An Honest Confession...

I have always loved stories.

It didn't take me long into my childhood to realize that I loved to make them up as much as I liked to read or hear them.

I began to write very early on. It became almost second nature for me to write things in my head, hoping I would remember the phrases later when I had a pen in hand or a computer to type at.

At first I wanted nothing out of my writing. I just wanted to write.

And then I began to question what I wanted those who read my writings to experience.

My initial reaction was to make them happy. Specifically, to make them laugh.

It did not take me long to realize that I am not funny. At least on paper.

Occasionally a rapid succession of witty remarks stream from my mouth and send the people around me into gasping laughs, as if in surprise that my natural seriousness would allow for such a thing. My immediate family knows better--they know there is a mischievous, happy-sappy, bright side of me.

However, that does not often translate to the written word.

So I turned from that pursuit in search of another.

I found it immediately and knew without a doubt that it was what led me to continue writing at all, because it was something that drove nearly all my actions.

Compassion, I decided, was what I most wanted my readers to experience. More than anything, I wanted to breach the apathetic veneer that so many people--so, so many people--wear. I wanted to break down the walls built in people's hearts that keep out selfless love, that promote self-preservation in the form of selfishness and negativity. Not to make people feel vulnerable, but rather to touch their souls with the sudden understanding and experience of the vulnerability of another. I wanted to cast people's minds away from their own fear of being hurt, betrayed, misunderstood, or unloved, to realize that same fear in the hearts of others.

It is the very same thing I want to do when I speak to others.

I don't mind making people laugh, and if I do that fills me with joy.

...

But if I'm being honest, I prefer to make people cry.

...

To cry with grief, with empathy, with a deep pain experienced as their own.

To feel within them the stirrings of something we often deeply lack in our daily lives, thoughts, and interactions: compassion.

Compassion: a love that means "to suffer with".