Dear World,

I’d like to consider myself a poet of sorts; I’ll never be an author for I can’t keep a plot more than thirty pages or so. However, in the midst of my childhood dream that someday I’ll be published somewhere, you throw someone else’s beautiful words at my mind. Words so beautiful, I get chills and just need to sit for a second to take in all the beauty and feeling conveyed before I dare read them again. Still in this daze of having read something that is classified beyond art, I rebuke myself. How dare I pick up a pen and put it to paper? How dare I think for a second, that I could ever write words that could compare? It is in these moments I vow to put silence the words inside and never write again.

For a while, I seem to succeed in this endeavor, I don’t write and feel no guilt when I read Emily Dickinson or Robert Frost, for I accepted defeat with dignity. But then, I start to swell after two or three weeks. Have you ever seen the sea before a tsunami? The waves shrink back from shore and the sky seems clear, but then all the water gushes out without any warning. The same thing happens to me, I become a tsunami. I try to hold in the words, desperate to not mock those who made me want to write, and then I just can’t anymore. All the words I’ve been holding inside for what seems an eternity gush out and I can’t control when. The words just flow endlessly, and poem after poem, short story after short story, they all end up in the margins of math homework and backs of history exams for weeks at a time. Then it’s all back to ‘normal’, I write when the words come but, on my own paper.

This ‘tsunami’ effect has happened many times in my short four and a half years of serious writing, and was starting to happen again just after the words came back to me for the first time in months. As I was about to vow off writing once again, I stopped myself. Just because I rarely, if ever, write something so beautiful or powerful a person gets chills and needs to sit for a moment, doesn’t mean I shouldn’t write. In fact, it means just the opposite I need to write more to improve what I write and make it better. I also realized that Emily Dickinson was Emily Dickinson, and Walt Whitman was Walt Whitman, and so on and so forth; but I am myself. How I write is different than how the ‘greats’ wrote, I have a style and a meaning all of my own.

So World, to conclude I want you to know something; I will keep on writing, and I will not cease writing. Writing is where I make sense of everything, writing is where I express myself, writing is where I am home. Molding words into something is who I am, and who I will be forevermore.
Sincerely,
A Poet, a Wordsmith, a Weaver of Words and a Spinner of Tales,
Samantha Aryelle