#thisibelieve

I took a creative writing class in my senior year of high school, before then I had a love for writing that nothing else in my life could match. I wrote about happy things and I wrote about things I found interesting and for the most part, I didn’t focus on the negative within my writing. A pen and paper was my safe place, and it wasn’t until my teacher sat us down and had us do daily writing workshops that were mostly on sad topics that were meant to open us up and get the creative juices flowing. Around this time I was really struggling with the relationship between my parents and with the stress of high school life in general, so writing sad stories wasn’t what I needed and it drove me away from something I loved so much.

I remember the first time I was given a real notebook to keep a journal in, I was only in middle school but from that point on every time I had a funky thought cross my mind I wrote it down on the first thing I could get my hands on whether that be actual paper or the notes app on my phone. I always considered myself to be a writer because I chose to write, it was as simple as that. The writing was an outlet, a place for anything that made me smile and I thought was interesting, not a place for me to express every dark thought or feeling that passed through my mind. Throughout my senior year, that was all that my teacher wanted though. She had this idea in her head that in order to be a good writer your writing needs to move its audience to tears. This changed the way I viewed writing for a very long time.

As a third-year English major and being relatively informed in regards to what makes a piece of writing good or not, I wish I could shake some sense into her. Through the negative lens that she is framing her creative writing lessons around, she is creating an association in her student's minds that links together being upset and writing. This is exactly what draws people away from writing and what made me stray away from the creative process for so many years. I was afraid it would bring me down.

 Be ready for what life is going to put you up against.

  Because in life there will be deaths and you have to learn to overcome them because you can’t let that pull you down. The one day that my belief was challenged was when my Grandma died. It was after her death when I put my belief into action. I lost my grandma to cancer it had spread from her ovaries to her stomach so when they tried to…

I Am From Poem

I Am From

Angela M.

  I am from dark brown eyes, from long brown curly hair and from bad tan lines

  I am from the smell of apple cinnamon

  I am from the giant palm tree from outside my house, from her strong roots

  I am from the laughing Buddha, from the need to rub his belly

  From Achoy and Mendoza,

  I am from the sunsets and from the bad acting of novelas

  From the “I love yous” and…

This I Believe Podcast

This I Believe

  The law of attraction can shift your entire life, only if you grasp how it works and absolutely believe in it. The law of attraction can essentially be interpreted as, “you attract what you think.” You target things you desire the most, rather than the stuff or baggage that you don’t care for. For instance, if things aren’t going great financially, you should focus on the…