My "First" Piece: Beware the Butterfly

I wish I could remember further back than the 4th grade. I'm sure I was writing even before that. The first thing I remember writing was in either 5th or 6th grade, and my memory of it is pretty vague. I was the kind of kid who knew what the teachers wanted from me, and a huge teacher's pet. Straight A's, getting my homework held up as an example, all that good stuff. When there was a writing assignment, I usually nailed it as expected. But then one day I got weird with it.

The teacher gave us some kind of free-writing assignment. We could write pretty much whatever we wanted, but we had to spend the time writing. I think I had mostly written straightforward narratives before this. I would think of a character and a setting and make something happen. That day, my brain responded to the command to "write something, right now" with "hey, can you do something funny with your butterfly phobia?"

So, fun fact: I have lepidopterophobia! Butterflies and moths bother me a whole lot. It started with an Eric Carle illustration of a butterfly that hung in my preschool's cubby room. No, it wasn't the one from The Very Hungry Caterpillar. I could tolerate that one for some reason. But the brightly colored butterfly poster greeted me like a jump-scare every day, and I never got over it. That one episode of Spongebob Squarepants didn't help, either. Another fun fact: the close-up shot used in the butterfly episode of Spongebob is actually a horse fly. You know, because it looks scarier, I guess. Anyway, I thought I would grow out of it someday but that didn't happen. Just seeing a butterfly or moth flutter its wings makes me physically ill.

Rather than writing a narrative story, I put on the metaphorical tinfoil hat and wrote an exposé about the butterfly conspiracy. I don't remember the details but the butterflies are taking over the world. They're everywhere, right? And they're so pretty and small that no one would think twice about them. I filled up one sheet of paper, front and back. At the end, I capped off the silliness with a tease of a sequel about the penguins. After March of the Penguins, it seemed like penguins where everywhere. Naturally, this meant the penguins were infiltrating the media on behalf of the butterflies.

Even though the details are foggy, it's an interesting moment to look back to. This wasn't another instance of an aspiring baby fantasy writer emulating her favorite chapter books. I was expressing something deeply personal, a real fear, and doing it in a creative, silly way. It was an experiment in style and free association. Above all, it was fun. I can remember the glee of writing it, and I remember the look of my handwriting filling both sides of the page. I wrote some dumb story about killer butterflies, and I wrote it for me.

Hang onto that, fellow writers. Let's hope we never stop writing for ourselves.