For me, writing has always been a way to respond to the world around me, a coping mechanism of sorts. When I see or hear something that leaves me wanting to say more- I write. When I am angry at my parents- I write, when I am lonely during my first few weeks in college- I write, and when I see injustice- I write. Every time I have something to say but don’t feel like I can say it aloud, I pick up a pencil or type on my keyboard everything that needs to be said, but couldn't. I write to make up for every time I say mid-conversation, “I don’t know how to explain it.”

         I will always remember the day Trump won the election. Trump’s winning marked the total destruction of everything I had come to know and value. To me, his winning signified the beginning of another era of open hatred, contention, fear, and pain. It happened during my senior year of high school, and I remember feeling like I could reach out and touch the confusion in the air as I walked through my school halls the next day. I also remember that when I got home, I felt the uncontrollable desire to write. I felt like I needed to get out my words before they came out in other forms like tears or shouting. I flipped open my laptop and wrote a whole page single-spaced of every thought that came to mind. At that moment, I realized that I write as a way to release my inner ideas. To keep myself from suffering silently.
       

         I use writing as a way to grapple with my identities, such as my blackness or my gender, and how these identities interact with the world around me. I write about these things because it is the only way I know how to make the thoughts in my head match what I want to put out into the world. When I felt alone in classrooms as the sole black person, I wrote. When I was feeling passionate about colorism, I created this entire project. I write to show people how I feel, in hopes that they can also feel how I feel; In essence, I write so that none of us will feel alone. Writing is a way for me to use my privilege as an upper-middle-class college student for good. I write for the voices of other people who look like me or have had experiences like me, but will never be heard. When I am not writing for class, I only write when I am passionate about an issue, so much so that I want my words to be preserved in writing for myself and others to see. 

         Words are like actors and sentences are like a stage. I write because I love to see my words perform. I like to see them turn from joyful to devastated and from jealous to proud. I like to see how many phrases I can think of to describe the way the day breaks or how depression sounds in the morning. While I mainly write to express something that I think is important for the world to know, I also write because I simply value the beauty in words. To read what I create and think- now, this is it. I write because I like my words to be a reflection of how the world is and what it could be. 

         At times, I write as if my life depends on it. Sometimes I feel like if I don’t figure out how to compose my words, exactly how I want to say them, then I am failing myself because then no one will truly understand what I want to say. When this happens, I am back mid-conversation again, scrambling to replace “I don’t know how to explain it” with even somewhat meaningful utterances. I write in pursuit of the perfect phrasing to convince someone that my feelings on an issue matter. This is how I eventually got into poetry. The beauty of words combined with a passion for social change. 

         I write poetry because it speaks for me. Poetry allows me to be creative in my writing, while also being persuasive. Poetry allows me to end lines without finishing them, or to swear mid-sentence. Poetry lets me write my words in the corners of the page

 

simply                                                                                                              because

 

 

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I feel                                                                                                                   like it.

 

Writing poetry lets me explore the medium of not only writing but truly performing my words. I can choreograph my words across the stage however I wish, so long as they stay in character. My poetry is like a reenactment, a social commentary on the world around me. A play full of emotion and passion. I write to tell people I’m not going to go, in fact, I’m going to put on a spectacular show.