Year seventeen was an interesting one for me, as I’m sure it is for all teenagers. There was a lot I knew about myself and had come to believe about myself. I knew I was a writer. My aunt, who’d helped raise me (and read my diaries and poetry without my permission, Lol), told me I was a few years prior, and by that point I believed it. I loved to write and could trace that love as far back as the second grade. But there were a lot of things I didn’t know and didn’t take seriously; school was one of them.