Introducing Myself :D

Hello!

Hi, I'm CherishingLightx3 and I hope you guys read this and get to have a sense of who I am, my writing, and some of the projects I'm hopeful about putting on here! I'm super nervous about starting this journey to begin garnering attention for my writing, but honestly, what a better place to start than a community of fellow writers! I'm super excited to finally have the courage to dive into this community and be a part of it!

Okay, so a couple years ago I had an account on here with a (kind of) similar name, and I loved this community! It was fun to read people's stories and comment on them, and even ask for writing advice from some of the more experienced authors on here. That was a really cool experience, but I felt pretty crappy that I hadn't myself posted anything yet, and life was also coming at me like a fast train (i.e. health issues and college), so my account was basically stagnant. I decided to delete the account and just read on anon until I finally found the time to come back and be more active with the community.

I was also EXTREMELY nervous (and still am!) about posting my writing on here, because anxiety is such a wonderful thing to have...

But now that I'm going into my third year of university, and facing that scary thing called the future, I realize that I have to figure out what to do with this gift that God gave me. I've been writing stories for so long, but so few people have ever read it, because I have been so scared of what they will think of it; I cannot waste this. God gave me this ability to write stories for a reason, and I know this is something I want to do with my life, so I am just going to swallow my fear as best I can and just do it! (Cue the Shia Labeouf meme) I'll never know until I try, you know?

So, now that I'm here, I'm super excited to get started, and I'm excited to talk to fellow writers about their experience, get some pointers about using this platform to the best of my ability, and to just have fun!

Now that that little ramble's out of the way, let me introduce myself and my writing:

As you will read in a moment, I am a huge advocate for having conversations about mental health and eating disorders. The reason behind that is that I am an anorexia survivor, continuing to recover several years later. I am also a cancer survivor, so I also preach about getting a yearly examination so that nothing bad ever happens with your health. <3 If y'all are survivors yourselves, feel free to message me anytime about any struggles you might be going through, I'll happily lend an ear. <3 

I am going to be a junior in college. I have no idea what I'm doing yet, but I have a lot of passions like writing, mental health advocacy--especially concerning eating disorders, protecting the environment and the trades, so my future might involve stuff like that. But it's fun to have a mid-life crisis when you haven't even reached middle aged yet?? I'm dying inside right now help. xD 

I've been writing since I was in elementary school. The fun story behind it is that my teacher gave us an assignment which was to basically rewrite the ending of our favorite book or movie, and my ten year old self immediately went: "Pirates of the Caribbean 3!" If y'all have seen that movie, that super awesome guy Will Turner died, and had to be the captain of the Flying Dutchman, and this fan was not having that. I rewrote the end, so that his story didn't end that way, and so he could be with his true love, then before I knew it, I was writing stories! Just like that! Pretty crazy, right? Maybe not, but I remember before that assignment, I used to hate writing! Every time the teacher would tell us to write a paper or use our imaginations, some part of me was hitting her head gently against the table and muttering to herself: "Why? Why?" Now, I'm like: "Why am I not writing more?"

So after elementary school, I went through a cringe phase where I wrote Jonas Brother fanfiction (please don't roast me), and to this day, I cannot look at that book and not want to cry out of embarrassment. But it was a start--albeit a cringy AF start, but we all start somewhere, right?