03/08/2026
Since I was just a little girl, I've been writing.
My sisters noticed that pretty early, and on rainy days when we couldn't play outside, they would give me writing prompts and tell me to write them a story.
Pretending to be their student was just another in a long line of make-believe games we played (with my brother, too), like Ice Cream Parlor, Camp Star, and Restaurant Chef.
(In the restaurant game that we played in the garage with a children's kitchen playset, you could order nothing but chicken noodle soup and PBJ sandwiches.😆)
During these writing games, they'd say something like, "Tell us a story about a girl who lost her cat," or "Write about your best day ever."
And then I'd sit in the front room of our old farmhouse (where we often played) and spend hours filling in notebooks with all kinds of little stories.
Looking back, it feels very similar to what I do now for work. Someone shows up with an idea, a concept, or a rough direction for what they want to say, and my job is to take it and turn it into something cohesive on the page.
The format has changed, but the core of it is not all that different from those rainy afternoons in our front room.
What really struck me when I was recalling those memories, though, was that the first people who treated my creativity as something worth exploring, maybe even something special, were women.
My big sisters didn't just tolerate the kid who was always writing and reading. They actively encouraged it, gave me prompts, asked to read what I wrote, and made me feel like my stories really mattered.
You don't always realize in the moment how much that kind of encouragement sticks with you and shapes your path forward, but it really, really does.
On International Women's Day, it feels like a good day to acknowledge the women who quietly nurture creativity and ambition in the people around them, especially in young girls who are still figuring out what they love and what they're good at.
Sometimes all it takes is someone saying, "Write a story about this," and actually caring enough to read what comes next.
