Welcome!

Hello! This is the first blog post of thaiswrites! I wasn't totally sure how to do this, if it was worth it to make a blog at all, what I would even write. But as an aspiring author, a blog is the perfect way to get my voice out there.

I'm going to make this a get to know you blog post, so let's get started! I've been writing my entire life. It started with journals that I got as gifts for holidays and my birthday, or computer paper from the printer, or word documents on my family's shared desktop computer. Throughout my life, my writing was unfinished stories that were somewhat depressing and based on sad stories and little to no personal experience or real life observations. However, my perspective on writing changed when I got to high school. My freshman year I began writing poetry, starting with a poetry contest in my creative writing class. It wasn't then that I fell in love with poetry, despite having won the contest, but it warmed the waters of my love for poetry. Two years later I was in my junior year and I had an AP Literature teacher that changed my worldview. He would begin every class period with a "Poem of the Day." For a long time, I was against writing poetry. I didn't see the point in it, nor did I think that it was enjoyable to do. All of the rules made me feel as if poetry was too hard. But then I listened to some of the poetry, and I felt connected to it. Not every poem followed a traditional style and I realized what freestyle poetry was. I didn't need to go through the different rules of stanzas and rhyming strictly in order for it to be a good poem. I could write a freestyle poem and it didn't have to be like homework and super strict. It just had to be me.

So, I started writing poetry. I wrote it in the margins of my notebooks, I wrote it on little sheets of pink paper that now sit in a clear container in my childhood bedroom. I wrote so many small little pieces of paper in the matter of a month or so before my Freshman year of college, and that became my first poetry book. After I finished that poetry book, I wrote a second one. And after that poetry book, I started a third book. Poetry became my home, it was somewhere where I could express the good, the bad, the beautiful, the ugly of my life. As someone who has severe anxiety, poetry became another form of therapy. A way to write folklore too, bring the daydreams and ideas out of my head and onto the page.

I consider myself to be a poet, first and foremost. I am a writer who began with short stories and book ideas and who found her home in the beauty and the expression that poetry provides. However, I also work on short stories and novels when I am not working on and expanding my poetry portfolio. In that arena I am focused on fiction, realistic fiction, and the young adult romance genre. As a woman, an intersectional feminist, and someone who is focused on political and humanitarian issues, my work has a focus on all of these things. I write about feminist issues and women's issues, political and social issues that I feel passionately about like gun control, mental health, equality, etc. I have severe generalized anxiety disorder and in my writing, I like to focus on the reality of this struggle and bring awareness to the reality of anxious lives and the normalization of taking mental health medication. And in between and while writing about these issues, I lean into the perspective of a hopeless romantic. I write about love, complicated, sweet, beautiful love stories. I write the love stories that I have never had. Because the one thing that we all have in common aside from our humanity is our ability to love.

Anyways, in the last year or two I have realized that this is something that I want to do for the rest of my life. I always knew that I wanted to be a writer, but I did not think that it could be my entire life and I certainly never thought about making a living off of a book with my name on it. This will be my life. I will graduate college, work on my writing, and publish my poetry, and hopefully a completed young adult novel. However, right now I am a Junior (almost Senior) in college and I realize that as much as my writing serves emotional and therapeutic purposes, I have to market myself. And so this is a way to market myself as a writer, but also just share my life as an aspiring author with all of you. I won't always just talk about my portfolio, I will share some writing snippets and share about how being a writer is realistically. I will also write about mental health, being a woman, how I live life in a way that makes me happy and things that I have done to benefit myself and live a better and healthier life. This will include the things that fill my cup: animals, reading cheesy YA romance novels, romcoms, my family, my friends, comfort TV shows, going on walks, live music, Harry Styles, Taylor Swift, the Foo Fighters, Lizzo, dancing, running (for fun and very slow), good food, dessert, traveling, therapy, and my home. I hope that I become a writer where people enjoy and find a homey sense of comfort in my writing. I hope this blog doesn't only get my voice out there, but gives a sense of community and inspiration. But most of all, I hope to inspire others (other writers, other people) to live a life that benefits them and leaves them healthier and happier than before.

I cannot wait to meet you all ❤️

Forever and Always,

T