Most lives are stories of their own. That's normal, right? A single life is a single story. That's normal. If that's the case, then I'm not normal. I knew that. Because if a "normal" life is a story on its own, my life is an amalgamation of stories. The stages of my life are defined by what I was writing at that time. In grade nine, I was plotting and worldbuilding for A Tale of Two Planets, my sci-fi thriller novel. Grade ten was my Guide (a transformative work), grade eleven was Ode to Radio, and right now, my in-betweenster stage is yfysiaf, my choose-your-own story. I suppose the perfect analogy would be that a "normal" life is like a novel, whilst mine is a collection of short stories. Like I was written by Margaret Atwood or something like that. That's not normal, right? I mean, I've met god knows how many writers, and they all still seem to be relatively normal. They have their own story. They create stories, put out stories, but their own specific life is one story, their story. But my life just feels like someone grabbed a fistful of stories from all different universes, lashed them all together with a few rubber bands, and hoped they'd all stay together. That's not normal, right? One person gets one story per life. That's only fair. And even if the one story that defines you isn't your life story, you still usually only get one. Like George Lucas with Star Wars. But I feel like I have a queue! I wake up with this brand new story throwing itself against the walls of my brain trying to get out, and I just barely manage to get that thing out on paper, often in point-form by necessity, when suddenly another one is thrown in there like a grenade into a tank. I never get any quiet in this head of mine. It's exhausting. I remember sitting down with a pencil (only a few months after I first learned how to use one) with one of those stories of mine thrashing desperately around behind my eyes and spilling it all out messily onto paper. This was long, long before I learned about stylistic devices and narrative structure and plot. I just... had a story to tell, and I told it. Since then, it was just one after another, and often multiple at once. I have this folder in my Google Drive labeled "Writing" and it is just chock full of unfinished stories. I have another folder in that folder labeled "Finished". Wanna know how many stories are in there? Three. Everything else is just out there in the Writing folder like a peasant uprising, banging loudly on the doors of the castle, screaming at me over the walls, "Finish us! Just finish us, goddammit! Let us in! Let us in!" That's not normal, right? But then, who's to say. Maybe there is no such thing as normal in the life of a writer. There's just so many of us, and there's such a variety of us; some of us are disciplined, write for five hours every day, meet deadlines, put out lots of books, get rich off of royalties. Some of us have this one world in our mind and can write a billion stories set in it, because they know every inhabitant of this place so well that they can tell you what this one specific person in this specific corner of that specific region had for breakfast three weeks before the inciting incident. Some of us have one story, some have way too many. Some of us finish every single one of them, some have google drive folders full of point-form plots. Point is, we're all defined by stories, be they ours or others', be they one or many. Stories are all that's left of us, they're our legacies, they're our memories, they're our souls. And in the end, we're not just defined by stories. At the very end, we are stories.