Growing Pains

Growing Pains

I think we become a bit of everyone else before we truly become ourselves.

I always told my mom that

I wanted to be this beautiful girl

I saw on tv when I grow up.

I didn’t know it at the time,

But what I was really saying was that I wanted to be like her,

Not be her.

It’s funny, though, because my whole life

I kept quiet thinking I was

Doing the world a favor.

My thoughts are scrabble pieces

I haven’t quite formed to achieve the highest score yet,

So why would anyone want to hear them?

I wasn’t not being myself because

I didn’t know who I was—

No one ever let me discover myself.

But as I grew, I realized:

Loving yourself doesn’t mean becoming all the things you want to be.

Flowers don’t know whether they’re becoming a rose or a dandelion

But either way they’re beautiful.

I grew into myself, like growing into those shoes

You bought despite knowing they were too big for you.

I was always told poems

Have to rhyme

But I didn’t care as long as I got my thoughts out

And I was always told that you cant mix cursive and manuscript

But I didn’t care because I thought that it looked

Like my thoughts

The world isn’t out to get you,

it’s out to change you

and I never realized until they told me

my shoes were too big for me.

I always wanted to be like the roses

And I never grew quite big enough

But at least I never wanted to be something else.