I Thrive For It
I’ve been a young girl giving her baby up for adoption.
I’ve been a homeless man saving pennies in a styrofoam cup for a new pair of shoes. I’ve run away from home in the middle of the winter. I’ve served the whiskey to an alcoholic. I’ve been born a twin. I’ve committed suicide. The gears of my brain tell me not only what is hot and cold, what I’m looking at, when to walk, and when to turn that walk into a run, but they also do something not everyone’s mind is capable of.
To me, it’s more valuable than the ability to configure numbers to solve the equation for math homework, or what foot to put my shoe on. They are able to lower the curtain on reality, leaving me with one thing: pure imagination. For the past five years I have dedicated the creative tissues in my brain to smelling scents that aren’t actually around me, touching objects I don’t own, tasting things I never have, watching scenes play out that would never happen in my small and safe neighborhood, and hearing sounds that intrigue me so much, that sometimes I hear them echoing for days or weeks at a time. Once those five senses frame a still shot in my head, my brain then instructs me to pick up a pen and express it on paper. Those still shots become short scenes, which expand into experiences started and completed in a fourteen-line sonnet or one-thousand-word short stories.
The ability to become someone I will never be is why I love writing and pursue any opportunity I have to improve my skills. I’ve done so by constantly showing my work to my creative writing teacher and to larger groups of people, such as my creative writing class. I’ve submitted my work on the TeenInk magazine website to receive feedback from other teen writers. This past summer I attended the Juniper Institute for Young Writers at UMASS Amherst and indulged myself in the works of published authors who were also my teachers, learning from workshops and question and answer sessions with these authors. This fall I enrolled in another creative writing course, online, this time to receive constructive criticism from strangers and a teacher who doesn’t see me around school.
As dedicated as I am to writing poems and stories, I want to be able to take what I’ve learned and physically create the sound of pennies dropping into the styrofoam cup, or the puff of breath escaping a runaway in the middle of winter, and show it to an audience. I would like to begin to study Communications, and expand my skills to screenwriting and television production so that I can help actors bring the images in my head to life. I have a true passion for writing, am dedicated to all my ideas, and very motivated to create new ones. I believe a college environment is the right place for me to expand my imagination because it provides the opportunities to experiment, and for growth. Although my mind thrives on imagination, I hope that in my reality you will provide the path to reaching my goals.
