“The Case Against Self-Optimization”

What if you are meant to remain the delightful freak that you already are?

I don’t know why I was born a writer.

Do you?

This is not to say that writers are only born, many are made, some are forged in the fires of some harrowing experience, some are birthed in the undertow of some adventurous voyage, and others are quietly grown, softly over decades like lilies that now bloom in once poisoned fields.

My point is only that I have no idea why any of us might acquire this strange and almost cartoonishly odd affliction, however delightful some aspects of it may be.

My affliction began at age five, just after moving states and starting at a new elementary school. This was my catalyst, awakening the piece of magic handed down to me from my mother and my grandmother, both storytellers, both poets of life and grit and survival.

It was moving that awoke the thing in me. Going from the safety and comfort of a town in which I knew, a place in which I had love mapped and sorted up the cobblestone path to grandma and grandpa’s house, which always smelt delightfully of age and exotic perfumes. It was there, under the shelter of that house, that I partook in spaghetti Wednesdays, a weekly tradition, bringing together my…