I am afraid. Of everything.

Well, not quite everything. My head is a mess and I am constantly worrying. I cannot actually remember how long this has been going on, but it has been awhile. My best guess is since freshman year, when I started to feel overwhelmed.

I have been writing prose since third grade, but my love of poetry is a more recent development. Since the beginning of high school, I have used poetry as a way to organize my thoughts and feelings.

It is therapeutic for me and winds up helping with a few of the problems, the things that are not actually a big deal. I tend to obsess over every mistake I make, but I take that obsession and I put it on paper and suddenly it is not as bad as I thought.

However, I am still afraid of things, no matter if I write about it or not. Which is where the other half of Writer’s Day comes into play: sharing my writing.

The thought of baring my soul terrifies me, and yet I push myself to do it because I find it so scary. I do not encourage exposure therapy, but I practice it myself. It does not work to make me less afraid, but I always enjoy receiving feedback.

My writing is my child, my soul, something incredibly personal about my experiences or my thoughts or my feelings. If I choose to share, the hearer is honored, because I am trusting them with a part of me, a glimpse of the chaos. In return, I get critique on my style, but I also get something more important: a connection to my audience.

My piece is a spoken word poem, though it is not the one I had originally planned. I had a prose piece prepared, but it was never meant to be spoken. In Creative Writing, we started our poetry unit, and as I read through the poems I have posted on tumblr, I realized that a few of them looked strange in print because they were meant to be spoken.

I found my favorite, a motivational piece that starts with the line, “To all of you who hate yourself, I understand.” The piece is from a while ago, and it was about a friend, but as I rewrote it, it became increasingly personal. Gone was a poem simply about why you should love yourself; now, I had replaced it with the story of a girl who is learning to love herself and wants to help others do the same. My piece became a snapshot of who I am.

I am not the only one who needs that poem. When it was online, I received an anonymous message telling me the poem was the most beautiful thing they had ever read and that they had been going through a similar time and that they really appreciated it.

That is the beauty of sharing. It is important to me to share my experiences because I know I am not alone. Perhaps I can help someone who is going through the same troubles.

But I will not know until I open my mouth and speak.