As a child, I was not just wise beyond my years, I was unbearably sensitive. The kind of child who felt everything before I understood what to do with it. The kind who was more observer than participant, who stood at the edges of the world and watched it unfold like a novel only I was reading. And so I studied. I absorbed. I noticed. Because I thought, if I could just understand — If I could map out why people loved the way they did, why they hurt each other, why they left, why they stayed — Maybe it would make existing a little easier. So I watched. I watched the way emotions moved through a room, subtle and unspoken, as if everyone could feel them but no one dared to name them. I watched the world as if I were separate from it. Not because I wanted to be but because I felt, even then, that if I allowed myself to dive headfirst into the chaos, it would swallow me whole. So I learned in silence. I built my wisdom in quiet rooms, in hidden corners, in the spaces between people. I turned to words. To stories. To meaning. If I couldn't escape feeling everything, I could at least name it. If I couldn't stop the world from being unpredictable, I could at least map it out in ink. And so, I wrote. And I read. And I did so to make sense of myself. To make sense of the people around me.

And now, after all these years, after all the words I've collected and all the wisdom I've gathered in silence-I write for you. I write to ‘unlock people' the way I once wished someone would have unlocked me. I write to pull the invisible into view, to name what others leave unnamed, to remind them that no emotion is too much, no truth too heavy to hold. Now, I wake up and write for a living. Now, I spend hours lost in poetry and meaning. Now, I study people and help them study themselves. Now, I take ink and turn it into feeling, take constellations and turn them into understanding. And I think, if little me could see me now — The one who sat in thrift stores running her hands over old books, the one who carried too much feeling in her chest, the one who thought if she could just understand, maybe she'd belong. She would see what I have built, She would see what I have turned my sensitivity into, She would see this space I have carved out in the world — And she would exhale. She would know this is exactly where I was meant to be.