What positive events have taken place in your life over the past year?

What positive events have taken place in your life over the past year?

When I was 5 years old, my family and I went on a trip to New York City.

I told my Kindergarten teacher that I’d be out of class for a week because I was visiting NYC.

She told me “Okay, but keep a journal. Write down everything you do.”

So I did. I brought a small notebook along with me. I wrote down all the little things I did — from cruising around the Statue of Liberty to accidentally running straight into a screen door at a family friend’s house. I documented all of it.

I went back to school the next week and waved my journal in front of my teacher. “I kept a journal like you said!”

She flipped through it. She smiled.

Then she handed it back to me and said, “Read it to the class.”

Most things in life aren’t that scary when you’re just 5 years old. So I wasn’t nervous at all. I walked up to the front of the class and started reading.

I don’t remember exactly what I wrote, but it must have been pretty funny because the entire class was cracking up (in a good way).

Then my teacher said, “You should go to the class next door and read it to them too.”

So I walked over to the next Kindergarten class, interrupted the teacher, and told her my teacher asked me to read my journal out loud.

Her class loved it too. Then that teacher told me, “Go to the class next door and read it to them.”

By the end of the day, I had walked up and down the entire Kindergarten hallway at George Washington Carver Elementary School in Little Rock Arkansas, reading my little journal to every single class.

Every teacher appreciated it. It was just a few pages from a journal, but they acted like I had just written the greatest book of all time.

That one moment gave me a deep, unbreakable creative confidence. I kept writing for fun for years after that.