I love experiences! The thrill of discovering something new to me never fails to lift my spirit. Some experiences, however, pop up unplanned. There was a time where there was a heaviness on my conscious and no way to deliver the message that would relieve that weight. Still I wrote this letter and aimed to leave it as an open letter on Facebook. As I was reading it I noticed that there was too much personal information in it, so I changed the wordings in a way that would make sense to the intended person and myself. After changing the words, I realized that it seemed more like poetry than a letter. Oddly, I wrote more. I wrote more of my stories that could not be traced back to me if you took my name off of them. I wrote more stories that others might be able to relate to so that they didn’t feel alone. As with everything new that I do, I become aware of the way I live and get treated.

1. Everyone thinks I’m writing about love or suicide.

To be fair to them, I suppose they’re no too far off. I started to write poetry because of love lost. The happy poems to follow were based off of the things I love in life. Just as well, the sad poems come from the things in my life that I wish were dead.

2. The assumptions that I am an English major

No. While that might help me write better poems, no one has to have a certain educational path to be able to write poems.

3. “This makes too much sense to be a poem.”

Yup, that’s something I’ve been told before. I mentioned before that I write poems to try to give people a sense of community. If they understood one of my poems, maybe they should be questioning themselves instead of me. Also, not every poem needs to be decoded and overanalyzed to death.

4. I hate everything I write

I usually nitpick when I edit my poems and even after about a month of that and I decide to post it, I hate something about it and I desperately want to change it. After this article goes live, I’ll probably spend the next three weeks wishing I had made the title something different.

5. People ask for you to recite classic poetry

I have lost track of how many times I have had to apologize for not knowing or having memorized any poems from Emerson or other famous poets. Even if I did, I doubt that I would recite anything. I don’t even like to recite my own pieces.

6. Being told that I’m not a real poet

This mostly occurs after I get asked to recite a classic piece and I am unable to. First of all, how dare you. How dare you tell me that I have no emotion, no story to tell, no burning passion that I boil my ink with before I write something? Should I call you fake because there is something in your employment that you don’t know anything about? You have not had anything new happen to you that put you at a disadvantage?

7. Words can hold the ability to change the world.

We’ve all (hopefully) have been taught the importance of our words. Our words can make people fall in love with us or it will cause them to hate us. Words can earn or destroy respect. Words can save lives or end them. A friend of mine told me to check out Button Poetry on Youtube. As I was going through their videos, and the videos of similar channels, I found Sierra DeMulder’s “Today Means Amen” and that was the first poem to make me cry. The hope in the words, the goosebumps that I get (still to this day) when I listen or read the poem, and 1000+ reasons more that I could tell you. If a single poem can bring out an emotion in me, imagine what other poems could do to others. Imagine what social issues could be brought to attention and fixed. Imagine how many people, who feel lost, could be saved.

8. The world has shifted

Since I started writing poetry I have noticed more colors that come out during a sunset. I have paid more attention to the trickling of water in a creek as it runs downstream. I have become more sensitive to the world, and I appreciate every part of this new world that I am finally discovering after 20 years.

9. Words are so much more difficult to write

This is my favorite experience and problem to have. I try to keep my text messages simple, but every so often I’ll be going on a tangent and my wording will be something that sounds like a rough draft of a poem. Instead of receiving a response to the topic of the text I get told that I need to write a book because of how I word things. It is annoying that our conversation took a sudden detour, but at least I have a good line for my next poem.

10. My mind is more open

Just as I have stories to tell, others do as well. There have been topics that I’ve looked into because I wanted to know more about something that I heard mentioned. There are voices speaking from all over the world and they are telling me their experiences; their stories. I will listen to these stories just as they have listened to mine.