I've always thought of myself as a fiction writer. From the beginning, I was in love with crafting a story. In grade one, it was a treat to take home the big manila envelope that was stuffed with the tools to make a storybook. That envelope had the special paper that was lined on the bottom half but blank on the top half, so my book could have illustrations. The envelope had a rainbow of construction paper to choose from for the book's cover. It had pencils and crayons so I could write and illustrate my own story. My story was about a flower that came down with the chicken pox.

In grade two, the teacher said I should be writing longer stories by now. I was trying, but I was reading well above my grade level, and I was frustrated with not being able to get the characters to develop the way I wanted. The characters in the books I read seemed so real. I wanted mine to have depth, but didn't yet have the skill for such a large undertaking.

I never lost my fascination with fiction. I studied fiction writing in university. I took courses in poetry, prose, medieval literature, old novels and recent short stories. I love fiction writing, and have always dreamed of being a novelist.

I even started writing club in university. It wasn't the biggest club on campus, but a few of us were devoted. We picked a random selection of words, or a first line, or a theme for the week. We would write a short story and come back and share it. I grew as a writer, and as a critic.

Recently, my sister-in-law suggested I attempt some nonfiction writing, because she likes the blog I write about my personal life. I thought it was sweet of her. I also thought it was a bit crazy. Nonficition? I'm a fiction writer. It's my dream job. It's my hobby. For most of my life, it's been a major part of who I think I am.

Who I think I am might just be a lie. For the past six and a half years, I've been filling a blog with memories and personal essays. I've been writing short nonfiction for years without really thinking about it. Instead of filling a book with quirky characters and dramatic plot lines, I've been filling a blog with reflections on how I felt about my first taste of Milk Duds, how it feels to go grocery shopping and then realize I've forgotten my list, and the difficulties of doing laundry in the apartment building's shared facilities during a pandemic.

For the past six and a half years, I've been slowly becoming a nonfiction writer, and I didn't even realize it until someone else pointed it out for me. And I write about, for the most part, nothing. This was a startling, and I'll admit, an upsetting revelation. I've become a chronicler of the minutiae of a fairly average life. This is who I've become to others: Someone who clearly meant to write a journal, but confused her keyboard with her diary.

I don't know how this happened. Here I am, happily working away on an attempt at a fantasy novel, and leaving in my wake several books' worth of nonfiction material. I suppose this happened the way much of life happens – little bit by little bit. Day by day. Word by word.

I wrote about candy. I wrote about being pregnant. I wrote about buying a dwarf rabbit. I wrote about the trials of working in customer service, and how faith is crucial to my mental health staying intact. I wrote about laundry, grocery shopping, going into labour, my babies growing up, the trials of motherhood, and the trials of social distancing. One blog post turned into years of blog posts. I wrote about whatever was on my mind. The last thing on my mind was the effect my blog was having on my identity as a writer.

I recently reread some of my early blogs. They are awfully written. In a few years, I wonder if I will think my current blogs leave as much to be desired. In a few years, I wonder if I will still be trying to write a fantasy novel, or if I'll have switched over to nonfiction entirely.

I didn't read much nonfiction when I was growing up, except when school required it. I preferred make-believe. Make-believe was captivating. It could capture characters, places and ideas in a neat little package that I could pick up and revisit at will. Still, as fantastic as fiction could be, it was also often predictable. There were tropes. There was foreshadowing. There were genres that ensured certain things must happen – comedy and tragedy, for instance.

Nonfiction is a different thing entirely. Nonfiction is a record of a very unpredictable world. Nonfiction is life through a lens, and when you pick up a new book on an old subject, that subject can look completely new. I've often found that unsettling. It's nice to think that everything that happens in real life is recorded accurately, and I can pick up a book and understand a small piece of the world a little better. That's often not true. I can pick up one book and think I understand one thing a little better. I can pick up a dozen books on the same topic and realize the world is far more complicated than I had thought, and every topic has a thousand different facets that reflect reality differently. Nonfiction is complicated, slippery, and potentially volatile.

I like my fictional worlds, where I create a world, populate it with characters, and explore the things that are on my mind in an environment that in no way connects to my actual life. Nonfiction, on the other hand, is connected to my real life, and thus is messy, and hard to pin down. Despite my misgivings about writing nonfiction, or even reading nonfiction if I'm being honest, I somehow wandered my way into the nonfiction world without even realizing where I was.

Life has not been predictable for me. If writing nonfiction is a way to classify and examine real life, I suppose it makes sense that my writing has shifted toward that vein during uncertain times. The more difficult my life gets, the more I blog. At times it has been nerve-wracking to post my opinions on controversial topics, or humbling to own up to my mistakes, but often it's been encouraging to share my life with others and to have words of encouragement or expressions of sympathy come back to me. It's even been cathartic and encouraging to put a funny spin on the stressful moments of parenting, working with cranky customers, or social-distancing.

Nonfiction is a daunting field, as it often begets more questions than it answers. Every book on every topic just leads to another book with an often conflicting interpretation of events. The beauty of nonfiction, though, is that it allows for the study of a topic from every possible angle, which not only informs the reader, but can also allow a reader to see an event from multiple perspectives. When I share my life from my perspective, it is not a clinical dissection of my life. It's an introspective mulling over of my life, looking for the flaws, the bright sides, and the life lessons.

That is a side of nonfiction I had previously overlooked. I missed the ability of nonfiction to elicit empathy. Each work of nonfiction is an attempt to have the reader see things from a certain perspective. If done well, nonfiction can open up a whole new understanding of real, flesh and blood people who live in a world that is at times scary, and always complicated, but also navigable - often more navigable for acquiring the empathy and humility that comes from seeing the world from the perspective of someone else.

Perhaps nonfiction is not the tumultuous mass of conflicting ideas that I found unapproachable, but is instead a way to see the world a little more clearly, if I can trust myself to glean wisely from the vast fields of available writing on any given subject.

I did not see myself as a nonfiction writer, but now that I'm here, I think I'll keep moving along down this path, and see where it goes. Nonfiction is unpredictable, as is life, so how better to deal with life than through nonfiction?