Sophomore year, I was bullied mercilessly by a contingent of boys in the grade above me. I had this binder I carried around all day, with Mind Games in it. One day, they decided that just harassing me wasn’t enough, and to really make me mad they were going to steal my Mind Games binder.

That binder was my life, everything I had been writing for months. I was devastated — this happened fifth period, I went to next period lunch in tears. It was two months before I got it back, thanks to some amazing people in administration who didn’t write it off because it was a ratty binder filled with handwritten pieces of notebook paper, none of it having any monetary value. I still don’t know who took it, but it terrified me. That was work I wasn’t ready to share with anyone outside a select few, and the idea of anyone seeing it was legitimately terrifying. It was taken in October, I got it back in December, and, to be honest, I’ve hardly touched it since. I can’t make myself.

Junior year, I took creative writing, and nothing I did was good enough. Every single thing I wrote had something huge wrong with it in some way, and I received very few positive comments. This was when I started to really question myself. I loved to write, I was proud of my skills as a writer — but people only tore me down. I closed myself off, stopped sharing past what I absolutely had to. No one read anything. I orphaned my fanfiction projects, I didn’t write anything original, for the first time since elementary school I didn’t enter a certain writing contest. I wrote, all the time, but I didn’t share it. I was afraid to.

Senior year, I saw that there was going to be a writers' group at the library, and I thought I would give it a whirl. Wow. Am I ever glad I did. It was one of the first times in a long time that I really felt accepted, that I felt I could share my writing and not be judged or teased or taunted. Our meetings were really my safe space. It sounds cheesy, but whatever. It’s so true. No matter what life threw at me, I always had my safe space to come home to. I made new friends, not always an easy thing for the person with (occasionally crippling) social anxiety. I don’t know if any of you even know that I have social anxiety, so that goes to show how much of a safe space I felt Plot Twisters was, and how completely comfortable I felt with you.

I don't see any of you as often as I would like anymore. I'm home so rarely, and usually only for a week at a time -- one day of Plot Twisters or Writeing Tyme. For some of you, I see you even less often, only when our breaks happen to line up, which isn't common. I miss you guys -- a lot.

Thank you for everything.