WHO AM I?
Writing for me has always been intuitive. When asked to write 2 pages, I would write four. When asked to write five, I would write seven. This is because I always have had an abundance to say, yet words got stuck on my tongue. It proved to be a subpar vessel for me. My anxieties surrounding speaking the truth overwhelmed my insatiable need to tell it. Before I found writing, a lot of my most intimate fears and hurts dominated my inner being, constricting my ability to venture outside of the familiar and safe and pushing me to doubt the elements in my life that seemed too good to be true. Through writing, I found a tool to battle these stifling doubts about both myself and the goodness of the world.
I found companionship in the indomitable Alex Elle. In Words from a Wanderer her book of poems, she writes concise letters to herself where she bares her greatest regrets but also speaks to how she intends to move on from them. For her, the answer never is silence. She advocates “resilience” and “courage”. I found when reviewing some of her works that my pieces share similar themes.
In my book, as of now named I Am, the main character suffers from recurring insecurities surrounding her own worth in the eyes of her mother. This stems from qualms about her past mistakes, but in dwelling on those, she proves unable to recognize all of her redeeming qualities.
I have always battled with the truth, not the little things, the question of “did you or did you not take the cookie from the cookie jar?” but the truths that are most telling, the truths that cycle in your head day in and day out but that the rest of the world is never meant to hear. In the pieces included here, I confront some of those truths. The epistolary poem Summer Salutations asks you not to look at that which “…would send you spiraling/Yet again into the unsettling isolation of your prison”. While in a short story borne from an attempt to parallel the thoughts of the much beloved Devan Suber, I ironically reference the beauty of consistency and “know[ing] what to expect when everything else is unpredictable, in flux”. In “With the Lake I’ll Stay” the narrator, a boy sitting alone in nature, reflects on the impossibility of nailing down that which is transient, including relationships and all of the living things surrounding him. He ponders “the waters that must have once been pure”.
These pieces all allude to habits and thought processes that are obviously self-destructive. The characters give in almost whole-heartedly to these tendencies, but also experience brief moments when they question the validity of these processes, either in identifying others who choose not to give in to them or in noticing how these habits make them feel and feeling some desire to change them. The question of “what is truth” surfaces. When defining ourselves, when have we found the definitive answer? When evaluating our world, when have we come to fully understand what it looks like? When have we reached the point when we have described it accurately?
All of these questions are for the reader to explore. I cannot guide you to the answers, but the pieces included here give some clues as to my take on the subject. I hope that in exploring this page and my works you find your personal truth. Once you’ve found it, I hope you realize that the truth is fragile, in desperate need of a knight. It can only last once you have made up your mind to defend it, preserve it, but along that same line of thinking, it can only change when you give it permission.
I found companionship in the indomitable Alex Elle. In Words from a Wanderer her book of poems, she writes concise letters to herself where she bares her greatest regrets but also speaks to how she intends to move on from them. For her, the answer never is silence. She advocates “resilience” and “courage”. I found when reviewing some of her works that my pieces share similar themes.
In my book, as of now named I Am, the main character suffers from recurring insecurities surrounding her own worth in the eyes of her mother. This stems from qualms about her past mistakes, but in dwelling on those, she proves unable to recognize all of her redeeming qualities.
I have always battled with the truth, not the little things, the question of “did you or did you not take the cookie from the cookie jar?” but the truths that are most telling, the truths that cycle in your head day in and day out but that the rest of the world is never meant to hear. In the pieces included here, I confront some of those truths. The epistolary poem Summer Salutations asks you not to look at that which “…would send you spiraling/Yet again into the unsettling isolation of your prison”. While in a short story borne from an attempt to parallel the thoughts of the much beloved Devan Suber, I ironically reference the beauty of consistency and “know[ing] what to expect when everything else is unpredictable, in flux”. In “With the Lake I’ll Stay” the narrator, a boy sitting alone in nature, reflects on the impossibility of nailing down that which is transient, including relationships and all of the living things surrounding him. He ponders “the waters that must have once been pure”.
These pieces all allude to habits and thought processes that are obviously self-destructive. The characters give in almost whole-heartedly to these tendencies, but also experience brief moments when they question the validity of these processes, either in identifying others who choose not to give in to them or in noticing how these habits make them feel and feeling some desire to change them. The question of “what is truth” surfaces. When defining ourselves, when have we found the definitive answer? When evaluating our world, when have we come to fully understand what it looks like? When have we reached the point when we have described it accurately?
All of these questions are for the reader to explore. I cannot guide you to the answers, but the pieces included here give some clues as to my take on the subject. I hope that in exploring this page and my works you find your personal truth. Once you’ve found it, I hope you realize that the truth is fragile, in desperate need of a knight. It can only last once you have made up your mind to defend it, preserve it, but along that same line of thinking, it can only change when you give it permission.