I've started journaling again. I used to write in a journal a lot when I was younger, but I haven't in years. But since the quarantine started, I decided to dig out a few of my old journals and read them. When I came across this poem that I wrote when I was fourteen, I was fascinated. Both by my teenage sense of confusion and also by how many of the things I dreamed about have become true.
I was especially struck by the dream that I wanted to be an author of children's books. What? I don't remember that. I certainly remember wanting to be an author, but I never would have remembered that I wanted to be an author of children's books if I hadn't written that down. Now I wonder what kind of children's books I dreamed of writing: picture books or chapter books? Now I also ponder the way I felt when I decided to set aside my collection of adult short stories and focus on writing Sophie and Spot. I felt like it was a tangent or a detour at the time. And yet how interesting that I had dreamed of it all along and just forgotten.
