I am soft, sensitive like my father, yet I am still tough, a strength I got from my mother. Sometimes I’m told that I’m the spitting image of my dad. I can’t pinpoint an exact feature that mirrors him, I never could, but it was my all-around appearance that reflected his. I see a lot of my mother in my eyes: a shape that wasn’t almond or round that was under a thick, low arched brow.
You know all that they say about opposites attracting each other? My parents started off that way. A trait that he missed was always something she had, and together they placed jigsaw pieces down on the table to complete the puzzle. But what happens when chemistry is thrown aside and puzzles are put away and you come to realize that all the science in the world couldn’t explain why you’d grown to hate everything you fell in love with.
They both had something that the other was missing. That missing piece is what drove them apart in the end. But then there’s me, my mother and my father’s daughter. I am the puzzle that they put together and I carry all of those traits with me.
What happens if I start to despise the person they made me into?
I always knew who I was. Sometimes, it feels like I’ve always been the same person. I was aware of the contradictions of my being, but I chose to ignore it—or at least half of it. Both of my parents have their fair share of admirable traits. My father is a charming man. I remember when he’d pick me up from my babysitter and we’d walk home together. He’d always stop to say hello to someone and ask them about their life. I remember wanting to be like that. The first hardworking person I ever met was my mother. She’d spend all day taking care of children, working until her bones ached and continuing on even after that. When you’re young, there are some things you just don’t realize, but I understood at six years old what a mother’s sacrifice was. I strived to be that kind of woman.
While I claimed the characteristics that I wanted to have, I denied the ones that I didn’t—even though they were already in me. My father is an emotionally driven man and I am the same way. He was the one who taught me that hearts were meant to be worn on your sleeve. I didn’t see the problem with being “so sensitive.” I saw it as being in tune with my own self, and I saw beauty in it. But there were days when he’d use those emotions to justify something that he’d clearly done wrong or avoid taking responsibility for his actions. It was easier for him to cry than apologize; I’d never seen something uglier.
At the same time, no one guards their heart as much as my mother does. Even after knowing her my whole life, I still try to pry in, get her to open up to me. Truth be told, she is a stubborn, reserved woman. It’s strange seeing the way I act around my parents. When I’m with my father, I am my mother blocking him out and building up a wall as he tries with his best efforts to tear it down. With my mother, I am my father desperately trying to get to her, to no avail.
I had this misconception that if I ignored the parts of myself that I didn’t like, they would automatically go away. I spent a long time lying about who I was for the sake of who I wanted to be perceived as. There’s nothing wrong with striving to improve yourself, but there is a problem when you neglect who you are. I wanted to be a kind person and I wanted to have a good heart, but in the process of being that person to everyone else, I constantly fought with myself. I wondered if this was what my parents went through: the moment where you’re fighting fire with ice and get nothing but burnt and frostbitten in the end.
Here’s the thing. I didn’t realize it gradually; instead, it all came crashing down like a tidal wave. I do not hate the person that I am. I couldn’t hate the person that I am. It’s true that I take after both parents, who are very different. But I am the piece they put together. No matter how odd it may seem, or how conflicting it may be, it’s just right. While I’m my mother and my father’s daughter, I will always be my own person before anything. I feel the most like myself when I openly embrace every part of who I am—the softness and the rough edges, the tranquility and the frustration, the loud and the quiet. What is the point of fighting with yourself when you’re on both sides?
My Un-Quiet Self
STACIE EVANS
Sabrina and I had a lot of ways to fill in Generation F . . . FIGHT, FORMIDABLE, FEAR, FOUND . . . and finally: FULL. I thought I was going to write about using my writing to fight. In the end, we both wrote about finding/coming to terms with our full selves.
I grew up mouse-quiet, mouse-meek, a go-along-to-get-along girl, a “good” girl, a seen-but-not-heard girl. I was silent when I should have spoken. This isn’t a thing to be proud of, and I’m not proud of it.
Writing ended my silence. I wrote things I didn’t say out loud, told stories I never told: the first time I was called a nigger, the night I was raped, the acceptance of my inability to have children. And when I wrote, I found I had more to say. And more . . . And more. Silence stopped being my default position.
I am anything but silent today. My written voice has been loud and sustained. The steady drumbeat of devaluation and death that has been the storyline of black and brown communities calls up my voice again and again and again.
I recently wrote a piece for a reading with the theme “Backslide.” I struggled with the theme at first, uncomfortable with the negative connotation that came to mind when I thought of the word. Desperate, I went to Google, hoping to discover an obscure meaning that would offer positive inspiration. I was surprised to find page after page of religious websites. I clicked on the first one, and what to my wondering eyes should appear but definitions of backsliding that resonated powerfully:
Revolt
Refuse to harken
Rebel
Suddenly, backsliding looked like something to which I could and should aspire. Biblically, of course, it’s all bad—backsliders were folks who “refused to harken” to religious rules. Okay, fine. But is that always necessarily bad? Questioning authority—speaking up instead of keeping silent—can be exactly the thing that saves your life.
I thought about quiet, go-along-to-get-along me, and all the ways the stress and damage of my silence has manifested in my health, in my bad relationships, in my fear of embracing my anger, and all the ways silence was a way of denying who I really was, of hiding.
But no more. I have become a proud backslider. I have—to paraphrase my favorite of the religious definitions—refused to harken and turned a backsliding shoulder and made my ears heavy that they should not hear. I have become my own authentic, un-quiet, angry, rebellious, refusing-to-harken self.
One. Hundred. Percent.
ISIS PITT
YEARS AS MENTEE: 1
GRADE: Senior
HIGH SCHOOL: The Preparatory Academy for Writers
BORN: Queens, NY
LIVES: Brooklyn, NY
MENTEE’S ANECDOTE: There was a time when I thought about quitting the program because I was overwhelmed. I met with Jessie and we talked it through. She made me feel really comfortable and did not judge me. She did not put any immediate pressure on me to figure things out. It was in that moment that I felt that I had made a friend.
JESSIE PASSANANTI
YEARS AS MENTOR: 1
OCCUPATION: Group Account Director, Griffin360
BORN: Fair Lawn, NJ
LIVES: New York, NY
MENTOR’S ANECDOTE: An evening at Bowery Poetry took our friendship to the next level. It was Isis’s first reading ever, and my first SLAM. We were spontaneously selected from the crowd to judge the night’s readers, which involved rating the performances on a whiteboard and holding it up for tally after each performance. It was exciting, invigorating, and a little nerve-racking, given the sudden responsibility. It brought us closer, not just as a mentee and mentor, but as two friends experiencing and interacting with the spoken word in the city.
Becoming Cinnamon
ISIS PITT
It’s normal to feel insecure throughout life. It becomes unhealthy when those feelings fester inside and influence your actions. Generation F is empowered to not
let their insecurities define them.
If I am to be honest
I am made of dishonesty,
as everything I am
everything I say
is to be taken with
a pinch of salt and a spoonful of sugar.
Salt.
I’ve made a habit of
presenting myself in a negative light
before someone gets the chance to;
before I can feel the
harsh glare of scrutiny.
I am a firm believer that
only I am allowed
to ruin myself.
I’ve made a habit of
exaggerating what I believe;
makes me unfavorable,
minimizes the qualities
I love about myself.
Sugar.
the sound of my voice
for strangers
in the hopes of
fitting into the stereotype
of what it means to be a woman,
how to shed my skin
in favor of another’s.
I find comfort
in becoming what
makes others happy.
I live for them
instead of myself.
Cinnamon.
but I’ve grown tired of the voice
that never seems to be satisfied
with the changes I make
to who I am
who makes me question
if I ever knew her in the first place.
The period of
hating myself
will not be the death of me,
it will merely be used as an example
of all the wrong ways
to treat a mind and body.
I am learning to accept
the girl whose reflection
stands before me in the mirror,
how to be patient with her thoughts,
feel at ease with her mannerisms.
She is whole on her own.
She does not need fine-tuning or tinkering
in the hopes of impressing strangers.
We meet again
JESSIE PASSANANTI
We are taught that loving ourselves is sinister. We are asked to change. Generation F is abolishing these expectations by loving themselves wholly, by living their own truths—even when it is difficult.
We meet again
You’ve changed,
I say to my soul
standing naked in the river.
What a wild me
to have escaped from my chest
to have planted her feet in the riverbed
with hands stretching up and up toward the sun
like a palm.
Am I allowed to love her?
From here
my heart slams harder
against the trunks of trees.
Doubt balances on the edge of a leaf, then falls.
I love her more than anything.
I am the banks that watch
water carve paths unto itself.
A river cannot flow without walls.
I lean in for a kiss,
sunlight dripping from our shoulders,
water surging past our feet.
STEPHANIE QUINTERO
YEARS AS MENTEE: 1
GRADE: Junior
HIGH SCHOOL: The Academy of American Studies
BORN: Queens, NY
LIVES: Queens, NY
MENTEE’S ANECDOTE: The day that we went to go get a bagel during one of our pair writing sessions, we talked about one of my poems together, and it was such a deep conversation that I really enjoyed. We were working on my poem called “Thought Bubbles of an Eight-Year-Old” and discussing some really strange, existential thoughts about dreams and being outside of your own body, all of which had arisen from working on it together.
JULIA LYNN RUBIN
YEARS AS MENTOR: 2
OCCUPATION: Author
BORN: Baltimore, MD
LIVES: Brooklyn, NY
PUBLICATIONS AND RECOGNITIONS: My debut YA novel, Burro Hills (Diversion Books, March 2018)
MENTOR’S ANECDOTE: One beautiful fall day, after getting a bagel together and discussing poetry, my mentee and I went searching for colorful chalk, and then walked to Washington Square Park. Together, we wrote one line each of one of her poems on the ground as onlookers walked by and observed and read, and it was one of the coolest things I have done.
August
STEPHANIE QUINTERO
This is a collection of poems that I wrote while I was in my first year of Girls Write Now. It speaks to the experiences of girls my age through feelings.
RAW AND NAKED
raw and naked.
imperfections are let loose
but he takes them all in with love and hunger.
her moans crack through walls
while the world is fast asleep.
their intimate moment not so intimate
anymore.
he finds pride in having her, and she is absolutely careless,
enjoying every second flirting with danger.
they share a connection that seems unbreakable
but is completely shattered under her eyes
when truth decides to spill over.
BRIGHT ROSE
I held on to a bright red
rose
the thorns made their way into
my veins
as I bleed for days and years
and somehow I was still alive
I removed the thorns with my teeth
while my teeth turned old
I was bruised
the kind of bruise that lasts
forever
LAYERS OF BEAUTY
you are covered in layers of beauty
beauty that shines bright enough to blind
weak eyes
layers of beauty that cover a scarred
canvas of skin
skin so scarred that you are confused
when you see your reflection
do the layers of beauty define you?
or do they speak out loud enough to show
the world what a great liar you are?
Your hands are on foreign skin
Your eyes are on unknown lips,
Your eyes are searching blindly
Do not question your mind
Darkness has washed over you
And now you find pleasure
Inflicting pain that multiplies
THE THOUGHT BUBBLES OF AN EIGHT-YEAR-OLD
The feeling of uncertainty was familiar
Because the questioning had begun from
Dominoes six feet tall in a dark place fell
Equally
One tumbling as the others continued
The godly figures of hands putting together
A human being
Made much more sense than two people
Coming together to create a child
The spirit of the physical body floats
But is it just the mind itself?
What is the point of living if we live to die?
PEN AND PAPER
Can descriptive words explain a feeling?
The pen maneuvers in a sensational way
As the fingers grip on to the pen tighter
The ink stays on the paper forever
A multitude of worlds will read this
And live in my world
Yet others will feel foreign
But one day
All worlds will collide
And that will be the end of all living.
ALLURE
Every word carved invisible scars
As time
Overly carved my skin
I became numb
A living body with an empty soul
Time reached out
Begging me to undress my confidence
Begging me to flavor self-love
On my tongue
Begging me to murder my insecurities
That were carved deep within me
With my hands.
THE MOON
As the sun falls asleep
Her true self awakens
Her skin is bare
Her emotions stripped raw
She is no longer proud
And no longer pretends
She is exposed.
High up,
I am caressed by confidence.
Growth lies under my feet
And dances its way up,
Through my curves.
The sun glows
On my vibrant caramel skin,
That belongs to the sand
On my fingertips.
My eyes glow
And the future awaits,
On the waves of the ocean.
Mother
JULIA LYNN RUBIN
This is a piece of flash fiction I wrote one morning after waking up from a very vivid dream. I edited this piece with my mentee, and together we puzzled over the ways in which it fit within the theme of Generation F.
The house was flooding. It was breaking open from the inside, water pooling at the edges, leaking into every nook and cranny, every crack and crevice. She’d tried to stop the water from seeping in through the pores of the walls and floors. They’d all tried paper towels and newspapers at first, when it was just leaks, just little dribbles of liquid. A broken pipe, perhaps. Something benign. Fixable. It was an old row house, stacked against its neighbors like a thick slice of deli meat, with its predictable design and stout, simple layout. It was at least fifty years old, if not older. Things happened. Especially in old houses. But as the hours wore on, the leaking got worse and worse, and they found themselves scrambling—all five of them, the mother, the father, the two sons, and the one young daughter—and the dog, of course, the dog was frightened, barking its head off and running around as if the world were on fire. And the mother found herself covering her face with her hands and murmuring and crying out, shuttling the dog and the children out onto the street, and it was then that they realized the entire street was flooded, all of the row houses cracking open like raw eggs, the water steadily rising under their feet. And they had to get out, they had to, because the floodwaters were drowning the house, and no matter how hard they tried they knew they couldn’t stop the water.