Returning to the First Sentence

I remember the bench first. It was pushed against the far wall in my grandparents’ dining room, wedged between the kitchen and years of family conversation. The bench was narrow and hard, the kind of seat meant for children, or for overflow at holidays when everyone had to squeeze together and make it work. I loved that bench because it was mine in the way certain objects are claimed through repetition. I’d sit there while adults moved around me — talking, cooking, setting down dishes — and I’d write, doodle, read, escape for a few choice moments.

The word “write” feels too generous for what I was doing. I was scribbling, mostly. I’d staple together sheets of notepad paper, crookedly, and fill them with stories I can’t quite recall. I know there were headlines and bylines because I remember how serious those words felt, like passwords to a secret club I didn’t yet understand. The pages rustled with the weight of my tiny, invented world.

I couldn’t have been more than six or seven, but I remember the concentration — the way time fell away while I worked. There’s a certain stillness that happens when a child is doing what they’re meant to do, even if they don’t know it yet. That was me, feet swinging, pencil smudging across the page, making something out of the nothing in my head.

Years later, long after I’d left that house and the bench behind, I found one of those stapled booklets again. I was an adult then, with a career and an email inbox and deadlines that filled up the corners of every day. The pages were yellowed and thin, the staples rusting a little. But there it was: a headline, a byline, a lede, and a few sentences of “reporting” about what my teddy bear had done that afternoon. It was absurd and wonderful. I had built a newspaper for one.

I think about that bench often now — especially on days when writing feels like wading through wet cement, or when I’ve convinced myself that words are a burden instead of a way through. Because that child, the one sitting in her grandparents’ dining room with a pencil and a dream of permanence, didn’t question the point of it. She just wanted to make sense of things. She wrote to organize her little universe, to understand what it meant to be alive inside of it.

Somewhere along the way, I forgot that.

For more than a decade, I didn’t write much of anything. I danced. I trained until my body learned to speak another language — one of rhythm and precision and ache. I lived in motion, performing, sweating, counting the beats instead of the words. Dance consumed me in the way writing once had. I thought that maybe the bench in my grandparents’ dining room was just an origin story, a quaint piece of childhood nostalgia that had nothing to do with who I became.

But life has a way of circling back on itself, often quietly, often when you least expect it.

When I retired from the professional dance world, I felt hollowed out and uncertain. There’s an odd ache that comes from realizing the version of yourself you built is no longer sustainable. I remember sitting at my desk, staring at a blinking cursor, and feeling that strange flicker of recognition — like an old friend had just walked into the room. The impulse to write came back slowly, but when it did, it felt inevitable. Like I’d been homesick for something I couldn’t name.

And when I finally began to make a life out of writing — to chase stories, to edit, to produce — I thought again of that stapled paper. It wasn’t that I had become something new; it was that I had finally returned to what was always there.

There’s something almost mystical about how early instincts linger inside us, dormant but intact. We can go years without touching them, convincing ourselves we’ve outgrown the small, strange things that once lit us up. But the truth is that those instincts don’t vanish, they wait.

I’ve always believed that the things we’re meant for reveal themselves in quiet, persistent ways. Sometimes they whisper through our childhood habits. Sometimes they reappear as déjà vu. And sometimes, they arrive with the strange comfort of recognition, like a song you didn’t realize you still knew all the words to.

When I look back at that bench, I see more than a little girl writing nonsense. I see the first expression of a self that wanted to observe, to shape chaos into meaning. That’s what writing has always been for me — not performance, not even purpose, exactly — but the practice of paying attention.

And maybe that’s what all creative callings are, at their core: a form of noticing.

Writing taught me how to listen. Dance taught me how to move through the listening. Both were, in their own way, conversations with life — attempts to stay awake to it. I used to think my years in dance had pulled me off course, that I’d lost valuable time wandering down the wrong path. But I see now that it was all part of the same language.

Discipline, rhythm, breath, timing, intuition — the elements of movement and the elements of prose are not so different. I was just learning to tell stories in a different syntax.

Sometimes I wonder what would happen if we all returned to the first thing that made us feel like ourselves. Not the version that earned applause or validation, but the one that existed before we knew to seek it. The small, unglamorous thing that felt right in our bones.

For me, that’s a pencil and a stack of paper. The sound of a stapler pressing pages into permanence. The belief, however childish, that something I had to say might matter.

I think about that belief now when I’m editing someone else’s story, or chasing a lead, or sitting at my desk in the early morning before the world wakes up. That same current hums beneath it all — the one that began on a hard wooden bench in a sunlit dining room, a child’s feet not yet touching the ground.

I sometimes wish I could tell her that she was right to trust it — that what she was doing wasn’t silly or small. That she had found the truest part of herself before she even had the words to name it.

But maybe she already knew.

Maybe that’s the point of remembering — not to tell our younger selves anything new, but to listen to what they’ve been saying all along.