From a teenage notebook to a first published novel

The road was long, marked by grief, by silences, and by a notebook I was never able to get back. I'll tell it to you without erasing its detours.

I was ten years old when I started writing. My aunt was the first person to believe in me, long before I knew myself that I had something to say. She kept telling me to believe in my dreams, in my talent, at an age when I didn't yet understand how deeply those words would stay with me forever.

When she passed away, writing became my refuge. Every page I filled soothed me a little. It was my way of finding myself again, of healing, of existing somewhere without having to justify myself. For a long time, I kept those stories to myself alone, like a precious secret.

In high school, I finally confided them to my best friend. She loved them, and her support gave me a confidence I had never dared to have. We even went so far as to turn some of my stories into little films shot on our phones, that's when I understood that my passion didn't stop at writing: it reached into film too, into directing, into storytelling in all its forms.

Carried by that momentum, I found the courage to tell my mother: "I want to work in film." Her answer was blunt: she would not pay for my studies for that, and I had to forget the idea. Those words hurt me deeply. From that day on, I started writing in secret again, the way you protect a flame you've been forbidden to light.

I never gave up. I filled notebook after notebook. And then one day, my mother found one. She burned it.

I can't put into words how much that devastated me. I went through months of deep sadness, feeling as if a part of myself had been torn away, the only part through which I truly knew how to express myself. For my mother, careers like medicine, law, or teaching represented a serious future. Film, writing, were not part of it. Our silences grew longer than our conversations. I felt alone, misunderstood, deprived of the one dream that truly made me feel alive.

For a while, I stopped writing. I tried to convince myself that this passion belonged to the past. But in spite of myself, I kept scribbling sentences, ideas, the beginnings of stories on scraps of paper, as if writing, too, refused to leave me entirely.

After my baccalaureate, I began studying medicine, as my mother wished. I tried to recognize myself in it, to do what was expected of me. But I felt as though I were living a life that wasn't mine. Even at university, writing caught up with me. At the smallest free moment, I wrote. It was still, and always, my space of freedom.

It was during that time that I met someone who believed in me like no one before. They kept telling me I had talent, that my dreams mattered, that they deserved to be taken seriously. They saw in me a strength I sometimes struggled to see myself. For the first time in a long while, I felt understood, and that renewed confidence gave me the strength to keep writing, without hiding.

One day, I sent them a story I had just finished. They simply said: "You know, this could become a novel." Until then I mostly wrote screenplays, but when you're not yet known in the industry, publishing a novel often opens the door more easily.

In the meantime, I immigrated to the United States, a new life, a chance to start over and finally give myself fully to what I loved. They took on that story with me: they worked on the layout, reread every page, improved the project with infinite patience, and helped me turn a childhood dream into something real. Every day, they encouraged me to keep going, to believe in myself.

I still don't know how to express all my gratitude. Over the years, I've had friends who believed in me. But this person didn't only believe. They acted by my side. And that, to me, is worth more than all the gold in the world.

This road taught me one simple and essential thing: you must never give up on what you love, no matter the obstacles, the rejections, or the silences that weigh on you. If a passion makes you vibrate, if it makes you feel fully alive, then it deserves to be pursued, even when the world around you doesn't yet understand it.

I never stopped loving to write. And today, I am proud to have kept believing, all the way through, in that dream.

And you, have you ever had to protect a passion against the opinion of those you loved most, and what helped you hold on?