Healing Words
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I beat computer keys with such force that they leave an everlasting impression. I beat on them to make words and I have devoted my life to words. I want to read the works of others, and write my own so that I may leave a small, possibly insignificant, mark on one person’s life. I believe in the power of words as a survival technique.

In high school, I was in the International Baccalaureate Program. My peers went out on weeknights and all weekend while I sat in my room and tried to cram every bit of available information into my already overcrowded head. The unquenched desire to go out and watch a movie on a school night, or waste an entire day baking cakes with my mom started to get me down. It put me in a dark place that I never thought I would escape from. As I continued to tumble down deeper into that hole of stress about the towering piles of work, I began to fear the neutral colored rooms where I would be given my final tests. I thought the mountainous stacks of subject material that I worked so hard to remember would fall over and get mixed up leading to my doom. To me, failure on these tests meant failure in life. I thought if I couldn’t pass these tests, I couldn’t do anything. I started to panic. I couldn’t dig myself out of this hole. The more I thought about everything I could mess up in my life, the more weight was thrown down the hole, landing on me. I thought about quitting. I thought about quitting school, cheerleading, IB, and sadly enough, I thought about quitting on life. As the pressure in school heightened, so did the pressure from that restricting hole. The dim light at the entrance to the hole flickered and went out when I realized I was too weak to change my outlook on life.

But, one day, I sat down and I wrote everything that I like about myself, and everything that my loved ones had said to encourage me. “You are beautiful, stop pushing yourself too hard, being bad at something is okay as long as you try.” Seeing those words laid out in front of me changed how I saw myself. The hole began to fill in underneath me with these words, and eventually I was freed. When the hole was gone, a mirror grew in its place. I recognized that day that by writing out emotions I could move them from my body to paper or a computer. Those words helped me to see the real me reflected once more. I could delete the words I wrote and watch as my negative feelings literally disappeared. In their place was a woman ready to go out and live life. I now write often, especially when I am upset. I believe that writing helped to save my life.

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Anika M