Words and the World

Words and the World

I love to write. I was eleven when I read my first book, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (beginnings bore me so I excluded the first book and randomly picked out the first one to read from the collection). I finished the book - amazed and enthralled by everything about it. It was the first of the many kinds of happiness in life I came to know. I continued to feed myself with joy, of knowledge. And with each book I put down was a love for the wit and power of its words: their ways of capturing the essence of a person, telling tales that stir our emotions and surpassing time. Words are marvelous.

So, I started to write; or rather, tried. I was almost twelve and my poems were mostly about my favorite food and Mother Nature. My mother enrolled me in a free workshop for creative writing conducted by our school. I was bad at it; really bad. But I did not care. That's the thing. I would hate the instructor for giving me remarks like 'scratch this out' or 'your point is not clear.' Yet somehow, those words were not the exact ones that stuck in my head. I will fix this because at the end of this workshop, I want to be proud of something. I want to be proud of myself. And this translation seemed to work for me. Later that year, I became a columnist in the school paper. I was appointed by none other than the same person who told me I wasn't making my point clear.

I entered high school with an adequate amount of confidence - enough to land me in an essay writing competition. I lost. One, the essay contest, and two, the trust I had in myself. Even without anyone telling me I should scratch a part of my work out, it was a harder fall than the last. I did not know how to deal with it. My mind was numb and heavy like a limb is after sleeping in a bad position. I needed to cope. I turned to music, to books, to artists who spoke of the same melancholia my system had acquired from an unfortunate turn of events. When I was well, well enough to stand back up, I regretted it. It was an amazing, different sight, sure. But it was a frightening one as well. There are people who are so good in what they do. There are people who have spent years - more years than I have - perfecting their craft. The immensity of their talents were like the high ocean waves crashing to the shore; mine couldn't even begin to rise. I started to worry and it ate me up. There were walls, barricades that marked the limits of my strength. I ceased to play with words. Maybe I was good, just not good enough. I let go of my pen and did not pick it up for six miserable months. The notion of changing the world with the written word became a ridiculous idea.

My fascination with writing, though, never ended. I was still admiring the art from afar, appreciating its power to affect people, to change lives. It was just the dream of me being involved in