Broken Beauty

Being a poet at an age as young as 11, some might say is impossible. When one thinks of poetry, it is thought-provoking, gut-wrenching, heart-breaking, and how can an 11 year old possibly have enough worldly experience to write anything so meaningful and deep?

Trauma. Probably some undiagnosed mental health concerns.

It's not as ugly as it sounds, or at least in my mind it doesn't. On one side is, in fact, the ugly- the days of bottling up so many painful feelings of sadness and hurt that I snapped over silly things like the anxiety of knowing I failed a math test I'd not yet received a grade on or spilling mac and cheese on the floor, all the times I couldn't get out of bed or brush my teeth and the itchy feeling of panic under my skin at seemingly all times.

At such a young age with no resources? I coped by focusing on upsides.

This is not to say I romanticized my own mental illness. They are ugly and tiresome and dangerous. I have managed to get through my hardest days by seeing the way the ugliness inside shapes the person outside, and I let it out by writing about it. This is not to say therapy does not work at all, or not to even say it does not work for me, because sometimes it has. However, writers write what they know, and I have known a lot of ugliness that some people don't often get an inside view of (which I am thankful for because some of these things I would not wish on many).

One of the first poems I ever wrote was a story of a broken butterfly, two friends walking side by side through a hellscape of castles in ruins, shattered windows and tattered flags swaying in a cold breeze, the sun blocked out by dark storm clouds as I picked up this butterfly, mindful of its torn wing, and set it free.

I walked through a horrific, dark kingdom of pain and suffering, found a beautiful thing within it, and rescued it, because it did not belong there.

In a sense, this poem had two sides- the me that could not find her way out of the hellscape that she called home, and the me that flew away. This poem was pivotal in the junior year of High School when I wrote it, amidst probably one of the worse points of my troublesome youth when I started to realize that people did not just live like that, that I was not the bad person I told myself I was and that good people did not deserve things like I'd experienced.

In another sense, the piece focused on finding a beautiful thing in a broken world, something I have always struggled to maintain belief in as an anxiety-ridden pessimist. This ideaology is one of the few shining moments of optimism I display. Yes, I have seen a lot of hardship in such a short life. However, it has made me ultimately very kind. I see the world in a very unique way, and I truly do find magnificence in everything I see, especially because I am so aware of the bad.

The butterfly is balance. It is broken, but it is beautiful. Ultimately, the world is such. Life is such. We can change it, we can let that butterfly fly and we can fly off and do amazing things, but there are still negatives in the world. There is still crime, there are still bad people, there are still disasters of the natural sense that we cannot control, there is still hardship and pain. But that does not mean we cannot fly into the world out of the dark and make it magnificent.

In a world of broken castles, shattered glass and ugly demons, be a butterfly.