Why It Started and Why It Continued

                It started with a person.  A person whose name was anonymous, but their writing spoke to me suddenly and I started thinking in ways I never thought I could.  I was in seventh grade, a young, weird and confused girl and I wanted to write just like that.  It seemed so powerful to put something you had bottled up throughout the day and let it all out onto paper like the way the tide rises up on the rocks of the setting shore kissing it one last time before it rests.  With all its complexities and emotion, I was sure the moment I wrote something it would speak to someone else, and they would surely feel it the same way I felt when I had heard it for the very first time.  However, I was disappointed when I had read my first poem to friends and family and they didn’t “feel” anything.  I was so upset, because I was thinking “isn’t this what poetry is?”  Yes, there is poetry that rhymes to the beat of time, but that type apparently wasn’t mine.  I had searched for more, craving it like the deep abyss at the bottom of the dark ocean waiting for the next ship to pass so I could swallow it whole.  I figured I must be listening to the wrong people or looking at the wrong books, so I eventually gave up.

                                Not so much later was eighth grade, I know, so young and not knowing what life is right?  That’s not what I happened to think at the time.  I had this boyfriend, and it just so happened that he was my first real boyfriend.  When we broke up, it was so tragic; as I speak with sarcasm.  Although at that time that’s exactly how it was for me.  I laid in bed and I cried like a normal overly dramatic girl that gets her heart broken, and I suddenly felt like I had to say something, anything, to express what I had been feeling.  But I did not have anyone to say anything to, so I held my pen and I told the lines on the paper exactly how I felt.  I never actually wrote about the relationship due to the fact that I thought love was way too cliché and common top write about at the time.  I, instead, wrote about what I had been thinking about and bottling up for a while.  I finished an astounding poem that I finally believed did not need to rhyme, and it was at least three pages long front to back.  I was nevertheless nervous to share it.  I had entered a state of depression and belted my heart out on this paper, thinking something was wrong with being depressed.  I had always thought people would judge me and stereotype me as insane or abnormal. 

                                Later, during that depression, I continued to write.  I developed different ways to express myself in great detail and started liking writing even more and becoming content with my poetic techniques.  I started changing and developing as a person in addition to all of this.  Switching with glitches here and there but ever so persistent to try and be myself for the reason that I had been trying to be the person everyone else anticipated me to be.  But my personality grew, and branched out like a newly bloomed dogwood tree becoming more beautiful on the inside and out.  I noticed things more differently now, there were new lights and darks, new emotions, characteristics of people I did not recognize.  It is like looking through the lens of a camera that catches all the unseen in life including the good and bad.

                                I now love this art so much, because it gives me escape.  I’m allowed to fly freely into my petite and perplex world and express my feelings in a large variety of ways.  Poetry cries, sings, whistles, speaks, screeches, and even dances on one’s tongue as they repeat it and even linger in their ear.  It is one of many ways that teens and others all over the world show how they feel or even approach a topic.  I am thankful I came across this wonderful method and I hope to someday be comfortable enough to share my poetry with my community and the people around me.  I hope others embrace themselves into these ways of approaching life because it has certainly helped me go through and understand a lot of things I would have never discovered without it.