My love affair with words

For as long as I can remember I have been a storyteller. I like words and they like me back. Speaking was my skill from a very young age and I shared the pride that my father felt when I reproduced the most intricate words like it was baby babble.

One day I discovered the written words. Oh joy. I was writing pages of scribbles and wormlike signs and I showed my mom what I wrote. She actually tried to see if I did manage to get any word on my paper.Truth be told, I was very impatient with her inability to grasp what I meant with my work. And I was determined to master the art of producing clear meaning.

You can only imagine my excitement when I found out that all of the words could be created with just the 26 letters in the alphabet. Ingenious! I can remember that moment so vividly. The first question was if this was something everybody in the world knew about. So everybody that uses these few letters can always understand what it says, all the time? Really one of the best things around. I also remember the first weeks of school when they came with such simple words that I felt it was going to take way too long to wait for them.

Discovering stories in books and reading them to my sister so she could share in my world in the right way: normal speaking speed. I paid no attention to others and their learning curve, to me, words in stories are like ice cream to others.

I did have a stressful summer vacation when we were driving through french and german cities where I felt the frustration of my eyes reading all the words in the street-adds but my brain failing to come up with the meaning of them. Mom! I can’t stop reading those stupid words all over the place! Poor me. I got that covered in the next few years by adding the meaning to foreign words. Those 26 letters still kept their glory.

Reading and writing have brought me so much when I was growing up. I could get lost in books, even comic books. Laughing out loud while reading. And I learned about badass girls and fantasy lands that still inspire me in my everyday life. Anything is possible anywhere, and I still believe that to be true.

Writing for the school paper and making news bulletins with my friends. But also writing small notes to my sisters' classmates, she would carry them back and forth during lunch breaks. I used to write letters to my friends and checking the mailbox was like digging for treasure. Not like now, when I keep forgetting to check it because nothing good is sent to you on paper.

I noticed that being able to write with ease had perks when I tried to negotiate with my teacher to do two essays in exchange for any other assignment. None of my classmates ever wanted to do the writing. When I spiced up my assignment on a history paper with a certain way of telling the all too familiar story of Cleopatra, my teacher passed it around to the other teachers and told me I had a real skill there.

I wrote for a few magazines, doing interviews and reviews and even a column for a while. The only thing is that the people I worked for either didn’t pay a lot, or I had to be fine with perks like keeping first editions of the books I reviewed and free dinners at the restaurants. That won't pay my rent, now will it. It turned out that a new form of storytelling did pay my rent. I started guiding travelers in my lovely city of Amsterdam. And I found that my verbal word skills saved the day. Until the pandemic hit and the travel industry collapsed as one of the first ones.

While having all the time in the world on my hands. I started to learn new skills and improve on others. Then I discovered Vocal. I see it as a sign that my first love has come back to me and I get to become a writer and a reader of all kinds of interesting pieces. I hope you like my story by hearting it and just know that you are supporting a childhood dream by donating. It is greatly appreciated!