CMKIGH

Writers are not normal people. I’m convinced of it. I may not be able to comprehend what normal is. But I’m sure in order to write, you must enter another dimension of thought, one that normal people avoid for good reason. Many of us writers come from a space where the doors were closed. What I mean by the doors being closed is simply that we were constrained by the minds of those who cared for us. We,...I was locked in by the quiet, by the lack of presence, the choice to deny me the truth which would have freed my mind because of the fear of shame. 

 So I..., we opened a door in our minds and walked through. On the other side was a madhouse that we cleaned up and within we created some kind of order out of the chaos that we found there. Some of us make it even madder. It doesn’t really make a difference because it’s just what writers do. We give shape to things we find in the mad places. 

I went through that door because the world I came from didn’t provide a definition for the word me. I was the cause, answer, and lesson of a cautionary tale. I was the daughter of a piano player and a widow from the south side of Chicago. I was the last of a family who had mostly died out or given up.

I was a writer. When I discovered this is when I became something more, or should I say when I became something? The madhouse I entered on the other side had a door of its own that led out into another world. I went through. Here I am. And somehow I never left.