I cannot pinpoint the moment I began to fall in love with writing. Books were always a joy to me as a child, but writing was something I don’t think I considered until about sixth grade. My teacher, Miss Vitale assigned my class writing prompts which we wrote about in a notebook on a regular basis. While the other students were grumbling, I was reveling in the task. The biggest thrill for me was reading those entries when I was done. I realized I had the power to create narratives on my own. I could make my own stories and I enjoyed rereading them.

Around the same time, I remember finding a dolphin journal on a spinning metal rack at a hospital gift shop. My mother and I had been visiting my grandmother and stopped in the gift shop to pick up a gift to lift her spirits.

The journal had caught my eye because of the three dolphins on the front cover. Dolphins are to this day my favorite animal. I picked up the book and opened it. I found one blank page after another. The idea that I could fill those pages with my thoughts and experiences amazed me.

I begged my mother to purchase it for me. She couldn’t understand why I would want a blank book, but I did not relent and she finally agreed to purchase it for me. That journal would become my vacation journal. Every year when we went on our family vacation to the Outer Banks of North Carolina, I would write about the places we went each day and the events that took place. My writing became something I did on my own. Not an assignment for school. It was incredibly liberating for an introverted child. I could speak without having to share my thoughts with other people. It was pure freedom.

I would go back and read those entries over the years and shake my head in amazement at how much I had forgotten. They were there in those pages, all the memories that may have been lost with the passing of time. The journal spanned decades of my life holding some of the fondest memories of those vacations. At the same time, the journal fostered my love of writing. I reserved that particular journal only for vacation. But I soon had notebooks and other journals filling up with other subjects and thoughts good and bad throughout the hardships of my teenage years and beyond. To this day I still keep a vacation journal. However, I have had to buy new ones as I filled the pages of one after another. I truly believe that journal started it all for me and I haven’t stopped writing since.