Being a girl & a poet

The two can not coexist

I started writing poetry when I was 12-years-old. Not in a way that would make me America’s next biggest child prodigy but in a way that made it evident I was spending too much time on Instagram. 

One poem went, “You’re in my thoughts / And not in my arms / And that I tell you, / Will never be enough.” I was in middle school writing that. Amidst my life of Disney Channel Original Movies and my daily school lunchables I somehow found the inspiration for poems about love, loss and abandonment. 

I occasionally think back to the writing I made then and cringe. Since returning to poetry I have found myself making a great effort to ensure my work sounds nothing like that. I can value its place in the evolution of my writing but boy, it was bad. 

A few weeks ago I was texting a new friend and I told her about my stint as a tortured poet in elementary school. I told her how embarrassing all of it was, for me to be writing about things that I so obviously hadn’t experienced. My only saving grace being that not many people saw it. She told me, “Well, that’s exactly what being 12 is like.” I didn’t expect that reaction but she’s right. 

What better encompasses the experience of being a young girl? To have an ocean inside of you that you desperately try to put into words, only to have other people take those words and say there is no water within you. 

The process of aging into womanhood is usually one laced with pain. As you come to develop your own relationship with your changing body, the world has already decided its feelings about it, it knows what it likes and doesn’t like. So as you’re changing you must also hack the hardwiring of your own body to ensure you grow only into the kind of woman you are being told you need to be. This, put simply, is hell. 

I’d look at my old poetry not realizing I was reading the work of a girl trying to explain the hell that it is to be a girl, and I was unable to give her grace for that. Where does that lead us? If those in our world who are in so much pain, who have such limited language to describe that pain, can not do so without being laughed at? 

What does it mean that when a girl says she’s hurting, we say she doesn’t know what hurt is?

My past self is my favorite poet. The way her work was unbridled and messy. The way you could see my adoration of my influences dripping off the pages. The way it was honest and few and far between. One day, in the name of healing, I purged my room of anything that held the memory of the past hurt version of myself. In that, I threw away an old poetry book. 

So much of my work I lost but it lives on in my memory. My old disjointed and hyperbolic poetry drives the way for me now. It leaves me now with the only thing I can think to do: continue to write, beautifully and poorly, but always truthfully.