly boring and deeply stressful, or why I felt like everyone else had received the manual on how to be a normal person and I’d been given a leaflet on sarcasm and how to be a successful over-thinker.
At first, I wrote things that were largely fictional but suspiciously autobiographical. A boy trapped in an exam hall who slowly unravels. A man who fakes his own death to escape small talk. A teenager who develops a mysterious allergy to group work. You know — classics.
What surprised me wasn’t that I enjoyed writing (though I did), but that other people seemed to enjoy reading it. Or at the very least, they didn’t immediately want to burn it. There’s a kind of magic in realising that something you’ve written — some odd little observation or ridiculous internal monologue — resonates with someone else.
Now, writing is the thing I come back to when life feels too chaotic, or too quiet. It’s where the jokes go when they don’t quite work out loud. It’s how I make sense of things, or at the very least, mock them into submission.
So no, I didn’t plan to be a writer. But like most of my best ideas, it came from somewhere unexpected — a throwaway comment, a mild panic, and the desire to say something honest without making it too obvious.
Thanks, Miss Taylor. You were right. I do have a voice. And now I use it to write about how I became someone who writes.
