The first time I wrote myself into a novel, I was 12 years old. I blatantly named the main character of the book I started writing in seventh grade “Bea,” a shortened version of my already short nickname, two c’s removed from the middle like the lettuce and tomato from a sandwich. I gave her six siblings, some kind of sick wish that I had more than one brother. I would change the name of Bea’s love interest on a weekly basis, depending on who my crush of the week was. A boy would make eye contact with me during a fire drill, and I would go through chapter one, replacing every “Joe” with “Ken.” 

Bea was a curious hopeless romantic who only ever wanted to please her family. She pined after the boy next door because he was always there and always kind. It was a bit on the nose, but it didn’t matter because this book was just for me. I hid the composition notebook filled with my messy handwriting in the back of my desk where I knew no one would find it. When I would go to my friends’ houses for sleepovers, I would pack the notebook with me, so that I could sneak off to the bathroom and jot down ideas in between games of truth or dare. 

I wrote the chapter numbers with a neon pink pen that I’d stolen from my mother’s desk, but the rest was scribbled in pencil. Whole pages would get crossed out or written over; eraser shavings would get stuck in the creases of the pages. Sometimes, in rereading early chapters, I would find the name of a boy I’d thought about for a second too long in September, his name forgotten in a round of erasing and rewriting. It would make me cringe and I would feel silly, writing a mystery/romance/thriller using the name of a boy I’d gone to school with since kindergarten because he looked at me once in the hallway on the way to algebra. 

Bea’s story, though, slowly became less my own. I lost something along the way. Her and Alex/Michael had to solve the mystery of his sister’s murder and Bea’s parents’ business was under attack. Conor/Josh suspected his ex-girlfriend had something to do with his sister’s disappearance and later death. I turned the small town charm of the story into something out of a horror movie, and I wasn’t even sure I had done it on purpose. I lost interest in Joey, the boy in my computer class, and even Robby, the boy who sometimes walked me to lunch. Bea and John/Pete went through a dramatic breakup in Act 2, and after that, Bea was utterly alone. 

I was a hopeless romantic, but I didn’t know what or who I was yearning for anymore. Eventually, I felt like I was losing Bea, losing myself. The realization hurt. How was I meant to understand myself and my life if I couldn’t turn myself into a caricature and warp her environment to fit my deepest desires? If I didn’t know what I wanted anymore, neither would my characters. So I hid the notebook away and stored my pink pen in the depths of a drawer I never opened. 


 
I waited a few months for inspiration to strike. It was the end of my seventh grade year, and I hadn’t had a crush on a boy since February. I didn’t get it. For all of sixth and seventh grade, there was a boy of the week. My friends would tease me, call me boy-crazy, and I embraced the term like it was a warm blanket, soft and worn down, but comforting all the same. I was nothing if not obsessive over what would never be love.

After I stopped writing about Bea, I stopped acting like her. I started to notice other people, a girl on the street whose lipstick smudged over her upper lip, the girl who worked at the pizza place in town whose hair was always braided to one side, my friend and stand partner in orchestra whose face twisted in contentment after every set of sixteenth notes. 

My school-loaned Google Chromebook took forever to load a document. I entered a filler title into the document name and started pouring myself out onto the page again. I wrote about two girls, best friends, who were secretly in love. I would go to school, see my friend, the girl from orchestra, and my stomach would do a flip, but I told myself that it was because she reminded me of the character I had been writing. The girl on the page had her freckles, her pin straight hair, but there was something else. If only I could figure out what it was. I thought of my friend, and a dream I’d had where she leaned over and kissed me during study hall. I was a fool, but at least I found a safe space to put us.

I would write pages upon pages of these two girls in endless monologue about their feelings for each other. One would spend hours late at night in bed pondering over how to tell the other how she felt, while the other did the same in her own bedroom. They would go on double dates with men and sneak time with each other in the bathroom, but they would never touch. They couldn’t. I couldn’t. I wasn’t ready. 

So I deleted everything I had, changed the characters’ names: Collin and Sam, two boys who met during their senior year of high school. These were boys, not girls. They would meet at the start of the story, they weren’t already friends. It was obviously so completely different from my reality that no one would question whether sweet, nerdy, glasses-wearing Collin was supposed to be me. 

I wrote the opening scene, Collin coming out as queer to his family. After I wrote it once, I’d write it again, and again and again. Every time I started over, I would tell myself that I was almost ready to move to the next scene. It took years before I could move on to chapter two. But I did it. I wrote chapter two, and then three, and four, and so on. I wrote myself onto a page again, wrote myself out of reality, gave myself a place to exist completely, shamelessly.


 
Years later, I would finally type “the end” on this story that I started writing when I was 13. I would feel complete and refreshed and like I understood myself for the first time in forever. I would exit out of the document and open a new one. 

Now, every time I start a new project, I give myself permission to write a little bit about myself too. Some will call it self-centered, to need to write myself into my fiction, but I think it’s self-care. Now I’ve named my main character after an old friend and placed her one town over from mine. I gave her anxiety and the nose ring I’ve always secretly wanted. I let her write poetry and let her be loved unconditionally by a blonde with a guitar. Hey, a girl can dream.