#and ripped up strips of paper and wrote my poem on them
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i finished a project about this recently but the more i think about it and the more i live my life, the more i see life and love as a garden. its something you have to tend to. its something that isnāt always pretty. sometimes you have to dig into soil, you have to get your hands dirty. sometimes you have to fertilize the earth with manure. but youāll produce such a beautiful harvest by doing so.
and if your plants donāt grow despite your hard work, you pull them out and plant something new, that will flourish in your sunlight and soil composition and seasonal temperatures. you donāt keep watering dead plants.
#i wrote a whole poem about this topic#and then collected photos from iād taken from throughout my whole life#and photos of me as a baby#and a selfie of my parents#and i collaged it all#and then painted over it#and ripped up strips of paper and wrote my poem on them#and layered them on top#iām so so happy with how it turned out#iāve been trying to decide if i want to post it on tumblr#lmk if yall are interested i guess!#its a very personal project so idk if anyone here would care fkskfjdk
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Wonderwall
The following essay is a piece I wrote for Heartbroken ZineĀ for their Issue #2: Coming of Age. You can buy the issue on their site here.
Coming of age is a tricky thing to navigate. Iāve found that itās quite hard for me to pinpoint moments in my life where Iāve sensed growth or tangible change. Some of us have extraordinary experiences to look back on when we think of how much weāve grown over the years. But, for those of us who donāt, we have to sort through the boring database of life events thatās implanted in our heads.
Maybe we have something symbolic in our lives that has changed with the times and that represents our own personal change. Maybe itās something simple and obvious, like our wardrobe. Maybe itās something a bit harder to label as concrete evidence toward our coming of age, but is still representative of it, like our taste in music. Maybe itās something in between. For me, itās my bedroom wall.
When my younger sister moved into the guest room in our house, I was excited to finally have my own space. To finally be able to arrange the bed and furniture the way I wanted, and to finally decorate the wall the way I wanted. I never got around to the first thing (mainly because there was no particular way Iād wanted to arrange the bed and furniture), but I got to work quickly on the wall.
Soon enough, it was covered in Tiger Beat posters of One Direction and Ariana Grande. Heart and star wall stickers. Autographs of Disney World princesses like Tiana and Belle from our familyās last visit to the park, when I lost my autograph book and had to get their signatures on mailing address labels from the post office.
After I got a Teen Vogue subscription in middle school, this version of my wallāthis elementary-school-girl wall explosionāslowly but surely became undone. Down came the Jonas Brothers cutouts and the Justice catalogue pages of girls my age in shiny tracksuits and sequined graphic t-shirts. Up went cutouts of perfume samples and photos of models walking down catwalks and wearing Chanel in grassy fields. Some of my previous decorations, most notably a poster of Harry Styles, remained. That era wasnāt completely over yet; it was fading slowly and bleeding into this new era, this āmore sophisticatedā era that was consumed by an interest in fashion and modeling and journalism and magazines like Teen Vogue that introduced these things to me.


Two pictures of my wall from March 2018, via the camera app HUJI. These are the earliest photos of my wall that I have, and this is around the time I started to realize how significant my wall was in representing who I am.
In my later middle school years, as my relationships with my friends grew stronger, relics of our time together were hung up too. Photo booth strips from school dances and birthday parties, polaroids from concerts and after school excursions around downtown Philadelphia. They were hung side by side with the magazine photoshoots, my friends and I sticking out our tongues and throwing up peace signs among models and celebrities standing straight and looking serious.
Throughout high school, my wall grew more and more into a culmination of my interests and relationships. No longer just photos of me with friends or family, but also things that reminded me of the times Iād spent with them. There was a series of acrostic name poems my friends and I had written for each other on a piece of scrapbook paper. A poster advertising the 2016 Boston Calling festival that my friend and I stole from a bus stop because it featured some of our favorite artists. Handmade birthday cards with bold, cursive lettering. Stickers and signs we made for our schoolās Mock Election. Ticket stubs from movies weād seen together. A map of the London Underground that I used during a trip to England to visit family.
Blurry screenshot of my wall from a video, August 2019. Not as ~artsy~ as the photos from above, and here itās āmessinessā is much more evident. I like to think of its untidiness as a testament to its authenticity.
My evolving interests also shined through in different ways. No longer just pages Iād ripped out of magazines and plastered on the wall, but things that I collected and created because of these interests. A framed, blown-up cover of an issue of The Amazing Spider-Man. Harry Potter and Glossier postcards. An article I wrote for a journalism program about how the Internet has reinvented secondhand shopping. Even my love for magazines was immortalized through collages I made, featuring letters big and small, and miscellaneous cut-outs of floral fabrics and perfume bottles, accompanied by larger silhouettes of models or celebrities I liked. And in the corner, the smallest sliver of my younger self peeking through: a creased, 8 ½-by-11 poster of One Direction, circa 2012.

My wall in my dorm room, November 2020. Itās clearly much tidier than my bedroom wall back home, and it includes mainly pictures and postcards, as well as three collages from my original room.
Iām proud of my bedroom wall. Iāve used it as a backdrop for pictures of items I sold on Depop. Before I left for college, I would constantly rearrange it and take things down when they felt out of place or no longer significant to me. Iāve even tried to recreate something like it on a smaller scale in my dorm room. I think it captures perfectly who I am and how Iāve grown over the years. Every relic it features is from a moment I consider significant to my personal growth. Itās cluttered and messy, and therefore, itās the perfect model of my coming of age journey.
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Myself
So I found a poem I wrote when I was 7. Itās a little scary..
My eyes are like pingpong balls that have a blue circle thatās been drawn on. Then a black circleās been drawn on.
My eyebrows are like little strips of brown construction paper that is shaped like a rainbow. Eyebrows never come off unless you rip or snip them off.
My eyelashes are like my eyebrows except further apart. Some fall out.
My nose is like a tunnel that holes has been dug in.
My lips are like red and pink worms that kiss, laugh and talk. Sometimes they get too dry.
My ears are like circles that have been smushed a little. Some holes have been dug in my ears.
My brain is like worms gathering up inside my head to break a worm record.
My teeth are like white flat beads. Some fall out or get loose but new, better, and bigger ones get strung on again.
My neck is like a toilet roll except when it gets wet, itās not wrecked.
My belly button is like a button attached to my belly.
My fingers, arms, legs and toes are like sausages.
My bones are like white sticks. My blood is like yucky red juice and my poem is like a true story. My poem is great.
#i died of laughter#old poem#poetry#poets on tumblr#original poetry#spilled ink#spilled thoughts#alt lit#alt poetry#myself#age 7#writing#lit#writers on tumblr
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