After my first experiences with poetry in school, the poems I wrote in my own journals suddenly started to feel self-absorbed. I was scared that my perspective was irrelevant. Eventually, I stopped reading and writing poetry altogether out of self-doubt. My professors whitewashed our school syllabus and as a result I grew up thinking that my experiences and feelings were not worth reading.

As an experiment please Google: greatest poets of all time. Count the women. Count the brown and black women.

It is difficult to describe how alienating it is to never fully see yourself represented within the books that you are assigned in school, or to appear as merely a mention, a side-note observed through the white male gaze. If you are not a cis-gender, heterosexual white man, it can feel as if your perspective is of no value. It can feel as if you are simply there to worship without question at the altar of white male supremacy.

Here’s what stops more people from writing than anything else: shame. That creeping, nagging sense of ‘should be,’ ‘should have been,’ and ‘if only I had…’ Shame lives in the body, it clenches our muscles when we sit at the keyboard, takes up valuable mental space with useless, repetitive conversations. Shame, and the resulting paralysis, are what happen when the whole world drills into you that you should be writing every day and you’re not.