Origin Stories

Children are often wiser than they’re given credit for. Adults tend to think it’s a fluke when something incredibly profound emerges from their mouths.

An adult will look at a problem — a question: what do you want to do with your life? — and think in terms of paying bills, of responsibilities to family and friends. As an adult, the answer tends to be laden with our own expectations of our self-worth.

Ask a child and the answer might not be anything grounded in reality, and it might change in five seconds, but you get the truth. She’ll tell you exactly what she wants.

Writers — all artists, really — are like super heroes. We all have origin stories, whether our art was a quiet compulsion throughout our lives, or whether it came to us in a bolt of lightning. Some of us never consider that we might be artists until someone else points it out (and then we’re often slow to believe it).

I was eight, and my whole life was a competition with my sister. We were in the bathroom, because where else would an eight- and nine-year-old discuss such a profound, life-altering question? An astronaut — a woman — had visited my sister’s school that day. For the first time, she had been presented with the idea that a girl could be an astronaut, and she wanted that with an intensity and surety even beyond her usual. And in the middle of gushing, she stopped, turned to me, and asked The Question.

So what do you want to be when you grow up?

Someone else must have asked me before, but none of it had the weight of her asking. She expected nothing less than a perfectly serious answer, and something as equally true to me as her astronaut dream at the time was to her.

Ask a serious child a serious question, and you’ll get a serious answer.

I thought. The list of things I wanted to do and to learn would have stretched for miles. How would I know what I liked, what I was good at, what I could spend an entire lifetime doing and loving when I hadn’t even tried it yet? But one thing I could do day after day and never get bored was read. I could read and be all those different things I wanted to try. Only I would go myself, and learn things, and have experiences, and write them into my own stories.

It was a lightbulb-epiphany moment. I’ve never regretted it. I’ve learned wonderful, random things, and done some crazy, not-so-bright things. Whenever anyone asks me why, I grin like a maniac and say, “Why not? I can always write about it later.”

So what’s your origin story? Please share (you know you want to)!