I fell in love in fourth grade. My teacher at the time, Mr. Jones, introduced us. I doubt he knew I would fall so completely and so swiftly, but I did nonetheless, even though all the adults probably thought I was crazy. Fourth grade hearts are so simple, though; they just fall, disregarding everyone and everything. Sometimes I try to imagine what I was like back then, so young yet so in love. My eyes must have sparkled and laughter must have poured out of me like water overflowing a cup. I was consumed. I knew it then and I know it now.

My love story is not ordinary. I am one of the fractions of people who can recall such love from such a young age. Maybe one day I’ll write something more about it, about young love that never dies. Although it wouldn’t be a normal story because in fourth grade I did not fall in love with a boy or a girl or any other living person. I fell in love with writing.

Obviously, since I now write for Odyssey every week, I have continued in my love. Writing has never completely left my life, even when I was at my busiest. During college finals, my roommates often found me ignoring my studies in order to write one more page of something. After new TV show episodes and new movies, I often sit down and spit out twenty pages or more of fanfiction, staying up all hours of the day and night to complete my story within the already created story. It may be cheating, to use plots and characters already developed by someone else, but it is practice and I love it. All writing is practice, even the long theological essays, and the confusing Shakespeare prompts, and so I love it no matter the difficulty. As I said, I fell madly in love with writing at a young age and I have never stopped.

It probably seems crazy, to write an article about loving to write, but writing is so often forgotten by our society that I feel the need to celebrate my relationship with it publically. We teach writing to our children and then when adulthood rolls around it is replaced by math and engineering and careers deemed more useful in a society filled with technology. Don’t get me wrong, we need mathematicians and engineers and people who can diagnose a computer problem with a single glance, but we need writing for all those things. We teach math with writing, engineers communicate with writing, computer books are all written. Words are what everything else is built on, so for society to push them to the side and tell the writers like me that they are not as important as the engineers are wrong. I build things too. I construct sentences and from those sentences, entire worlds rise. New people can be created by my mixtures of twenty-six letters. They deserve just as much respect as the beautiful buildings engineers create for us.

I write today for the fourth grader I once was. I write for the girl who filled pages of journals with ridiculous stories, for the child that thought to publish a book was a plausible feat, for the young writer that was slowly born in my soul and has never left. I write to tell her that math is a necessary evil that will never pin her down so long as she holds onto words, no matter what society says. Respect society and write to change it. Do not write to conform to it.

And I write for the young person that finds joy in math. I write to tell them that words are beautiful, but it is okay that they do not fall in love with them. We are all given gifts, with brains wired in unique ways, and God must be laughing Himself silly at our feeble attempts to fit everyone into a box. Enjoy your math. Flourish with math. But I have one request. When you grow up and complete your hard won degree, please let me celebrate the joy in completing mine. Let me write for pennies an hour while you build your expensive skyscrapers. I will respect your equations and your buildings, so long as you respect my words.

Writing will always be a part of me. I’m an English major, it’s what I do. And I will continue to celebrate the power of words and what loving them can do as I grow up and enter the world that looks down its nose at the girl who still dreams of publishing a novel instead of building a skyscraper. Perhaps if I respect those building hands and constructing minds, I will also gain respect for creating an entire world in my head and having the strength to write it down. And even if I don’t get their respect, even if falling in love with writing in fourth grade remains a childish mistake that distracts me from the more important parts of life, I will write anyway. I have no intention of giving up a love I have had for so long.