I used to collect obituaries. There’s almost always a stack of newspapers in the mail room at my school. Every week when a new issue came out, I would slip the first paper off the stack, remove the page containing the Obituaries section, fold it up and quietly stick it in my pocket. Then I would lift the entire stack and put the rest of the unused paper on the bottom. At the time, I didn’t care about the rest. I only wanted the obituaries.

After that, I would retreat back to my dorm room, curl up in bed with my red teddy bear, and read. Most of the Obituaries were in regards to older folks. Some were younger. All were human. That, I think, was what I loved the most.

Recently, a New York-based actor I knew from high school dyed his hair bubblegum pink and posted a photo of himself on Instagram. In the caption, he wrote about his love for acting, but how he was tired of suppressing his own individuality for the industry. He ended it with the words, “Here’s to living the life you want to live.”

I haven’t properly spoken with this man in years, but his words resonated with me. I reached out and touched the black curved letters of the poem that hung on the wall above my bed. It was a poem I had written four years ago, after a particularly dark period in my life, a reminder to be happy.

Here’s something: I love sentimentality. I keep every program and ticket stub that comes into my hands. I hang my own art on my bedroom walls. I used to exchange handwritten letters through the mail with my last boyfriend. Once, recently, a friend of mine was having a rough time of it all, so I wrapped a pack of Whoppers in a happy little note and taped it to his car door. I thrive off of all the little moments in my life, I write down everything that happens to me that makes me feel something, and I hold all these memories inside my tiny body until the ravens come for me, until my cells all swell and burst, until I cannot hold them in anymore.

Poetry, however, does not agree. Poetry grabs sentimentality by the throat and tosses it to the linoleum-covered cement floor. Poetry wears fur coats in Manhattan, sticks its nose in the air and swings a $5,000 designer handbag in the face of sentimentality, while it sleeps under newspapers on park benches and starves to death on the side of the street. Poetry doesn’t let sentimentality sit with it at lunch. In the first college-level creative writing class I took, there were two things we were told to avoid like a mosquito infected with malaria, and those two things were cliches and sentimentality.

Poetry may not agree, but my sentimentality is a part of me, and it’s a part that I am no longer willing to sacrifice for the sake of my art. I will avoid it in my classes, focus on sensory images and metaphors and juxtaposition and hope it is enough for my readers to feel what I want them to feel. But why should I only hope they understand? Sometimes I feel like a walking cliché, and sometimes when I am kissed by someone I love, my heart explodes into a thousand shining butterflies, and then sometimes I am so sad that I want to drown myself in a river of my own tears. It’s overdone, I know— but who’s to say that I can’t feel that way, too?

Also, I’m immune to malaria.

Here’s something else: I love the smell of cigarette smoke, even though I have and will never touch a cigarette in my life. It’s a scent I have always associated with my late grandfather, and it is comforting to me. It contains a piece of me. It is something like home.

I think in colors. I have a cat. I love to wear black. On nights and weekends when I have nothing else planned, I dance to show tunes and classic rock alone in my apartment. I am a human vacuum for potatoes.

I am not unique for any one of these things on its own. I am unique for the combination of them. I am myself for my red hair and my affinity for all things Italian, for all the love I’ve received and every gift I have given, for every single one of the millions of words I have written. If nothing else, I am this. If nothing else, I am me. I create my own individuality, and I am learning to love it.

I wish I had a better reason for collecting obituaries. I don’t remember how or why I started doing it, just that after a while, it was something I felt compelled to do. Buried somewhere in the hurricane that is my room, I still have every single obituary I’ve collected.