Fluorescent lights magnified the smell of sweat and the noise of rowdy banter. I stood at the entrance, wishing, yet again, that Mom would just drop me off a little later. The bell never rang, never saved me from sitting alone on newly refinished gym floors. At least I had my book: a young adult novel about a quirky girl yearning for conventional popularity. Each sentence melted my surroundings into white noise.
“Are you reading?”
Laughs dissolved away.
At the end, the brown-haired, brown-eyed protagonist gained a sense of self-worth while vapid blonde snakes cried from unfamiliar defeat. The bell rang. As everyone else picked up their backpacks and formed single-file lines, I desperately wished to insert myself into the same pages that I pored over.
Why couldn’t I be her? Why couldn’t I bear to face at the imperfections of my face, the meekness of my voice, the quiver of my will?
In the coming years, I closed that hardcover novel. I put pen to paper. I wrote with sinful ferocity.
My solution was vicarious living, an attempt to strip bildungsroman of its core elements. High school parties, first boyfriends, combat boots, but no meat, no development, no coming-of-age. My characters were empty blocks of clay, molded by my lack of self-confidence. They felt soulless and rigid, exclusively abiding by static development.
Meanwhile, in Ms. Chow’s English class, I learned about words as my fingers trembled from isolation. Her classroom stunk of suffocating poetry. Every day she read to us, line after line. Each lesson seemed to be an oblique attack on my prose: it was solely plot and motif, not art nor beauty. Back then, I believed that she was in love with a pretentious craft, claimed by those who spat out frivolous nonsense into what they called verse.
I didn’t raise my shaking hand. I feared the thought of being heard.
Every so, her ideas about poetry eventually stuck, swirling around my mouth like peppermint candy. Lectures seeped into my unfinished stories, which favored human connection over hollow technicality. My metaphors flourished with intricacy as I unwillingly explored the unknown. Beginning, climax, resolution were no longer as important as feelings, thoughts, ideas.
Ms. Chow was right. I stopped choking on my own tongue. Good writing did not rely on perfection. We were all flawed, but poetry embraced flaw. Poetry was unabashed in its mirth, pain, familiarity. Poetry was truth and character arc. And my prose could be too.
Before, all I had wanted was to be the girl at the end of the book. Chapter one reminded me too much of myself. Yet, I failed to realize that we all undergo growth. In that way, we were all intertwined, more alike than we were different. I wasn’t so alone anymore.
And so, I finally listened. I stopped thinking about my own insecurities and just let myself exist among the human chorus. Similar to peeling back the layers of meaning behind each sonnet, underneath the superficiality of the individual, there was depth in the collective. I relinquished to vulnerability.
Therefore, when I performed at my first open mic, my voice did not waver. Afterwards, at the back of the dark cafe, I huddled together with my fellow writers. We were contrasting standing side by side. But together, we sobbed at rom-com endings, discussed free will, danced to booming music at 3 AM, wore combat boots and Converse high tops. Together, we savored the beauty of melanin, cherished gradual strength, basked in loud opinion and even louder delivery. Together, we captured shared experience and intertwined it heart and soul.
Only then did I truly understand dynamic storytelling. It was not a means for reconstruction, but for connection. A means to feel happier and sadder and more alive and real, ever so real, with each wistful short story, each melancholic poem.
My writing is alive.
*even so (10th paragraph)