Poetry and Finding My Voice

I sat in my seventh grade English classroom frightened. I had always struggled with self-confidence and understanding who I was. I didn’t know how to tap into my personal voice. But on that day, everything changed.

My teacher, Ms. Merrifield, announced we would be starting a poetry unit and we would need to prepare presentations with our own poetry. This came as a shock to me as I’d struggled with presentations. But as we launched into poetry, things started to piece together. We started out with The Raven by Edgar Allen Poe and I fell in love. “Lenore, Lenore.”

I thought about what it would be like to live with Poe and write with him. Poe was the first poet I’d studied who had captured my fascination. Every day, after getting home from school, I would rush to my desk and read Poe for aan hour before starting homework. He gave me confidence, made me feel like I could be more, that I could discover my own voice and create my own styles in poetry. Little did I know that poetry would go on to shape my life and teach me many lessons. I’ll never forget the moment I first started writing, words flowing out of my fingers. There was no going back from that moment, Nevermore!

Poetry helped me become more vulnerable. As I wrote my first poems, I began to discover a personal voice and develop a relationship with it. I trusted it and started to believe in it. I realized the more real and raw I was, and the more I opened up, the more others opened up. After I recited my first poem at a school assembly, people came up to me to tell me about feelings they weren’t aware of before and the clarity that the poem gave them. Being vulnerable allowed me to dive into a deeper sense of compassion, that refused to be defined, that wasn’t just a mindset, but a new way of living and being human. I was able to bring this compassion into my leadership roles, which I have applied as Captain of Odin House. When I push myself for the team, it leads to a domino effect that creates a desire in others to contribute, which is how Odin won a charity sock competition after I hauled a bag with 400 socks.

I also learned the value of poetry in defending cultural and political diversity, both at home and internationally. Just as poetry offers different viewpoints and styles, so do societies have cultural and political variations. I have been able to apply this through my career in Model United Nations by reciting UN charters in the forms of poems and harnessing creative energy to convince countries to come to the negotiating table and compromise. The value of this diversity is best epitomized in my family’s journey. My dad lived in a refugee camp, his family escaping communist Burma, emigrating to Pakistan and eventually meeting my mom, a survivor of Bangladesh’s civil war.

Poetry has also allowed me to have a direct impact on other people’s lives, in particular my friend Selina. When I first met her and learned her story of abuse, I wanted to show her how to harness her personal voice. She felt that she was incapable of love but by pushing her out of her comfort zone and constantly supporting her, I got her to perform poetry with me and, as I saw her speak from her heart and heard her voice raging and full of confidence and self-belief, I broke down in tears. I realized that my true purpose was to be a giver and receiver of love.

I want to harness the transformative power of poetry for the benefit of the individual and the collective, for our small and big struggles. We are all poets. When’s the last time you wrote a poem?