Did 15

I’m slightly nervous about this post. Just a little.

If you refer back to my life goals, you’ll see that number 15 is “Write a poem that I actually feel I can deem somewhat good.”

Backstory: I’m horrible at poetry. Abysmal, in fact. In the past, I’ve tried to write it and it has just utterly failed. I would have something I wanted to write about somehow and make it look like beautiful writing.

Fact: I’m not very good at beautiful writing, either.

I can do funny writing, or witty writing. I can do intriguing writing and establish a character and a story. That’s how I’ve written three-and-counting novels and am able to make this blog somewhat interesting. (I hope.)

But I’m not good at beautiful writing. I’m just not. I can’t express my feelings through writing without just flat-out stating them. I am very good at that, too, by the way– I’ve been actively(and simultaneously) keeping several different types of journals for the past year and a half.

No, I express my feelings through music. That’s how I can do that. Just by doing away with words and just going for pure emotion.

But I have a friend who likes poetry, and he wrote me a poem for my birthday last August. It made me cry, not because it was beautiful writing, but because I could see the emotion through it. So, I thought, maybe there’s hope for me yet. I tried to write a poem about our friendship.

And failed.

I huffed. I even tried to write it minus the whole rhyming and rhythm crap and just tried to go for prose that was meant to be read like poetry, but then I would have to worry about making it beautiful again, so ultimately I was just frustrated and ended up tearing the page up.

I didn’t touch poetry again until Christmas, when I tried yet again to write a poem for him, and I wound up giving it to him(encased in a letter of my normal voice and words, of course) but I still think it was trite and stupid.

But then March 29th happened.

Now, I have this little book that I got for Christmas from Barnes and Noble. It’s called a Q&A, and it’s this small brown five-year journal that has a different question for every day, and gives you four lines to answer it. You go throughout the year and answer the question every day, and when you get to where you started, then you use the second set of lines it has for you, and then the third, fourth, and fifth.

I’ve only been using it since January 1st, but already I love going back and reading my answers. It has some fun questions like “What colors are you wearing?” or “What was the first thing you ate today?” as well as having some more profound ones like “What is your mission?” or “In three words, describe your spirituality.”

I adore this book. Really. I recommend it to anyone that enjoys– well, no, I just recommend it to everyone. The best part is going back after the five years are up and seeing how your answers evolved as time passed.

Anyway, my friend and I got this book at the same time, and started using it at the same time– right at the beginning of 2012. Our plan was to meet once a month after that and read through our answers for the past month, and see how our answers were different or the same and just have a little more insight into each other’s lives. We’ve done it three times so far, for January, February, and just yesterday(we were running late), March.

Now we’re getting to my actual point.

March was a fun month to exchange questions. We were both involved in a show and it was interesting to see how the other reacted to being at the same rehearsals and performances for so many hours and just to be able to see what we were thinking.

But, on March 29th, after the show was already over, the question was “Write a few lines from a song or poem that you identify with today.”

What I do is read my question for the next day the night before, and then think about it and what the answer will be all through that day, and answer it at night, when I write in all my other journals. So for that whole day, I was trying to think of a song or poem that I identified with.

The problem: I don’t listen to music. With words. I don’t listen to music much in general, but when I do it’s mainly classical. And the other problem: I don’t read poetry much either.

So I had a dilemma. How was I supposed to put a few lines down that I identified with when I didn’t even know anything to identify with? The few songs I did know weren’t anything near what I was feeling by the end of the day.

Now you see where I’m going with this. Yep, you got it– I decided to write a poem of my own. It expressed perfectly how I was feeling that day, and what was going on, and then that was that and I didn’t think anything of it.

It wasn’t until yesterday, when my friend and I were reading our answers to each other, that I read that to her and she just said “That’s beautiful.”

Needless to say, that was the first time anyone’s told me my writing was beautiful. I’ve heard “good,” “excellent,” “captivating,” “awesome,” “inspiring,” “a page-turner,” “enticing,” “interesting,” “intriguing,” and “wonderful,” (and I know all of these are very good compliments, but they’re all from people I know) but never “beautiful.”

I know my writing’s not beautiful. I don’t write it to be beautiful. I write it to be all of those other things up there.

So to hear that something I wrote, a poem, no less, was beautiful, made me rethink myself. I reread it later. And again. I memorized it. And I decided it wasn’t half-bad. It didn’t make me want to cringe. And my friend thought it was beautiful.

Therefore, 15, completed.

Here’s the poem. It’s very personal, and it reflects pretty much exactly how I was feeling about what was going on that day. It doesn’t make much sense unless you know me personally, and what I’ve been doing recently, but that’s okay.

Of agency, of choosing where I desire to go, 
Of who to be, or what to do, yet I just can’t say no.
He thinks he knows what’s best for me, and while that’s true, he might,
I want to make my own choices, with just God as my light.  

See you again next Sunday.