Another installment in the series of posts of the WCWW scholarship contest winners and runners-up! Today’s post is written by Moon’sLark, one of our scholarship runners-up. Enjoy!

Change your life, change the world.

My passion has always been writing… since I was old enough to hold a pencil to paper I have been scribing words to the page – everything from poems to short stories, attempts at novellas and novels, plays, rituals, entreaties, manifestos, journals. For my 16th birthday, when all my friends only wanted cars of their own, I asked my parents for a Brother electric typewriter. I yearned to express myself, to write, to connect with other people… and for most of my life I thought that I would do that through writing.

But… like most of us, life happened. And although the urge to write never stopped, the urge to share myself through writing was stamped out. Maybe it was out of genuine concern that it happened – “find a job, make a life” – maybe it was control — “You can’t make a living that way” or “You’re just not good enough, find something else” – but either way the message was clear: Writing is unacceptable.

Writing was a “hobby”, but not something that was acceptable for me. It was something that was delegated to only the SPECIAL FEW that are good enough to create ART, and something that the rest of us were shoo-ed away from lest we think that we, too, might have the ability to create something or think outside the norm.

You know what? It might have taken me 36 years (30 if you don’t count those 3 years when I was busy inventing my own hieroglyphics and my stalwartly uncoordinated 3 years of pre-literate use of the English alphabet before I learned how to properly put letters together) to figure this out but:

It’s a myth. Artists are people who think “outside the box”, who refuse to be controlled and cowed to what is “normal”. Artists are freaks who let their Freak Flags fly. Of course those in control want to make it seem like being an artist is a special privilege instead of an inherent RIGHT of all people to pursue their true nature. Making art, of any kind, the voice of only a few cuts off the voices many of us…

I might not necessarily seem like someone who can change the world enough, I know that even the changes that seem the smallest can inspire many other small changes… and snowball to truly alter the world in surprising ways. So, how would allowing me to join in the World Changing Writing Workshop change the world?

I am working on challenging the status quo that says people like me – over 20, women, single mothers, educated in business and psychology, never formally trained as a writer, not yet “living the dream” – can not write to change their lives, and that writing is not for anyone who might want to express themselves.

As a mother, my voice is powerful in shaping the world. My voice, my actions, my words guide and mold the lives of my children, and their voices and choices ripple out. Stories I read, stories I tell, histories I share with my children all help them learn about the world. My ability to write makes me a better mother, believe it or not, and changes the paths of those that I interact with. My passion for writing shows my children the importance of language and the love of structure and flow of writing. My willingness to put myself out there, to mirror my struggles to become a full person and to guide my children to adulthood, shows that connection with art (in my case writing) changes lives for the better.

Writing is my creative outlet, my wish for the world manifest. Writing is my spellwork, my ritual, my way of bending the rules of the world to allow the wholeness of my being to come out. Writing is my freak flag flying out there, timidly I admit, but with growing confidence that my voice matters. My writing shows my true self, exposes me to the world, and forces me to take a hard look at myself and the patterns of my own paradigms… I yearn to learn the ways to improve my writing, ways to strengthen the voice that has tremulously started to come through with my words. I need to change the world, connect to other people, and enthusiastically change the way we see each other and ourselves in this world we live in.

I want to learn and grow and open myself up to my creative passion. I want to encourage those who were beaten down in the way I was, through the school system or religious system or through domestic violence, to come back to their authentic selves, learning to debunk the myths of the special few. I am determined to challenge the “way things are” and “how things have to be” and re-writing the stories that we tell one another to keep each other down. I want to challenge the notion that writing is divisive and elitist, and show the world that ordinary people can change the world too..

I can change the world: One word at a time; One story; One challenge to the status quo. And slowly a voice grows stronger through the words of challenge and the stories of overcoming and making it genuine.

This I know is true.

Moon’sLark currently writes on her personal blog FrozenNowhere, which chronicles the inside of her head. She has started a spiritual blog as well; the purpose of which is to share her journey through what she thought she was (Wiccan) through her critical thoughts on what she really wants, needs, and thinks about her spirituality.