In third grade, I started handing my teacher essays he hadn’t assigned.

They were about whatever had captured my imagination—dinosaurs, the ancient Egyptian mummification process… I wrote them at home, paraphrasing sections lifted from books I’d borrowed from the school library. I’d handwrite on loose-leaf papers, my letters large and swirling, and give them to my teacher, who took them with curiosity.

He always read them.

At the time, I didn’t have the language to explain why I did this.

Speaking up has never come easily to me. In conversation, words arrive slowly, often long after the moment has passed. Writing, however, gives me time. On the page I can sit with a thought, turn it over, understand what I mean before offering it to anyone else.

On paper, I don’t have to watch someone’s face twist in anger, annoyance, or dismissal. I don’t have to measure my emotions so they won’t be labeled “too much,” or worse, dismissed as the anger of an Arab woman. Writing removes the immediacy of other people’s reactions. It gives me space to think, and to say what I mean without fear interrupting the sentence—or without being interrupted.

For someone who grew up shy and wary of social rejection, writing became the safest place my voice could live.

I’ve only been a published author for less than two years, but I have been writing the last twenty-eight years, since I was a child. Stories have always been the way I figure out the world, lean into what I’m interested in, develop an understanding for another person (even if fictional). And, for someone who grew up shy, and afraid of social rejection, it was the best way I knew how to be heard, if only to myself.

It’s why, during an emotionally turbulent adolescence, ripe with loneliness and self-doubt, I wrote poems scribbled on loose-leaf paper, under moonlight peeking in through the bathroom window, even though I should have been in bed hours prior. The need to pour myself onto the page (never mind that no one would ever read it) outweighed the need for sleep.

Now, I write also because I have something to say to the world.

Often, I dismiss myself, and my own perspectives, thinking they are not important or salient enough to warrant sharing. I’ve been working on a narrative essay collection, of instances of discrimination and racism I’ve seen or experienced in my life, woven with history and science, and yet, several times in writing the manuscript, I considered abandoning.

Who would care about all this?
It sounds like you’re complaining.
Boo-hoo you were told something mean, get over it.
You’re preaching to the choir; whoever reads this book already knows everything you’re saying.
Your life isn’t horrible, stop making yourself a victim.

On and on, the thoughts swirl and confuse me, like a devil tempting me in the desert to give up on myself, an inner tribunal condemning me for being human. At its core it something more treacherous:

that I don’t have a voice.

This means so many things: that what I have to say isn’t important, that no one cares about the things I’m writing, that I’m wrong in my interpretation of my own life, that my life isn’t “bad” enough to warrant an entire book, that no one will take me seriously.

None of this is true, or rather, I would never believe this of another person. And yet I so readily apply these scripts to myself, narrating all the ways I have nothing of value to say.

Where all these feelings have come from is likely something I need years to unpack with a professional, but I do know that so often, girls, and especially, girls of brown or black identities, are told they must remain still, silent, and subservient. No one tells us these things directly, (well, usually), but we learn it implicitly. And we carry it with us into adulthood.

In the last two years of being published, I’ve seen a floodgate open in me, a willingness to stand in the face of all my insecurities and my thoughts of not having a voice, and remain steadfast, even if I falter.

Something about committing yourself on paper is at once freeing and redeeming, a permission granted unto the self to see yourself through the lens of value (and I don’t mean that in a capitalistic sense).

Writing frees the soul, gives voice to those who thought they had none. It is no wonder books are targeted, authors and creatives suppressed, when those in power want to remain in power. It is a way to exert existence, to demand to be seen and heard, to be deemed a person.

When I think about voice, I think about that child in third grade, sliding loose-leaf pages across a desk to a teacher who had not asked for them. I did not know then that what I was practicing was not simply writing, but presence. The small insistence of a person who needed to be heard, even if only by one reader.

Perhaps that is what writing has been for me: the quiet act of sending words out into the world and refusing to disappear.

By: Rania Hanna