I’ve heard it said that there is one book that all writers come back to. The one that took their breath away, that made them realize the power of language, how to move someone with something as intangible as letters strung together to make words, words strung together to make a sentence, sentences strung together to make a story so emotive that they can’t help but want to do the same. This moment—this gorgeous, ecstatic moment—met me in my junior year of high school. I read a book that made me think about myself and the world in a completely different light than I ever had before and from that moment on I was hooked. I had written stories before—scrawled in my clunky third-grade penmanship in a polka dot notebook my mother gifted me, carried in my chest just waiting for their moment to be spoken, on an old hand-me-down laptop shared between my younger brother and I. I’d written stories before, but I’d never been committed to them like I was after I read that one book. I knew from that moment that I needed to do this for the rest of my life. This one moment and the possibilities of future affectations that this one book opened for me is the reason I am studying creative writing. Four years later, in my junior year of college now, I believe more than ever in the power of language, of stories. Talking with my professors and my classmates, I learn all the time, over and over again, the impact and importance of storytelling. Shirley Jackson opens her novel The Haunting of Hill House with the fantastic sentence: “No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream.” Short stories, novels, poems, plays—these are all access points to our dreams, our imaginations. They are how we come to understand ourselves and the world around us. How we are able to continue living, even when it sometimes seems impossible. I’m studying creative writing because I know that escape is necessary if we are expected to continue living in the world in any functional capacity. With all this beauty and mysticism in mind I imagine myself as the poet laureate and the winner of the next Pulitzer. This is my own dream. However, even within my own dream, I know that, as a writer, I cannot be everybody's everything. I’ll consider my writing career a success if I can be even one person’s something. If I can live in the mind of just one reader, just for one moment, I believe that I will have successfully completed my goal: to make people think differently than they previously have. This knowledge has made me think hard about what I want to do with my degree, outside of publishing my own work. Like I said before, stories and language are one of the most important things in any person’s life. Humans are a species of communicators. Without communication, we would be extinct. I want to see that communication through storytelling advances beyond myself. This is why I am planning to become a literary agent after my graduation. With this career choice, I will be able to assist dozens of writers in having their voices heard. I can amplify them and get their words and their language into the hands of people that will truly appreciate them. I’ll be able to leave my footprint on the hearts and minds of readers everywhere, even if it isn’t my name on the cover.