My Secret Identity

“You can never get rid of what is a part of you, even if you throw it away.”

Goethe

I’ve been making up stories since I knew how to write. I learned to read somewhere between four and five years old, and once I knew how to translate the strange black marks on paper, suddenly it was all I wanted to do.

One of my earliest writing memories is from about four years old, when mom dictated a story in a blank book for me to color. I dubbed it lovingly ‘The Fairy Princess Book”, but it didn’t actually have anything about fairies or princesses in it. It was a fun activity, and I still have the book and like to read it sometimes. It’s really funny to see what my imagination was like back then.

I remember the first story I wrote completely on my own was about (yet another) fairy princess, fully illustrated by me at six years old. This one was about a fairy girl named Peony (my favorite flower at the time), and I acted out the story multiple times with my sister, until she got bored of it and I was left with nothing to do but write it down. I spent hours on that story. I don’t know where it is now, probably lost in my many archives of books somewhere. There’s something about me that needs to be in another world, usually inside my head, and writing was a natural response to that feeling.

When I took my first writing class nearly three years ago, I really started writing more frequently. I hadn’t seriously considered writing before then; I didn’t realize that I liked it! It seems crazy and outlandish now, I can’t picture life without writing. I guess taking that class, and having more fun with it that any other subject made me realize that writing was one of my favorite things to do.

Strangely enough, it was during that same writing class that I came up with my pen name: Lady Bluebird. I was asked to come up with a pseudonym for privacy reasons, and of course my mind went completely blank. Mom sat there at the desk, waiting for me to come up with something, and I knew that if I didn’t think of a name quick, she would think of one for me and of course I didn’t want that to happen!

At the time, there was a painting hanging on the wall on a picture wire we had hung up for displaying art, mainly watercolor things we did for our homeschooling. (A particularly memorable one was a black and white picture of Abraham Lincoln I drew while learning about the civil war.)

On the top wire, prominently displayed, hung an acrylic painting of a bluebird that I did with the help of an adult I knew. I considered it one of my best, and I loved it very much. You could practically see the fluffiness of the bluebird’s delicate feathers.

“Uh, how about …Lady Bluebird?” I asked, hoping it didn’t sound completely silly.

“Sure,” said mom, and from then on that was my secret identity.

(Don’t tell anyone!)