Every story starts with a hand holding the pen.
Sometimes the hand is steady — a grandmother at the kitchen table, writing the family tree on the back of an icon, letters leaning left, as though the weight of memory is too much to carry. Sometimes the hand shakes — a middle-aged woman signing a lease, her first after leaving the man who spent years convincing her she was too stupid, too weak, too broken to survive alone. Sometimes, the hand is invisible, buried in the fine print no one reads until it’s too late.
Lately, I’ve been thinking about all the hands fighting for the pen right now.
We like to pretend we write our own lives, that we control the stories we live inside. That’s the biggest lie of all. We inherit stories like debts from mothers, from fathers, from the places we’re born and the wounds they leave. Some of those stories come in lullabies, some in gossip over coffee, some in the silence after the door slams. And some don’t feel like stories at all until they’ve already shaped us.
I think about this every time I sit down to write.
My own hand isn’t always steady. Some days, I write because I can’t breathe until I get the words out. Other days, I write because I’m afraid — afraid of forgetting, afraid of being forgotten, afraid of leaving my daughter nothing but questions. Either way, writing is how I stop the world from writing over me.
I write because my grandmother Maria fled the destruction of Smyrna, carrying her infant daughter — my aunt —and a charred icon wrapped in the folds of her skirt. I write because survival wasn’t the end of her story, just the first chapter of mine. I write about my mother’s hands, my father’s silence, the green iron gate on Perikleous Street. I write about saints and cigarettes and the women who raised me —tender-hearted and defiant, holding tight to our faith, openly weeping at funerals and laughing a little too loud at weddings.
I write because if I don’t someone else will — and they’ll get it wrong.
And when I look up from the page, I see all the hands trying to pull the pen away.
The algorithmic gods not people, but machines trained to feed us stories that keep us scrolling, clicking, consuming. They don’t care if it’s true. They don’t care if it’s beautiful. They care if it’s addictive.
The billionaires and the false others dreaming of Mars and immortality, bodies optional. They hold their pens like swords, convinced they’re the chosen ones, convinced their wants should become our future.
The institutions — governments, corporations, media empires — the ones that used to own the pen outright. Their grip slips now, but they’re still writing: in fear, in greed, in desperation to hold onto a world that’s already gone.
And then there’ s us.
The women they underestimate.
The ones they call too soft, too sentimental, too angry, too much.
The ones who carry entire histories in their hands — hugging children, blessing icons, holding their families together, writing and weaving letters that never get sent.
We hold the pen too, even if they want us to forget it. Every time we choose what to believe, what to carry forward, what to bury, we’re writing. Every time we open our mouths and tell the truth, we’re writing. Every time we refuse to disappear, we’re writing.
That’s the fight. Not left against right. Not tradition against progress.
The fight is over who gets to decide what’s real.
Who gets to decide what a woman is worth, what a body is for, what survival means, what God looks like, what love can hold.
That’s why they ban books.
That’s why they flood the world with noise.
Control the story, control the future.
So here’s my question— if the pen is in your hand, even for a breath, what story will you write?
Will you write a world where we remember what it means to be human?
Where technology serves us, not the other way around?
Where meaning isn’t something you buy, but something you make —out of grief, out of dirt, out of bread and prayers and hands held across kitchen tables?
Or will you let them write it for you?
I can’t answer for anyone else.
But I know this —my writing, my pen — it’s the only power I have left.
And it’s enough.
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