In sixth grade, our class had a show-and-tell every week,
and every week, a small handful of students were selected to participate in the next one.
As I was selected, anxiety kicked in.
I wasn't really proud of anything.
I didn't have anything extraordinary,
like an heirloom from my ancestors that was passed down to me
or an art piece that I made out of clay and acrylic paint.
Maybe they'd make an exception to the "no pets" rule for my cat,
but then I saw my name in the paper.
It was a poem I had submitted to Young Writers Project
and I didn't expect anything to come of it,
but something did. I was out there in dark ink, my thoughts immortalized.
I was eleven years old then, fragile, and I held up the flimsy paper proudly
for the whole class to see what I had created. My teacher beamed.
She had read my writing before, stories that faded with time, but this was stained.
My mother perfectly cut a square in the paper, careful not to clip the outer letters,
leaving space for the eye to pause before each line,
and she placed the clipping in a silver frame on the living room coffee table.
It was the first time I felt real pride in my writing.
I was eleven then and I am nineteen now. For eight years, I've grown.
Though my hair is a different color, different style, and my legs are longer,
I beam with pride at times, though words aren't perfect.
I am still my biggest critic, adding and deleting entire pages,
revising, rewriting, redrawing, redoing everything over and over.
But I am now majoring in English literature, looking to study creative writing,
and hoping to be a part of the influence words have on young people like myself.
This community has urged and inspired me to explore what that means to me.
For that, I remain loyal. I continue to scroll through, even when I don't feel young anymore.
In the younger writers, the ones who beam with pride, I see me,
and I beam too.