You're Only an Oddball Until You Find Your Tribe

 Nine years ago I wrote my first blog post. Reading it now reminds me how it felt to be without a tribe. My tribe. The storytellers. It also brings back the rush of realizing my passion for writing fiction.

Here is an excerpt of the post I wrote as I began my journey as a writer. 

 All my life I have been the oddball.  Not quite fitting.  Different from the rest−the rest of the family, the rest of the class, the rest of the co-workers.

I was the one staring off into space−lost in thought. 

It was not that I wasn’t focused.  I was too focused.  Not on what was happening around me, but what was going on in my mind....a whole other world.

I am not sure at what age I started recording some of my daydreams.  I suppose the first stories found their way to paper when I was a child living in Sarnia, Ontario and later as a teen, in Cambridge.  Even after entering the workforce, I continued jotting down character descriptions and conflicts.  Detailed note-taking became an obsessive habit. 

When I returned to Sarnia with a young family, I was still dabbling in a make-believe world.  Faces and personalities emerged.  Happenings grandiose and minute; happenings born of an overactive imagination.

As far back as my memory takes me I studied people. Of course, I never considered it studying, but merely a fascination for behaviour and reaction, emotion and energy.  Everyone was different.  If I could interchange all their characteristics and idiosyncrasies, what kind of person could I create?  I could develop a perfect personality but then their lifelike qualities would soon make them imperfect.
Yes, my fascination for people grew. 

My daydreams and imaginings− those minute scribbles on scraps of paper− became involved stories written longhand on yellow lined pads; the kind sold ten to a package to offices−are they still?−long before computers became the norm.  Those yellow sheets were then rolled and secured with elastic bands, and hidden in my cardboard memory box.

My writings and story tales were my secret.  Not even my best friend knew.  No one knew.  I must have appeared constantly distracted. 
There was never time to consider writing on a regular basis.  I wrote to ease the anxiety of not writing.  There, I would say, I have scrawled fifty pages.  Of course, it was only temporary relief.  My addiction to storytelling was never truly cured.

When I joined the ranks of retirees, I whispered my desire to write.  Write what, he asked.  A book.  That is what I had always wanted.  To create living, breathing characters that made their own way through hardships and heartaches: characters that made choices−some good, some bad− but each having its own consequence.  So write, he said.  Go write a book. 
I questioned why I needed validation.  Did I enjoy writing so much that I felt guilt over time frivolously spent?  Whatever the reason, I had finally revealed my passion.  Go write a book he said.
I wrote.  Words appeared on my monitor faster than I could read them.  Characters took on life: so much so that they took over my story and created their own.  They ignored my development of the plot, seeming to have something different in mind.   
I laughed over their shenanigans and wept when they grieved.  They became important people in my life.  My laptop friends.  I was immensely satisfied when the last line appeared in black and white.  However, I found it was impossible  to type The End.  I hated for it to be over.