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For the Passion of Poetry

my journey to becoming a writer

By Jason WhitePublished 3 years ago 9 min read
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When I was fourteen, I fell into poetry through my grade nine English teacher. Closer to the beginning of the school year we had a poetry unit, and the assignment was to create and submit at least ten poems. My first inclination was to take a zero on that assignment. I had written some things, but I thought they wouldn’t be good enough to share. This mindset of not being good enough was cultivated through the daily pain I felt in my home. The pain I did everything possible to hide from the outside world. I completed my assignment with fifteen poems that I wrote over a three-day period. On the day when I was to hand it in, I left it in my bag and told my teacher it wasn’t done yet. At the end of that period, she asked me to stay behind for a moment. She confronted me by saying she doesn’t buy my story, that she thinks I am a naturally talented writer and was looking forward to reading what I had to say. I am still not certain what changed my mind, but I pulled my work out of my bag and handed it to her. To which she simply said, “thank-you, see you tomorrow”. I left her class still afraid of what she would think of what I wrote. To this day, I still am not even sure what was on those pages. I went to class the next day, then the next, then the next without any word on my assignment. The anxiety was growing to an intolerable level. The day after she began the class by handing out our poetry assignment, I flipped my work over nearly ready to pass out because I was holding my breath and saw A+ You Have an Old Soul. I didn’t even know what that meant, but it must have been good because I got an A+. Again, she asked to see me for a moment after class and said that she cried while reading my work and asked me if I knew who Leonard Cohen was. I said yes, of course. He was one of my favorite musicians. Then she told me I write like him. I told her I was surprised that I got such a good mark because I knew nothing about poetry and have never read a poem in my life. She just smiled at me and said I earned it. I learned two things that day:

1. Pain is what sculpts a poet.

2. I may not have ever read poetry, but I listened to poets on a daily basis.

I went home that day and shared my happiness with my mother. Her response was typical; “that’s nice”. I was used to this kind of thing. My mom recognized that I was naturally great at math and had been pushing me into the field of accounting. I now understand from her perspective, accountants earn a good living and arts have such a high failure rate (especially in 1991 when self-publishing wasn’t a thing). Three things happened that day:

1. A complete stranger recognized who I truly was meant to be.

2. My mother could not recognize who I was truly meant to be.

3. I gave up on myself before I even started.

At the end of that school year, my teacher gave me a book of poetry and wrote in it, “keep writing”. I didn’t have the nerve to tell her I had given up on writing. I wrote a few things in that year, but not a great deal. Instead, I worked toward becoming an accountant.

As I progressed through high school, I wrote periodically but didn’t share it with anybody. I would go through my days where I could write five or ten poems and then nothing for days or weeks, or even months. After all, that wasn’t my dream. My dream was to become an accountant. Only if someone had the courage to tell me I wasn’t being true to myself. My goal of becoming an accountant and not wanting to fail or disappoint my mother was so strong that I became incapable of coping with the reality that it wasn’t making me happy. And I denied it for so long that writing made me happy that I felt sick when I thought of doing it. Nothing in my life made sense. I was fatherless, I was following in his criminal footsteps, I had massive anger issues and was abusing drugs and alcohol, and school was such a distant memory. By the time I was fifteen I was moving out and into my grandfather’s house. I finally felt the pressure of being someone else’s version of me disappearing. I began going to school again, distancing myself from the street life I grew up with and, most importantly, writing more. I was happy and fucking blind.

My grandfather was happy to have me there. His wife on the other hand wasn’t. It only took her four months to convince me and my grandfather that it was best I move into my own place. She convinced me that they, particularly her, would check up on me frequently. At first, I believed her; she helped me get everything I needed to be self-sufficient, she helped me apply for social assistance, and she helped me get an apartment. Within two weeks I realized nobody was coming to visit me, I was alone. And I that welfare wasn’t enough to pay the bills. I quit going to school again and gave up on what I thought were my dreams, again. After all, playing it safe was what I was taught. It takes absolute fucking courage to go against everything that is pushing against you to find yourself and your dreams. Courage is something I did not have. What did it look like to play it safe? It looked like going back to stealing and drug dealing. And, with that life comes pain and a lot of it. Except for this time, I was making more money than I could ever have imagined. After all, I didn’t have an adult looking over me. At this point, I was getting angrier and feeling emptier daily. I blamed it on everybody else around me but now know it was because I wasn’t being true to myself. Shortly after my sixteenth birthday, I was being arrested for nearly killing someone who I was told assaulted my younger sister. I spent the next three years of my life in incarceration.

It was this time that I had to find my strength, to become courageous enough to follow my own path. Instead, I gave in more to safety and I hopped back onto the path of becoming an accountant. Over these next three years I wrote, sometimes. But the longer I denied my true self the harder it became to acknowledge that is who I am. I was released one month early. The judge and crown were pleased that I had been working toward a career as an accountant; one more nail in the coffin of who I was meant to be. I spent the next few years bouncing around in life until I met the woman who changed my life. That was when I decided I was going back to school so I could become an accountant. She was happy, her parents were happy, my mom was happy. Everybody was happy, except me. But I was good at hiding my pain. Until I wasn’t.

Eventually, I was done with school and got a great job. Well, if being an accountant was what I wanted to do. I put all the effort into my job and then began to sabotage it, and it wasn’t even a conscientious decision. Over the next fifteen years my life became a broken record; upturn, self-sabotage, fall. But it wasn’t only in my work life. It was my life story. I attempted to assert myself as a writer, a few times over this part of my life. But each time I didn’t have the courage to do it. I didn’t want to disappoint my partner and I couldn’t imagine what it looked like if our relationship failed because I was filling my cup. So, I carried on becoming less of who I was meant to be and more of who someone else wanted me to be. And life sucked for everybody. I wasn’t only failing at everything; I was ruining people’s lives, people who I loved deeply and couldn’t imagine hurting. Finally, in 2014 when I was 36 years old, my partner developed the courage to do what neither of us could to this point. She left me.

Naturally, I didn’t know who the fuck I was. This is problematic when the person you lived to please is no longer there and literally only speaks to you because you have children. Additionally, the entire shit show that was my reality was now being put on the table for everyone to take in. I had to face that the family I would have died for was no longer together. I also had to face the fact that they weren’t together because of me. I was so torn apart that I didn’t know where to start to rebuild myself. So, I turned to something that gave me great comfort and was easy to me, poetry and writing. But, like the rest of my life, I didn’t believe enough in myself to say I was a writer. Finally, in 2018 my oldest child suggested we put out a poetry book. At the time I was working on a project that brought twelve artists together where the artists would use the previous artists' piece to inspire their own. So, I suggested that is what we do and we wouldn’t identify who authored which piece. In the end, we had a really amazing collection of poetry that worked well together. We both realized that writing is our passion so that is what we called it. Passion can be found on Amazon.

I can proudly say that I am now a writer. I am becoming the truest version of myself. And, since our world has changed on account of Covid-19, I have had the opportunity to really go hard on my passion. I have to say though, with all honesty, if it weren’t for the pain I felt through most of my life I don’t think I would be the writer I am today. Even the loveliest poetry I write is greater because of the pain I experienced through most of my life.

inspirational
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About the Creator

Jason White

Jason White is a father, a grandfather, knowledge seeker and sharer. Jason is the owner of Growth Positive Consulting where he puts his fundraising and management skills to great use. He is a writer, a woodworker, and a philanthropist.

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