When I was a child I engraved in my brain the idea that expressing your feelings and asking for help was a sign of incompetence and weakness. I believed that it would cause the people around me to worry. So I hid. I locked everything I felt in a box and threw away the key. The subject was never to be spoken of, and no one could ever know how unhappy I truly was with myself. I lived this way for a large part of my life until the moment that I discovered a form of therapy better than the rest.
The power of the written word.
Since I discovered the power of writing, it has been the only way I can truly express myself. Somehow creating a fantasy world where everything was perfect and the good always defeated the bad helped me escape my world which most of the time wasn’t perfect. I used to sit outside for hours with pen and paper in hand, writing about everything I saw. I wrote about how the birds looked with their wings spread out heading to a new place unsure of what was expecting them there -- I wrote and I became the birds. I wrote about the flowers swaying back and forth in the field of green grass. As I wrote, I transformed into the flowers. Writing taught me to look at things from different perspectives. It taught me to see the beauty in things, it taught me that if I didn’t see beauty in something all I had to do was look harder.
I began fighting this war against myself when I was in fourth grade, and for three years I felt completely alone -- even when I was surrounded by people. I looked around at them being so open with how they felt and it made me wonder if it was normal for me to not be able to say everything that I wanted to say. I wondered if it was normal that every time I was tempted to speak I held it all in. Instead of speaking I wrote it all down in the notebook I always kept with me.The notebook I carried with me became a type of security blanket, and to this day I still have to carry a notebook with me at all times. At times I found myself discouraged from writing but I always found myself going back to it. No matter what anyone said and how they often told me that I would never be able to publish a book -- which has been my biggest dream for a really long time -- I always went back to it.
I want to become a teacher to help kids find what they are passionate about. I understand that not everybody will fall in love with writing the way I did, but I want to help them learn how important it is to put your heart and soul into something. I want to teach kids to find what they love and never let go of it. If they want to be artists, engineers, astronauts or singers but the world is telling them they won’t make it, I want them to know they can accomplish anything they put their mind to. I developed a connection with writing that has helped me through so many things, and I want kids to have that same opportunity.
