Watering the roots

My earliest memory of making up stories is kind of fade. I vaguely remember strolling around my grandmother's yard and telling fantastic stories of magic, unicorns and dolls coming, to life to no one in particular. I would pull the weeds off the flower pots and smell the miniature roses while talking non-stop. Once my grandmother peeked from the living room and smiled, telling me to "keep talking to the angels". Come to think of it, my strongest memory is actually of me terrified that the angels were listening to my Barbie stories and thinking I might be talking to them.Then there was the lying phase. I would come up with tiny white lies, and also big ones that were too on the nose, as kids do. But the white lies kind of stuck, and for many years I had to make a conscious effort not to include tiny little lies into otherwise mundane tellings of facts. I convinced myself it was just a way of trying to make everyday conversation more interesting.There was also the time when I wrote a book. At least it felt like a book, as I filled an entire notebook and even glued more pages to it, but might have been more of a short novel. It had a lot of The Wizard of Oz in it, but non-intentional. There was a group of kids, and they would fall into a top hat only to find themselves in a desert, looking for a castle where an enigmatic magician would give them magic powers. I wrote it for a writing contest but never sent it; it was supposed to fit in a notebook.It seems so obvious now, looking back, that storytelling was my thing. You know, the thing you love doing. I oddly still talk to myself all the time when I am alone, most of it making up stories, except not about unicorns anymore. But I don't write them nearly half as much. And often this realization comes with a sting of self-doubt and questioning. This grey area where your thing and your work cross is so, so dangerous. We see it happen so often when working in games, people mistaking their passions for their job.And I don't know, maybe I am too. For the longest time all I could see in these episodes of my early storytelling life was an anxious girl learning to cope with her anxieties. Memories are a funny thing. Not like binders of pages covered in typed-down evidence of our lives, but more like orbs filled with holographic liquid. Take a look under the right light and you'll see something new there. New colors.Or a group of lost kids learning what magic really means. Dammit, that was a good one. Should have sent it.-Maíra