Hi Blog World,

After a year such as this one I find myself often sitting in the darkness of my room exchanging witty remarks with the clock sitting on my nightstand. In a mindset created only by many sleepless nights, I am starting to notice that I am missing the little pieces of confidence that come from knowing the pillars that make up the foundation of who you are. As the last twelve months have formed beautiful waves and sent them crashing down on the beach, the knowledge of my intrinsic self has been washed away. I do not mean the new parts of my identity that one is supposed to find in these crucial years of budding adulthood, but the intricate moments of self-formation that one falls back on when cleaning their slate of smudges. The more I sift through 19 years of torn memories and crinkled feelings, the more I realize that these pillars of self are not formed by the momentous achievements or the tear filled mistakes, but the banal intricacies of my everyday existence.  As I prepare to embark on the next step of my ever-changing path, I am working on rediscovering the commonplace afternoons that formed the basement level of my being. Today on the corner of rush-hour traffic and impromptu spoken poetry, one of those pillar-forming moments came flooding back to me. 

 Every morning my mother used to drop my sister and me off at school.  Although this is a seemingly mundane task, for my family it was about an hour and a half journey from stumbling out of the fount door to exchanging rushed kisses and “have a good day’s”.  See, education has always had the utmost importance in my household, which fostered a never-ending search for the perfect institution to support our individual and developing learning styles.  As my sister and I have always insisted on being polar opposites, our respective facilities for elementary education were on opposites sides of town.  It is not my specially selected education that now forms an important part of who I am, but what was done to pass time in those grueling daily car rides. To spare me from boredom, and herself from something far more agitating, my mother and I used to play the rhyme game. She would come up with a word, and I would come up with as many rhymes as I could…should, would, hood, stood. I believe that is was the continual playing of this game that developed my passion for the beauty that words can be crafted into. Also, not to mention, countless improvised raps ranging in topic from the United States Budget to Sunday morning’s laundry.

So, my dear bloggers, I will tuck that little piece of myself back into my memory knowing that it will always be there when the complexities of life wash parts of me away. Moral of the story? I guess in a climate where change is the most abundant element, never underestimate the miniscule details that  create who you are.