Crack!
The little girl who had just been playing with her toy looked down to find the purple zebra figurine she had just gotten for Christmas broken in half. Helpless.
Her schoolmates started to laugh, but the girl couldn’t figure out what they found funny.
Their laughs began to swallow her, weighing her down so much that she couldn’t breathe, and the people around her began to look ten feet tall.
She’d laughed before, of course, she had, but there was something different about this laugh.
They grinned as if they were at the zoo, and she stood in a cage while they looked at her through the bars, letting her embarrassment fuel their laughter.
From that day on, the little girl grew and grew and grew.
As she grew, that little girl learned more about the world.
She learned that the mitochondria are the powerhouse of a cell, y=mx+b and that people have opinions of her that hurt.
Yet, every day she yearned to hear these opinions, searching for answers in every furrowed brow, every smile, every head nod.
She hangs on to the words of people she barely knows and lets them harm her more than her own.
She could build mountains out of these words, worshiping them like gods.
It’s supposed to be this way, she tells herself, because the people around her have made it seem so,
And she allows herself to become embarrassed and ashamed because she’s taken up too much space, and in her head,
The world would be a better place if she were someplace else,
But the truth is—she is exactly where she’s meant to be, there’s nothing wrong with her, and she shouldn’t let the opinions of those
she wouldn’t take advice from sway her opinions of herself.
She’d speak for herself, and start to say no.
She’d learn that you’re never too old to grow,
And never too young to know
That the world has more in store for you
She did things that helped her figure out how to answer the question “Who are you?”
And now she sits down to write this poem, sharing the message that you all should too.
Now, this little girl may be fictional, but in a way, she represents us all.
She represents all the people who haven’t found themselves,
All the people of this generation and those who came before us who hold the words of others over their own,
All the people with a demon looming over their shoulders that they don’t want anyone else to see,
All of the kids with a broken zebra toy that picked it up and put it back together.