By Hallie J. Carl
When I was a teenager, I wrote all the time. My dream was to be a writer. I imagined myself in a cabin with a cup of coffee on my desk and a dog curled up at my feet as I clicked away at a keyboard. In junior high, I bought a little notebook from the bookstore at school and I scribbled story ideas or ideas for characters.
I got a typewriter for Christmas and I began to write more seriously. I remember realizing a identity statement, “This is me. I am a writer,” embedding into my bones.
However, I stopped writing at a certain point, ideas and characters and plot lines gone. I would try to pick it up here and there over the years, only to feel like that part of myself may have been lost somewhere along the journey of my life. As often happens in life, I began to bear the weight of how others considered me with such a shouldered burden. Insecurities of what people would think about me if they read my writing began to loom so large that it stopped my fingers from dancing across a keyboard.
Through the events of the last seven months of my life, there has been one solid thing that I have heard over and over in my mind,
“Write it, Hallie. Write it.”
I have pondered the thought of that and little light bulbs began to appear just as if I was a 13 year old holding a little tablet full of ideas. Except this time, they weren’t story ideas, they were moments of my journey. A memory, a conversation, a text or email. Moments that have such full weight and meaning. Something began to settle into my bones. I needed to write again, I had a story to share. A conviction grew that I could do this and do it unashamed. “This is me. I am a writer.”
I reached out to a friend who is a novelist and she gave me the advice to start with a blog. I was overwhelmed at the idea of how to tell this story of mine from start to finish. She assured me that wasn’t necessary. Just fill the blog with moments, thoughts, experiences. With time, those thoughts would begin to weave together with a tone, theme, and continuity that I may be able to compile into a book.
At the end of the day, that is a goal. A book. One that guides mothers who have children with mental illness, churches on how to handle trauma and mental illness, and individuals to step into the dark places of their worst fears realized, electrified anxiety, and the heavy depression that can be unwanted companions on any journey.
So, here I am, a cup of coffee next to me that long ago lost its heat, a dog curled up, not at my feet but nearly on my lap, and a story to share. You are welcome to join me.
(7th and 8th grade author, Hallie 🙂
Storytime with Hallie 
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