1. Ever since you were young, you’ve been observing the people around you. Your parents and siblings were your first introduction into human behavior and you studied them as if they were in your home solely for you to understand why people do the things they do.

2. You started talking, reading, and, eventually, writing sooner than your older sibling did and/or other children your age. You have been interested in communicating since you were old enough to understand language.

3. You have always felt deeply misunderstood and like an outcast, simply because you have not viewed the world in the same way as everyone else has.

4. Your entire life could be summed up by this exact cycle: feel deeply, overanalyze the feeling, feel crazy about overanalyzation, feel deeply about the overanalyzation, overanalyze that feeling, and on and on and on.

5. People have said to you many times, “Why do you think so much?” And, for a while, you felt embarrassed about how much you can think yourself in circles, but now your answer to those people is, “How can you not think so much?”

6. Once you began writing, you realized your ability to think about something from many different angles was the attribute which separates you from other writers. Your specific brand of thinking about the world is your voice and now you know all that time spent overthinking was basically practice for your writing career.

7. Your most prized possessions are the many journals and Moleskines you’ve collected over the years. You’d throw out every last material possession, but never your journals. Never!

8. You know the pure ecstasy of filling out the last page in a journal and retiring it to the sacred area you store your other weathered-down journals. (Furthermore, you know the pure ecstasy of, then, opening the first page of a new journal and how it represents a whole new world of possibility.)

9. Your entire life has been a journey to collect stories. You will do anything for a good story or life experience and your threshold for emotional pain is higher than most, plainly because your pain becomes words on a page and there’s nothing more valuable to you.

10. You have spent your life alone, craving space and openness. Distraction might be a natural part of your writing process, but you know it only serves to keep you from the work at hand, which is, simply, to write until you’ve laid your blood on the page.

11. After a few days of not writing, you start to become irritated, frustrated, and you have this sensation of being emotionally backed-up. Once you start writing—after, presumably, procrastinating the writing for minimum two hours—you suddenly feel freer, lighter, and more at ease.

12. If someone pulls out a quote of your writing to compliment your writing skills, you fall in love with them a little bit in that moment.

13. You have never let your life be easy. You have willingly sludged through your past pain, welcomed in breakdowns, and have never allowed yourself to become complacent or mediocre. Contentment is not a workable muse for a writer.

14. Thinking is an actual activity for you. If your life is too chaotic or stressed for you to slow down and hear your thoughts, you are not okay. While your thoughts may drive you crazy, they are also what propels you to write, so it’s a double-edged sword in a way.

15. You’ve always needed solitude. You’ve craved traveling alone your entire life. You’ve done it, too. While you appreciate and respect other people, you cannot process an experience while first having to process it with someone else.

16. You are sensitive, empathetic, and emotional. These attributes are great for a writer. For a human being who has to exist in the real world? Not as fun! You find yourself envious of people who can shut off their brains and exist in a non-overthinking universe of, what you imagine to be, sunshine and happiness and the absence of the never-ending need to feel things deeply as a means of inspiration.

17. Your entire life has been unconventional and you’ve always willingly chosen the path least likely, even if it ostracized you many times. And yes, maybe it has been lonely, but every lonely night has led you to a deeper understanding of what it means to be human. And, funny enough, this is exactly what you’re always writing about anyway…