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I came into high school having read Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart and Sherman Alexei's Diary of a Part Time Indian. I enjoyed both a lot as two very separate animals, and was excited for the reading I would do in high school. Then high school English classes dampened my interest into necessity. There was so much work, so many deadlines, so much to worry about. I wasn't enjoying the classes and it made me not want to read the books, even if I enjoyed them when I did. I dreaded every paper in high school, and I stopped reading on my own.

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I began reading at a very young age, and it came easy to me. I liked to read more than anything else in school, and took reading home with me,  wanting to read books on my own when I was only 3 or 4. I remember being 6 and opening one of my brother's freshman year high school textbooks and reading and understanding all of it, and not understanding what wasn't normal about being able to reading it. I kept alive a joy of independent reading with me through my younger youth, and writing developed easily with me just as reading had.

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After a having a bit of an artistic expression crisis before the fall semester, I dumped a class and picked up creative writing last minute. I wanted to be a writer, not just write, as I guess in my head I made those different things. The formality of deadlines and topics lead to a discovery that I really didn't want to be a writer, I wanted to write for me.

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The way reading began to directly influence how I felt and lived made me take that further into artistic expression of how I felt. So I began to write. My writing began as cathartic but soon sprouted some ambitions out of its emotion.

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When I was a senior in high school, I really didn't know what to do with myself or who I was...I attribute getting out of that stage to reading more than anything. I began to take in all sorts of work, nonfiction by Krakauer, philosophy by Alan Watts,  historical Japanese poetry...All of this helped shape a new worldview that helped me to be comfortable and grow, and reinvigorated a love of books.