The headache was the worst I’d ever experienced, but I still didn’t want to go to the hospital that Friday night. I had plans with a friend to go to the movies. It was the summer before my senior year of college.

My mom insisted on taking me to the ER with my father. I grumbled in the backseat as the pain stabbed through my skull like a sword.

Inside the ER, the wait was interminable. A young woman with a headache is not high on the list of emergencies. Finally, late at night, I was taken for a cat scan and everything changed. I knew that something serious was wrong, but the fumbling resident wasn’t able to get the words out, clumsily drawing an outline of the brain and muttering about fluid. It was my father who ultimately told me I had a brain tumor.

When I was back at college that fall, I spoke to no one of the emergency surgery I’d had. I looked the same on the outside, but inside I was changing, after my first confrontation with mortality.

I began drafting some anecdotes from the experience and showed them to one of my professors, who encouraged me to tell my own story. From then on, I’ve been interested in the power of reflection to change our lives – and in nonfiction and memoir as forms of this reflection. Prior to this time, I had always written fiction, stories set in distant lands, historical fiction about immigrants, and characters who were anyone but me, thinking I had nothing to say about myself.

In my own life, reflection has shown me my strengths, helped me overcome my weaknesses, and enabled me to focus on what matters the most. It’s by sharing these reflections with others that we help each other understand what it means to be human.