For Ray

I am a writer.

If you had met me three years ago, you would understand why this sentence would never have escaped my lips. I was (am) scared of what being a writer truly means. Writing exposes. It is vulnerable. What's more, good writing is just as terrifying as bad writing because good writing demands a successor. What if I never achieve anything better than what is already my best?

But I am a writer.

This means I cannot stop writing. It is my expression, my passion, my tangible thoughts and imagination. It serves as an active telescope into my mind, giving me the chance to dance through ideas, arrange dreams, and play in my imagination.

Ray Bradbury once said that he writes "so as not to be dead" (The Illustrated Man).

Writing is not for sport, for entertainment, or for money. Writing comes from a deep desire to capture life and weigh it in our own hands, judging its contents to be fair or false. By words on pages, we not only share ideas but emotions and injustices and empathy. If writers were to stop writing and readers were to stop reading, I believe humanity itself would be absent of hope.

But I am a writer.

And by this title I accept the role I have to write and create and speak onto the page everything my heart asks of me. Ernest Hemingway wrote, "There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed." What happens when I stop bleeding out my story? Will my heart give out altogether?

So I am a writer.

I write to live. I write to understand. I write because I'm afraid if I stop writing what I see in my head and think in my heart will become vague and purposeless. Yet before all the computers crash, all the pencils are burned, and every pen looses ink, I will write every word that I want to ... "so as not to be dead."