For several years, I kept a hand-out my secondary two teacher gave out. It was Robert Frost's poem "The Road Not Taken". We had analyzed it in class and I decided to keep it, without knowing why:

The Road Not Taken

Growing up, I frequented two places daily: home and school. People's reactions to my behaviour and my interests always made me feel like I was not normal. I preferred being alone to being with people I didn't like and that made me weird. The stories I wrote which were full of emotions were also considered weird. People spoke over me and tried to force their opinions onto me. I didn't have any support; I was alone.

Five years later, I was in cegep and started my first job in a boutique. As I became acquainted with the staff, I found that my manager, although he was a photographer as opposed to a writer, shared my interests and I, at last, had found one solid connection in life. After reading two of my poems, he said, "It is a harduous path [following your heart] because only the bravest choose these paths. But it is yours..."

Two years later, I was listening to the soundtrack from one of my favourite television shows, Quantum Leap. The show features a man who is able to leap into other people's bodies throughout time and, in order to leap out again, has to fix things in the people's lives to change history for the better. The show demonstrates that leaping can be lonely and one of the songs on the soundtrack, "Fate's Wide Wheel", features loneliness as its main theme:

Fate's Wide Wheel