A Time When I Learned to Like Something
When I was a kid I experienced things that most people could never dream about going through. From divorce, to being homeless, growing up with addicts for parents, I have experienced pain in more ways than physical. I remember kids my age having journals, writing about the things that happened throughout the day, week or month. I hated talking about things and I hated writing about it even more. I always thought, "why?". What is the point of writing about something that no one will ever read? I hated writing, it was such a dreadful feeling when I was required to write about anything.
My senior year of high school, I was in the running start program through Everett Community College. I enrolled in Introduction to Human Services because I knew that I wanted to help people as a career. In this class, we talked a lot about world issues; homelessness, war, addiction, etc. There was so much that I connected to on a personal level. One of the assignments in the class was to write my story and in that moment I thought, "oh great!". I hated talking about it, let alone writing about it. Despite being very uncomfortable with the assignment, I completed it. At first, I had no idea where to start so I asked my professor for some advice about what I should include and she told me to write about what shaped me as a person in society.
I started thinking about all the things I had experienced as a child. In the movies, I always see people having flashbacks, and that was what I began to experience. As the memories flowed I wrote. I wrote every detail that popped into my head. It didn't matter in what order they flooded my brain. I ended up writing almost 10 pages of significant events that shaped my personality, my views and my attitude toward the world. I began to feel a huge relief, as if weights had been lifted from my shoulders. I know that sounds cheesy, but that is when I had the realization that I could enjoy writing. When I turned in my assignment the following Thursday, I was very nervous about my professor reading the river of thoughts that flowed onto the pages, but the next class day, I was pulled aside and told that my writing was beautiful. I thought that it was weird and messy, I was not expecting the word beautiful to be associated with my pain.
After that, I started to write for myself and every time I put that pen to paper, I continued to feel that relief. I loved it. It was a strange feeling for me, but I finally grew a love for writing about myself. Eventually I discovered poems and quotes about pain and eventually I fell in love with poetry, too.