A Message to the Skeptics:

I’ve reached the point in my life when people are no longer asking me where I want to go to college, but what I want to do with the rest of my life.

When I tell people I want to be a writer, their response almost always falls along the same lines of “...why?” followed by something similar to, “Ohh so you mean you want to spend the next 20 years of your life glued to your parents’ couch.”

What they don’t realize, is that writing at least to me,

Isn’t just a hobby, a career, or even a calling.

It chose me before I ever really had the chance to choose it.

Ensnared me in its barbed embrace,

Kept me prisoner in its steel grip,

Claimed me as its victim like the burning venom

That’s cursed its way through most of my relatives’ veins,

I too am addicted.

But if I’m being totally honest, most writers are, to that rush.

See, we get high off of a freedom once denied,

Now one we create with our own bare hands

just to fill the half-empty coffee mugs of our existence

with something more substantial,

We’d much rather burn our tongues again and again

with the liquid fire of our hurt epitomized in our words,

Than feel nothing at all.

Whatever it takes to make them more meaningful

than these watered down attempts at self-defense.

We’ve built up a tolerance through

These fabled myths, tongue-tied lies.

Tales and tragedies disguised as comedies,

We’ve kept them docked away in our damaged diaries,

Our fear the lock, our pride the key.

We keep our insecurities hidden between these lines of our fateful, flawed poetry,

Tucked between the pages and pages of our life stories.

And when we read the letters we’ve written to ourselves,

Scratched and blacked-out broken promises made in a drunken state of hate,

We learn to love the art behind our craft.

Learn to pick our cracked and torn out scraps off of the ground,

Glue them back into each and every glitter filled sketchbook,

Learn to piece together the puzzles of our troubles,

The tattered remains of our shattered childhoods,

We learn to knit together the fabric of our futures and create.

We sum up the courage to prick ourselves with the needle just to feel every time,

To let that blood run red, raw, and real, spill freely onto the page,

Inkblots staining and smearing our doubt out, we feel.

We fight, we fall, and we rise up from dust again and again,

Like a phoenix flaming from the fire,

With each new beginning, we find ourselves between plot lines

And the eyes of the characters who laugh and cry tears of our same joy and sorrow.  

We lay the cornerstones to the foundation of our aspirations

Beneath the soil of the worlds we’ve built up with nothing

But a ballpoint pen and a post-it note.

We are the exiled, the outcast, and the betrayed.

We are the GI-Joes, comic book heroes, and princesses

Who’ve started revolutions, fought wars, and ended them before they even began,

We are the storytellers

Authors in our own right we write throughout every fleeting night

We’re the losers and the sorcerers,

The do-gooders and the space-wizards,

The lovers and the haters,

The fighters and the dreamers,

Why do I write?

If only because passion is my greatest muse.

If only because I really love what I do and he did too.

If only because we bend, and break, and pull, and pry the very boundaries of the mind,

If only because we tear down walls just to build up bridges

If only because we walk on water, move mountains and part seas,

Compose symphonies with our heartbreaking, yet uplifting melodies

Each syllable a note, each sentence a harmonious phrase,

each chapter a mesmerizing movement

Our words bring music to millions of ears,

But we don’t need a standing ovation, our proclamations ring true anyway.

We are the few silent artists whose voices are never silenced,

And we lend them to all who wish to say something.

Change something.

We preach, and we teach,

we just have to believe for once that we are indeed good enough.

Wise enough. Strong enough.

To pick up the pen, used all too frequently

To merely shield ourselves from the sticks and stones

Thrown by the twisted, gnarled limbs of our own uncertainty

Deadlift the very tool that somehow always seems to weigh us down,

You’ve heard it once and you’ll no doubt hear it again,

Our greatest enemy and our largest obstacle is ourselves.

Realize that wielding the pen, really is mightier than brandishing any sword,

Words are always stronger in numbers,

And we are stronger than that venom and those demons

Who try to claw their way back into our dreams and haunt our memories.  

These stories are ours, parts of our hearts,

And he knew better than anyone

that we can learn to mold these manuscripts into masterpieces,

If only to break them down, and start again.