By Rachael Lozano

“All stories are written by the stars,” my father would say before he kissed me on the forehead goodnight. My father used to say every night after reading me a bedtime story that my future had already been written by the stars—Vet school at CSU—and be a famous vet.

So, I grew up believing that is what I wanted because that is what the stars wanted me to do. For many years, I could see myself rushing into operating rooms. I could see myself helping to birth kittens. I remember continuously bandaging up my stuffed animals without even a thought. In fourth grade, my father bought me a lab coat and a stethoscope for future career day. That day solidified that this was what I wanted. I wanted to be a vet. And through all the failed math assignments, I kept a tight hold on that dream.

But looking back, I think it was because that was the only dream I’d ever known. I think I kept hold so tightly to that dream because I was afraid of disappointing him. Perhaps that is why I fought for so long when I encountered my true passion.

I thoroughly thought that being a vet was all I ever wanted until fourth grad,e when my sister showed me the power of writing fiction.

Let me elaborate a bit.

I grew up in a world where wifi was not just at the touch of a button. You had to take your laptop and go downstairs to connect it to the internet cord to get any sort of internet, but what can you expect from the early 2000s? My father was an electrical engineer. He was always coming home with laptops. Not bright shiny new laptops that just came out of the box. No—I’m talking hand-me-down laptops that only had the most basic of functions. So yes, my siblings and I all had laptops at a young age, but we didn’t have convenient access to the internet, so, therefore, my parents didn’t care that much. I had a laptop, my brother had one, and so did my sister.

One day, I walked in on my sister sitting in her window seat, typing away on her computer. As the ever-curious eleven-year-old that I was at the time, I remember walking up to her and asking her what she was doing.

“I’m writing a book,” she told me. I noticed the smile on her face. I titled my head.

“But you’re not a star,” I said. “You can’t be writing a book.” My sister laughed.

“No silly. Anyone can write a book. It is not just something that a star does.” I watched her. She smiled.

“Here,” she said as she patted the spot next to her. I climbed up and looked over her shoulder.

I noticed how she’d pause before her hands danced on top of the keyboard, spilling out words that would create worlds and characters.  I sat there, watching her for five minutes. The graceful pauses. The virtual paper filling up with words. I loved how the cursor blinked slowly as if waiting for further instructions.

“That’s so cool,” I said. I read her words. How poetic they sounded on the page. She smiled. “I want to try!” I exclaimed as my head shot up from her shoulder. She chuckled slightly. I watched as she clicked another word document open.

She then placed the laptop on my lap. I smiled down, waiting for the words to start showing up. I kept waiting. I looked at her after a few minutes.

“How-How do I do…” my words trailed off as she smiled down at me.

“Why don’t you start with the words, ‘Once Upon a Time’ and then begin typing words until you start creating a scene.” I turned my head back to the blank screen. 

It was at that moment, when my hands first typed out the cliché “once upon a time”, that I was hooked.

Writing for me became an addiction. For years, I didn’t go anywhere without a notebook and pen. I was that weird kid who didn’t have friends in elementary school—scratch that, throughout my entire career as a student, I didn’t have many friends. But it was okay because I had my characters. I had my worlds to escape to. Recess for me consisted of writing and reading. That’s what I loved to do.

  Until the classic mean girls of my school, who had too much time on their hands, decided to grab my notebook and chuck in the mud.  They were the first villains I ever encountered in life. And so, they were the first villains that graced my stories’ pages. Their bullying was met with me turning them into frogs or snakes or owls. In a way, I found justice without having to deal with it in reality. And though they never turned into insects before my eyes, knowing their fates in fiction made dealing with the harassment far easier.

But I will say that they did trash a lot of notebooks to the point I contemplated moving inside for recess. The teachers didn’t like that idea, so I always hid.

By the end of fifth grade, I had written my first novel. It was called Wolf Fang, and it was about 300 pages full of epic battle scenes between canines and felines on an intergalactic planet—Yes, it was very bad. Suffice to say, I was frustrated with it because it didn’t convey what I wanted.

So I tried again. This time, I wrote about a vampire slayer. By the end of that year, I completed another story. But it still wasn’t perfect because the characters were one dimensional.

I kept writing and wondering why my work wasn’t turning out the way it needed to. Around this time, I stopped reading. Writing followed after. It was the first large chunk of time when words didn’t consume my mind.

Because a part of me was afraid. I couldn’t stop wanting to be a vet because that was the fate written in the stars.  The stars had told me that my fate revolved around saving animals and not writing about other worlds. If that was my fate, then I needed to do whatever I could to succeed.

So, for months, I locked away my writing at one point. I still allowed my characters to talk to me, but I refused to write down their stories. It was painful. It was agonizing. It almost felt like sweet relief when I picked up a pencil again.

Writing became my salvation. It was my saving grace at thirteen when a gunman shot at my school—in case you are wondering, no one died.  Whenever I tell someone that I was in a school shooting, that is usually the first question they ask. Did someone die? It’s even more disturbing when I notice the subtle disappointment on their face when I answer no.

  But it doesn’t mean that I don’t still feel hunted by the gunman. To this day, he still lurks. His hunting rifle always at eye level. Miraculously, I am always able to get away. Sometimes, I still see him at night. Those glowing red eyes in the darkness. Perhaps that is why at thirteen I furiously wrote after the encounter. To escape the demons of PTSD, depression, and anxiety, I wrote. I wrote until my hands went numb. Until my mind was so exhausted that I would be able to sleep fully through the night. My coping was writing my nightmares away.

I let words consume me. After that, a myriad of other novels and short stories were written. It was in those moments, being a writer, that made me feel like I was alive again. The monsters couldn’t hurt me while I wrote. I felt like I could breathe again. It got to the point where I was terrified to stop writing. Terrified to stop reading. I know that writing became my everything.

Being a vet was no longer an option for me. Not in the way it used to be. I thought that I could subject myself to being a vet because I didn’t want to disappoint my father or the stars.

So, I worked hard in biology and I tried my best in math. But I always found myself running back to my fictional worlds. Perhaps it was their promise of escaping reality that leads me back to them. Perhaps it was the characters with their arms outstretched towards me in a way that no friend has ever done. Perhaps, in those worlds, I found solace and comfort in knowing that I didn’t have to play a role. I didn’t have to feel alone anymore. I could escape for a moment to another world where I wasn’t broken and my life wasn’t torn.  They were my comfort. My mountain of books became like a fort that I could hide behind. The words I wrote became my armor and my weapons. They were my protection against my reality.

I’d never done something in my life that filled me with so much passion. The idea of being a vet became no more. It was all about writing. It was all about breathing life into me through words. I realized that is what I wanted. I wanted to write for the rest of my life, and only when I was knocking on death’s door, would I stop.

By college, I realized I wanted to be an author. I wanted to write stories that made people also feel like they weren’t alone.  I didn’t want to be one for fame or recognition. Although, I would consider those perks.

But when the awards did come in, I would be lying if I said that I wouldn’t cry with happiness that someone loved my work enough to give me an award for it. Before, those awards flooded in, my parents didn’t pridefully talk about my writing. Now, whenever I get a new award or a new scholarship, it is the first thing brought up at dinner parties. Because I was finally recognized as a talented writer, I could finally tell my father that I didn’t want to be a vet.

He told me that he knew. He saw the passion for that job disappear long ago. He was happy that I found writing even if he knew that I was setting down a path where I couldn’t be successful.

In truth, I’ve always been a writer up past the early dawn of the morning just staring at a draft wondering if it was any good. I’ve been the writer who has murmured in the middle of Target about a new plot to add to her story. I’ve been the writer who has jotted ideas down on any paper I can find. I’ve been that writer who zones out before letting my fingers take flight on the keyboard. I’m a writer who has never once stopped writing.

This is why I never thought someone could take that power and love of writing away from me.

Not everyone will like your work. I know that now. I wasn’t just knocked off of my pedestal by a fellow writer though, I was shoved off the pedestal and told that my writing was worthless by a professor that I was supposed to trust because she was considered one of the better ones in the English department.

I was told as a Junior in the Creative Writing Program up at CSU by my creative fiction professor that my words would never amount to anything. She told me, that my stories, the ones I cared about, had no place in this world. She said, that the only story that would ever get me famous would be the one about my real-life trauma consisting of being in a school shooting when I was thirteen years old. She told me that anyone who writes fantasy is an idiot and contemporary or literary fiction is the only fiction that should be written. She said that if I wanted to pass her class, then I needed to stop my foolishness and write about actual literature.

I remember walking out of her office and going to the bathroom to cry. I remember putting up a post on Facebook about how I wasn’t good enough and I wish people had told me sooner. I contemplated going home that night and destroying every single piece of work that I had created. I’m glad I didn’t destroy anything that night.

The worst part is that night, my roommate said that I was an idiot for going down the writing path too. She told me that writing is not the way of the world. If I stuck with writing, then I was sending myself to an early grave. She took my professor’s side and said English was the worst department a person could sign up for. She then pushed me back towards being a vet. This isn’t the first time I let this girl bully me. But in my writings, I got justice on her. I believe I always turned her into a toad. Her personality was quite perfect for a toad.

So, I changed my major. I spent one semester as a Zoology student. In truth, I hated every minute of it. It was when I was studying the inside of a dog’s reproductive system that I realized  I was letting someone else write my story. A professor told me that my writing sucked. A roommate, I trusted, told me that I wouldn’t amount to anything if I was not a vet. They tried to write my story. And I let them. Just like I let my father control me with his dream for me. Just like I let my mother dress me up and take me to acting auditions. Just like how I let past relationships steer me in directions that I did not want to go.  It is almost as if I was programmed to accept everyone else’s story edits of my life.

For most of my life, I let people and the stars write my story. They all pretended like I had a choice. They all pretended like I could say no.

  I am done letting other people write my story. I don’t want to be the main character. I want to be the author.  I now know that no one is allowed to write my life, not even the stars.