Maps Are Not Always Paper

I didn’t go looking for writing. Writing found me. I did not start because I loved stories. I started because there were things inside me I could not explain. Memories with no proof. Moments that did not belong to the physical world. I needed somewhere to put them. Somewhere that could hold what my life could not carry in silence. Writing became the place where I could finally see the shape of what had happened to me, like tracing a map of something that had no outline. I did not know it then, but every strange moment and every unseen thing was pushing me toward the page, marking coordinates I would only understand years later.

The first time something tried to take my body from me did not start in terror. It started with that uneasy feeling as I walked up the stairs toward my bedroom, the sensation of eyes following me from my mother's bedroom, where that doll sat watching me pass. The air always felt different near it. But when I stepped into my room that day, the feeling disappeared. Everything seemed normal. No heaviness. No strange tension in the air. I lay on my bed staring at the ceiling, just a fifteen-year-old kid trying to take an afterschool nap. Then something changed. Without warning, the air thickened as if the room inhaled all at once. My muscles locked. I could not lift my arms. I could not scream. Pressure dug into my chest like someone had climbed on top of me and pinned me to the bed. My throat tightened. My mind was awake but my body would not obey me. When it finally released its grip, I rolled off the side of the bed and hit the carpet, scrambling to my feet. I ran from my room like there had been a murderer I could not see. A kid should not know that kind of fear. This was the first marker on my map, the first point where the invisible world pressed itself into mine.

It did not happen just once. It happened again days later at my older sister's house, and then once more at my dad's house. Each time it was the same possession, the same weight, the same feeling of being held down by something I couldn’t see. The only difference was how strong it became. The pressure grew heavier. The presence felt closer. It was as if whatever found me in my bedroom had learned how to follow me. I was beginning to understand that some territories cannot be escaped by simply changing location.

Time passed. I carried the memory. It was not easy.

As time moved on, I tried to live like nothing had happened. I went to school. I grew up. I pretended that what happened in that room stayed in that room. But even while life looked normal on the outside, something else had started. I began waking up outside my body, the beginning of what I would later understand as out-of-body experiences. I would feel myself fly upward, leaving the weight of my body behind, like slipping out of a jacket. I could see myself. I could see the room. I was present but not contained. It did not feel like floating. It felt like I had stepped into another layer of reality that had always existed beside this one. My map was expanding into dimensions I had no words for.

One morning, much later in life, I was resting on my bed. Sunlight came through the blinds in brilliant lines. My cat slept beside me. My dog lay in the corner. Everything was peaceful. Then I heard it. My name. Clear. Too close to be imagined. Joey. Slow and stretched, a scratchy, high-pitched voice like someone who knew me well. My dog lifted his eyes and stared at the same wall I was staring at. My cat jumped down and ran from the room. Nothing was there. No person. No reason. No explanation. I walked through the house checking every room, every door. Silence. I stood in the hallway with every hair on my arms raised. I had heard a voice, but I did not have a body to attach it to.

Another time, I was driving alone. The day was quiet. No fear. No tension. Just the road and the thoughtlessness of routine. The passenger seat beside me was empty. I was thinking about inventory lists, or bills, or something that didn’t matter. Then it happened again. My name. Joey. Out loud. The voice was slow and deep. Like someone dead or someone evil. Spoken from the empty backseat behind me. I almost slammed my foot onto the brake and looked around the car. The back seat was empty. The passenger seat was empty. Yet someone had spoken my name. Not a thought. Not imagination. Not internal. Real. Another point marked on the map of the unexplainable.

In the early 2000s, I started writing. No idea why. No outline. No career plan. No dream of publishing. I just turned on my computer and began typing. I wrote scenes of a story that might someday become a novel. I poured thoughts into the document and watched characters appear. I did not know why it mattered. I only knew that writing gave the things inside me a place to go. I felt like if I did not write, whatever was happening to me would keep building with no release. I wrote page after page. Paragraph after paragraph. Not to be seen. Not to be understood. Just to breathe. This was when I discovered that a map does not need to be shown to anyone to have value. It only needs to be true.

Years later, life broke again. The problems were not supernatural this time. They were ordinary. Bills piled up. Responsibilities pressed down. I hit a point where frustration and exhaustion hollowed me out. Then the dark season came. A road trip went wrong. A vehicle broke down. I ended up stranded in a place I was never supposed to be. Everything felt like a barrier. Every plan collapsed. I was angry at God. I was angry at His silence and angry that there were no answers. I did not understand that silence is sometimes the answer.

Later, I ended up in the hospital with COVID. Machines beeped beside my head. Covid ammonia, they said. They told me I would probably die in that room. I denied it. Everyone else accepted it. Then something inside me shifted. Not a voice in my ears. Not a whisper across the room. A knowing. A clarity that filled my mind like someone placed a sentence there that had always existed. You are exactly where you need to be. It did not fix anything. It did not comfort me. It changed me. I stopped demanding an explanation for my life. I stopped trying to drag the future toward me. I let go. In that moment, my map became clearer not because I could see farther, but because I stopped trying to redraw it.

Writing returned with force after that. Not because I felt inspired. Because I needed somewhere to put everything I had lived through. I opened a blank document and felt that same release I felt in the early 2000s. Every time I typed, I felt something in me unknot. Writing was not only therapy. It was survival. It was the way I processed what I could not prove had ever happened.

Eventually, I started publishing. Quietly. No announcement. No expectations. I learned of a platform that made it easy. They have a button that says Publish. I sat there staring at it for a long time. The cursor blinked on the screen like a heartbeat. For a moment, I felt the old fear again. The feeling that if I put my story into the world, I would lose control of it. That people would misunderstand. That people would think I was wrong. Or dramatic. Or misinterpreting.

I clicked Publish anyway.

It was not brave. It was not confident. I clicked because something inside me was tired of carrying everything alone. After that, writing followed me everywhere. Manuscripts. Short stories. Memoirs. Personal essays. A few poems. Pages filled. My voice formed. I have manuscripts stacked and waiting, some ready to become books and others still being worked on. My direction became clearer without me trying to steer it. The map filled itself in as I walked.

When I look back on all of it, I can see that every strange event, every spiritual moment, every night something pressed into my body, and every time silence answered me instead of words, all of it pointed in the same direction. It was not random. It was not disconnected. Each moment shaped me. Each moment moved me. Each moment demanded to be written. Each was a landmark I could only see in retrospect.

I have lived more than what I put here. Many other moments shaped me into writing. Some are still too heavy to carry in public. Some are still finding their words. What you read is only a small part, only one finger of the hand.

Maybe the world we see is not the only one that shapes us. Maybe the things that mark us the deepest are the things we can never prove. Maybe we learn who we are not through what we can hold in our hands, but through what we battle in silence.

Writing became the only place where the invisible finally took shape. Where the map of my interior world could be drawn and redrawn until it made sense. I did not expect to fall in love with it, but I did. Now I know writing is not just something I do. It is who I am. It is the cartography of my soul, the legend that explains all the strange symbols. It is my true love.