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TATL Final Draft
Last updated at 5:26 pm UTC on 21 October 2006

My Special Place

    The earliest time I remember writing poetry was in the sixth grade. Actually I don’t really remember it at all, I just happened to come across an old journal of mine one day which had some poems dating back to my sixth grade year. I started writing poetry to help me deal with my own insecurities and emotions. Although I was fairly popular in the sixth grade, I was also very insecure. My grandmother, whom I loved very much and was quite close to, had passed away the year before. To make matters worse I was the one who found her. She was asleep on the sofa bed in the front room of our house one morning before school. I tried to wake her up that morning, but nothing seemed to work. My mother told me to let her sleep. I never imagined that I would not see her again until her funeral, but my grandmother’s funeral was the only time I saw her after that dreadful morning. I remember seeing my father cry at her funeral, which was the first time I ever remember seeing him cry. I used to think that it was in some way my fault that my grandmother was no longer with us. I thought that if I had been more persistent at waking her up that morning that she would have woken up and she would still be with us. I carried around this enormous guilt and pain for many years. Poetry later helped me to deal with all of these emotions by letting me get them all out on paper. Once I committed my feelings to paper they didn’t seem to be as overwhelming as they once were.
    Poetry allowed me to keep my grandmother alive in my heart while allowing me to deal with the pain and guilt that I had been carrying around. Previously I had tried to keep her with me by surrounding myself with things that reminded me of my grandmother. I remember shortly after she passed away, I frequently wore a particular pair of pants the color of wet cement that I had gotten on a shopping trip with her. They had bright purple trim along the waist. The left pocket had bright pink trim and the right pocket bright yellow. The pants were cropped in length. Wearing these pants did not really help me to keep her with me. I was not really dealing with the fact that she was gone and was not coming back; there was nothing I could do to change that. When I started the sixth grade I began to deal with her departure by writing my feelings into a journal, later on that year I began to write poetry to help me deal with my feelings. I discovered over time that healing is an individual process, one that can be done in many different ways. The way that worked for me happened to be in the form of writing poetry. Writing poetry was a very relaxing and somewhat meditative process for me. Somehow through poetry I had finally begun to deal with my grandmother’s death.
    Poetry continued to be my sanctuary when I embarked upon middle school. I would write whenever the mood struck me, whenever I found inspiration. I would write wherever I happened to be, even if it was at the lunch table or in class. That first year of middle school, I shared my poetry for the first time. I did this by giving my mother a card I had made her for Mother’s Day. Inside the card was a poem I had written in class as an assignment. It was a poem that told how I felt about my mother, how much I appreciated and admired her. My mother sent that poem in to a poetry contest without telling me. She didn’t want to tell me about the contest for fear that I would be discouraged if they didn’t like my poem. I only found out about the contest when one day in the mail I got a certificate on gold colored paper congratulating me on my poem being published. I was so excited. I remember thinking that some day I would be a great poet like Emily Dickenson. I felt at that age that I had found my calling, something that I was good at, something that was so special to me. Whenever inspiration struck I would begin to write my next masterpiece.
    In high school I continued to write poetry sporadically. By then I had found my own special place to write. I would sit out on the dock behind the house and look out onto the water. My mind would drift off as if into another world, a world that only I knew. I would often times go out there in order to find inspiration, to leave everything behind. I would take a notebook and pen with me and I would write, often times I would write poetry.
    In my junior year of high school I really got into reading poetry as well as writing. On a trip the band took to Atlanta that spring I bought a book of Emily Dickinson’s collected poems. I read the entire book from cover to cover before we got back. Her words spoke to me and inspired me. I wrote many poems at that time, poems about all the emotions I was experiencing.
    During my junior year I also finally got a chance to share my poetry with my English teacher. She loved poetry, and I trusted her and valued her opinion of my work. Our English project that year was to write several poems of our own, and then to pick out several poems written by some of the greatest poets which spoke to us, we then put them together in a book. We also had to research the poets whose works we decided to put into our books and write a short biography for each.
    I dedicated my book to my mother and gave it to her for Mother’s Day. The front cover of the book had scenic pictures from our vacation to North Carolina as well as pictures of my sister, some friends of ours, and myself pasted onto a piece of yellow construction paper. The cover was then laminated as well as another sheet of yellow construction paper for the back cover, and the book was later bound together. I was very proud of the poetry I had put into the book; and therefore, I was very flattered when my teacher, who loves poetry, asked if I would allow her to have a copy of one of the poems I had written for the book. That truly was a great compliment, one that has stayed with me always reminding me of one of my talents.
    For me, writing poetry became a way to express all of my emotions, especially those that I didn’t feel I could talk about. Poetry became my way of escaping the reality of my day to day life. I think that my poetry helped to keep me grounded when inside I often felt out of control. My poetry was something that I alone had control over. It was my way of turning all the things in my life that I thought were horrible into something beautiful, into something that I thought I alone could truly understand. I didn’t think that anyone else would ever understand what I was writing about and for that reason it took a long time to be able to share my poetry with others. I feared that no one would understand and that my work would be criticized and at the time I didn’t see the difference between criticizing my work and criticizing me.