My Love for Writing

My passion for poetry didn't start with me. It started with my dad.
He was a busy man, but poetry was where we met. He was a fantastic reader—the kind who could take you somewhere just by reading aloud—and I was an enthusiastic five-year-old ear, soaking it in. His favorite poet was Edgar Allan Poe: The Raven, Annabel Lee, A Dream Within a Dream. Deep, dark material for a five-year-old, honestly. But it wasn't really about the poems. It was about the bonding—a father and daughter finding each other in the rhythm of someone else's words.
His passion became mine. At eight years old, I entered a talent show and tried to perform Annabel Lee from memory:
"It was many and many a year ago, in a kingdom by the sea, that a maiden there lived whom you may know by the name of Annabel Lee."
The microphone didn't work. I froze, and eventually ran off the stage. But the audience clapped anyway — for the attempt, for an eight-year-old brave enough to try to hold Poe's darkness in her small hands.
I still get stage fright when I read today. That hasn't gone away. What's changed is how I understand it—not as something to overcome and be rid of, but as proof that I'm still growing, still choosing bravery over retreat, every single time I step up to a microphone.
That's what writing has always been for me: not a performance without fear, but a practice of turning toward fear instead of away from it. My father gave me that first, in poems that were far too heavy for a child — and somehow, exactly right.