Someone once told me when I asked how did you gain the confidence to write your first novel. And he answered, “when you are hungry you don’t ask permission to eat.”

But the very thing I loved writing was frozen in time due to a trauma that hit me to the core. My brilliant sister in the 60’s was misdiagnosed as a schizophrenic and was sent to a hospital when she was in 11th grade. She read the NYTimes at 2 yrs and at 4th grade was already reading at college level. Today they probably would have said she had Asberger’s Syndrome but in the 60’s there was no such thing.

At 11yrs old I asked to visit her this brilliant, funny, ecentric soul. I brought here a valentine’s card saying I hope you get on the 2nd floor where the doors are not locked. And I was carrying a cheese sandwich that got all melted. I remember the perfect manicured hilles and walking a long walk. And arriving where a nurse with bright orange lipstick brought out my sister Karen and helped her walk as she was a little shakey. She tried to talk but you couldn’t understand a word. And she was wearing this grey dress that she kept in the back of her closet because she hated it. She looked so pale and drugged all the magic and the miracle of who she was as a human being was gone.

At that age I was in 6th grade and my writing began to stand out. The teacher would read them in class nearly every week and then I stopped. Because I thought I would go to one of those places that karen when to because I was different. It wasn’t logic, it was how I felt. And so I wrote in private like a Jewish person hiding from the Nazi’s.

And I want to come out but I lost so much time. But no more I am giving it all I got. And I am expect to fail but that won’t bother me. Its never have tried to persue the one thing I love most in this world.

Melinda Khan