My Ever-growing Monologue: Making Sense of Me

I am trying to draw the line between being a writer and being a narcissist.

There are mornings where I wake up and feel so far away from myself my body doesn’t even belong to me. My bed feels like a sinking hole, I wake up breathless haunted by my past and my fears masqueraded as dreams. I run to the bathroom first thing and stare at the mirror for what feels like forever, probably way too long for my own good. I stare at my reflection and sense that something bigger than myself is staring back. It is sort of an out-of-body experience, you realize that your body isn’t yours anymore. There is something distinct staring at that flesh and I can feel my thin soul craving to get out. Is my body the one trapping me and my potential? I feel like I am meant to be something bigger than flesh and bones.

People don’t understand the power I hold within me. I am trying to find the source of my strength, what makes me this self-assertive being. I excavate into the darkest most vulnerable parts of me that might have remnants of the strength I used to arrive here, at the golden gate. I search for the magnetic force that pulled me out of the water, the source that forced me to stop counting, the source that disassembled the crimson program. Nobody will ever understand my power, and I am certain about that because I don’t understand my power.

You know I rant and rant about my darkness and brokenness, but I don’t think anyone will ever get to face the part of me that has battle wounds of every confrontation I’ve had to stand up to. The closest thing I think I’ll ever get to opening up are these coded messages that only I get to decipher. I have become accustomed to this state of indifference, never knowing if tomorrow will be a wind or a war. I appreciate the underlying fear and uncertainty of everyday life, I have programmed myself in a way where my code runs in fears, triggers, and skills. This darkness that I continue to talk about has been provoked in ways and raised in others, I think I might have been the one to keep feeding it.

I had a dream, I was naive again. It was lovely.

I am starting to understand that my writing isn’t meant to be polished, incredible, intellectual or The New York Times best-selling anything. My writing is raw, unpolished, brutally honest, and I’d even dare say it’s broken. My writing is broken. I can’t think of something more beautiful than piecing together a narrative to the reader's desires, to the reader's affairs. My writing isn’t meant to be understood, it is meant to be crafted into your very own. If anything, I think I am the only one who knows what’s behind my words, how often I use the word liveliness because of my attachment to deadly living. How often I say I long for everything and everyone because longing is the only thing gluing me together. So yeah, I don’t expect to be Shakespeare or a best-selling author, but I hope my stream of thought envelops you in its incandescent waves and heals, awakens, or enlightens your soul or whatever we are made of. I promise to never betray the honesty behind each and every word I ever publish. My writing is broken and it has never been more beautiful.

I fear that without my darkness and my illness every scrap of me will go to waste. It’s idiotic but I truly believe they are meant to be part of me, even if that means I have to keep drowning repeatedly and collecting the weight of everything and everyone. I fear that in my darkness lies my substance. I fear I’ll find myself in an endless stream of desolation and purposelessness. This darkness is tattooed in me, it’s my essence, my script. It’s the nature of my being.

I have the urge to dial 911. There are those moments whenever you breathe in the smell of childhood meals or you replay a song you used to listen to starting your teenage years. That moment where you are taken back to a time when life didn’t feel so complex, so inhumane, I feel the inevitable urge to dial 911. I can’t think about a bigger emergency than the realization that I can’t stop time. I can’t be expected to stay in the moment, reminisce and go. When nostalgia rushes in I am frozen, a knot starts to grow in my throat, and my hands start sweating. I want to make myself so small I am able to get back into my mother's womb. I wish I could just go back and not take my childhood for granted. I need to dial 911, I can’t stop time.

I look up to the sky in search of the colors I can’t find within myself. Whenever there are no pigmented shades, whenever the sky turns gray I wonder if it carries that insatiable darkness I relate to. Could I be the one projecting it? Did I take your brightest colors away?

The world is loud and in words I found silence.

It’s nice to talk to someone from your past knowing that they don’t know you anymore. It’s the most beautiful feeling for someone from such a distant reality to acknowledge your change and embrace it without a single ounce of discomfort. I’ll eulogize the feeling of becoming strangers with someone you once held close, forever.

Therapy is scary not because I fear talking to a stranger because frankly, I am all for it, but because of the idea of being “okay”. What if someone actually manages to teach me that I am not meant to drown every day, that I can get myself out of the water if I want to?

I have a thing for the broken. I am so mesmerized by how carelessly you try to disguise your pain and the number of people you manage to fool. The way you so effortlessly give in to a world that doesn’t deserve you, the way you are a people pleaser but manage to break boundaries. I can see through you, I see the scattered pieces of your soul through your emerald eyes, I see crystal clear through your fainted woods. I am so astonished by the way you impact, the way you manage to dominate everything and everyone, but remain so broken. Your brokenness is beautiful and lord I wish I could hold it. You are a misfit and I am the outcast, I see myself in you. I see your rage, your fire, your stardom, your questions, and I think I might just have the answers.

We are made of the same substance of dreams, overachieving idiotic thinkers who can’t see straight.

I wish I didn’t have to keep proving myself. I wish every time the spotlight shines on me, they didn’t question how deserving I am of it. I wish people weren’t surprised when I achieve greatness. I yearn for people to see my potential. I long for them to see the part of me that isn’t reckless. I wish they wanted to see me succeed. I wish they didn’t say “Congratulations” if they were trying to spell “I hope it doesn’t last long”. I wish I couldn’t see through people, I wish their hypocrisy blinded me. I dream that someday they come to terms with my fire and don’t try to put it out.

Can you see us looking into the corners of ourselves trying to find something, anything that feels familiar? We used to stay up until 5 a.m talking about how you dreamt of saving lives and how often I didn’t know who I was. What happened to those 730 days? We were two lost souls trying to find purpose within each other, we so desperately tried to make sense of our unison. Our connection will remain forever unexplained, we might as well stop looking for answers.

“I think I might hate writing”, my subconscious says after way too many sober words. I have compromised myself and writing, but what if I actually do hate it? Writing scares me, it hurts me. When I start writing, words, thoughts, and ideas that I’ve never actually had the opportunity to give into arise. As a writer that desire to have the upper hand fuels me, the ability to paint my sky a different color. But what if I don’t have that ability? When I write my head goes into autopilot, I have no control over the things I decide to put down. I have no control. It is a reflex, I start pouring, barfing all these words that seem so foreign but feel way too familiar. Writing is another one of my contradictions, it’s where I feel safe the most but it also bends me until I break. I am no longer sure if writing is healing me or just throwing me way deeper into nothingness.

I think words make me fuller, I truly believe they fill me up, they define how much of me I own. When I decide to publish them, you own these words, they belong to you. You have access into the perplexity of my troubled world and that, it makes me as empty as one can be. Maybe one day I’ll find emptiness alluring, but for now… “I think I might hate writing.”

People think the worst feeling is grief… I beg to differ, the worst feeling is outgrowing someone or knowing they are outgrowing you. That moment when you know it’s about to end but you are not quite sure when yet. Conversations run dry and you no longer wish to be around. You think about saying something about it but fear it will shatter the fragile atmosphere you are both set in. When someone outgrows you though, that is the worst feeling. You know you aren’t a victim, you can’t blame them, you knew it was coming. There is nothing left for you to do but wait for a prolonged, painful goodbye.

You were a heatwave on my wildest winter.

It’s funny how you can become a prisoner of your own dreams. It’s been three days, and he is still here watching me, waiting for my voice to crack as I cry out for mercy. He is in every dream and for once it’s not romantic, it's the furthest thing from it.

I love the self-destructive nature of humanity. They give us a pack of smoke with the image of a poor man struggling to breathe, a tube on his throat, sorrow in his eyes. Somehow that never makes us stop, we will always take the smoke if it means we get to tune out reality for a while.

Maybe it’s because I know what’s behind my walls that I let the undeserving in. Maybe it’s because I am not blind to the other half of the shadow, the unsettling contrast. I let unworthiness take control of my every move. It’s because I know I am not better than anyone and somehow everyone is better than me. It’s because I know what happens at 2 a.m, how my mind searches for leverage inside my darkest sins. The feeling of being unworthy comes with a cascade of remorse for feeling this way. How ungrateful can one be?

It occurred to me that while all the people in my life were opening up and getting closer, raving about their triumphs and miseries I never dove into the perplexity of my own. How could I ever unleash my mind in such a casual fashion?

I can’t believe I live in a world in which I overthink if I should wear a skirt every time I step out of my home. For years, I’ve second-guessed my every move and for once I don’t know what to care about anymore. I feel like so many people are mad at me for being happy, it’s almost a superpower. I idolize myself so often I forget I have to look out for my well-being, I am an actual person, I am human. I forget that I am bound to make mistakes.

I forget that I can’t be it all, I forget that I won’t be it all.

Yesterday’s sight was manic. I stood at the mirror searching for bruises, cuts, bumps, searching for some sort of switch that would give me the answer to all my self-loathing and self-doubt, the absence of my control. I was searching for a device, an outlet that would prove to me that someone was in control of my body, of my decision-making, of my mind. Certainly, it must be impossible to be such a self-deprecating fool. After what felt like forever I stared into the dreariness reflected in my eyes, the daunting realization that there was no switch. It’s just me. I am a self-deprecating fool.

I want a love that shatters me, something that makes me feel so overwhelmed I forget what reality and reason mean. I don’t want a love story, I don’t. Isn’t the most intriguing part of love, heartbreak, and self-destruction?

I try to blacklist all the versions of myself that have led me into exile, but the more and more I select, the more I realize all the versions of me have some twisted relationship with isolation. A relationship with destructive secrecy. It is carving into my bones, twisting into my heart, pulling me apart, all I’ve ever known is being stripped away from my very own control.

I bet that not being your type meant I had ambition and dreams. People can’t seem to fit the idea of me and who I am together, it’s almost as if they knew two completely different people. It’s lovely, isn’t it? The picking up the pieces, figuring out you can make yourself whole again. I hate you because you've made blonde hair and blue eyes the symbol of treason. I wonder if there’ll be a chance of owning myself someday because right here, right now there are people who own more of me than I will ever belong to myself. My relationship with food is so toxic, it's the only thing I've never posted on social media. I call 2 a.m the grieving space, there is something that collectively pushes the memory of all the people I’ve lost into thin air and screams how I might just be the one behind it all. I have never felt more guilty about being alive than right now. Art is such a beautiful thing, what some would deem ridiculously idiotic and unnecessary might be the most gorgeous and astonishing thing to people who understand and resonate with it. I’ll always remember you as the one who taught me I didn’t have to be anything but myself to be loved. I feel sorry for those who weren’t told they could be anything and everything. I picked up: ballet, swimming, karate, orchestra, drums, cheer, soccer, business, crafts, photography, and finally writing. I did everything until I found the one thing I’ll spend forever with. The memory of you is much more romantic than you coming back.

You were deception, the way you stepped on my name, the way you walked out, the way you betrayed me, the way you said “sorry”, the way you didn’t mean it, the way I still loved you after the fall, the way I still do.

I don’t trust my intuition anymore, it led me here. There is an emptiness that comes along with achieving. The hopelessness, the end of the high, the questioning, the doubts. Sometimes I wish I’d never accomplished anything, I would be free. It wasn’t until I was mid-air, that I finally allowed myself to feel relief. I am here, I made it.

To you, the reader: I am sorry I am not better at this, I am sorry that I come here only when the wave hits, I am sorry I make myself a victim, I am sorry I am a narcissist, but I am not sorry for writing because it’s all I have.

-D

The Essay That Got Me Into NYU

NYU has been my dream school ever since I knew I wanted to become a writer. I started my college application the summer before my senior year began, I wrote four essays total and had an amazing teacher to help me through the process. I followed my own prompt instead of picking one of the Common App prompts, it was a risky move but I wanted my essay to tell my story and not spend 600 words trying to answer a question. I worked on my essay for five months total and it was a stressful process, but by the end of it I felt proud of my work, and thankfully it paid off! I am posting my essay in hopes that it helps someone who is about to apply to college.

Without further ado, here is my essay:

My Diary

Words locked and hidden away, secrets of shame and embarrassment: that is what diaries have traditionally signified to most people. Yet, growing up in Honduras my diary was my biggest treasure, my essence in every page, and every word my childhood self could come up with. I still remember the thrill of picking up my diary and that horrible green Crayola marker. With green ink, I wrote about princesses, pizza, and at some point, poems. Sharing my entries with my friends was the best part of my day; however, they refused to share theirs in return which left me curious and often upset. That was when I realized there was something that set my diary apart from the others: It wasn't secret.

To many, a diary is a private item - something forbidden - but to me, a diary was a story: one that my childhood self would love to share. I remember taking it to family gatherings as a 9-year-old, battling for the stage with my uncle and his Vicente Fernández karaoke. I would take that time to grab the mic and tell my aunts and cousins about my dreams, my stories, and the way I perceived the world. To me, a diary was a gateway to new concepts and incredible perspectives. I wondered why people chose to hide something so wonderful.

As I entered middle school my perspective of the world around me completely shifted, and that was when my real diary began. Living in Central America was a gift as a writer. The culture and its people were unique, as were the stories that surrounded me as a kid. Conversations at the dinner table opened my eyes to an uncomfortable reality. As I sat there listening to how our presidents were stealing money from healthcare funds and treating sick people with flour pills fabricated as a scam instead of real medicines, my perspective on things started to change. Everyday sightings like watching kids my age perform tricks at stoplights in order to survive inspired me to turn my diary into a blog— A Teenage Perspective. My voice needed to be heard. My entries became articles documenting the reality of my conservative nation, politics, and society.

Throughout high school, I became more aware of the lack of voices in my community. This made me realize how much I truly wanted to use my voice, although it would be harder than I’d anticipated. As third-world countries, we deal with misconceptions and stigmas all the time, but people fail to see the lack of freedom and media corruption that governs everyday life. For years Honduras has lived under a masqueraded dictatorship. Murders, attacks, and threats against human rights defenders and journalists are rampant and go largely unpunished. My community was facing conformism and fear, provoked by the sense of normalcy that corruption and violence held in the country. Growing up around these situations was the main reason I’ve always felt like my diary was worth being shared, hoping that anyone would find their voice through my own.

As I embarked on the challenge of using my voice, my community did not fail to impress me while they embraced what was perceived as an act of bravery. Writing my blog still gives me that same thrill I got by holding that awful Crayola marker, but the rush that gets my heart pumping is when I see my articles help in the slightest ways. I recently received a text message from a youth group called “Heroes 504” after I wrote an article on their attempts to change their town, which was struggling with severe poverty. The text read “Thank you for amplifying the voice of those of us who can’t be heard.” My diary was the beginning of a love story: my love for words, the world, and the stories my community makes me strong enough to tell.

Here are some tips I would suggest keeping in mind when writing your college essay:

DISCLAIMER: These are tips that worked for me and in no way am I suggesting this is what will get you into college. What worked for me may not work for you so don't run with it, do your research about the college you are planning to apply to and the essay writing process. Find what works for you.

- Set yourself apart from others: Talk about a situation that is unique to you, don't generalize your story. Try to fill your essay with vivid imagery about what your life has been like and how it has shaped you into the strong candidate you are.

-Paint the picture: The admissions committee doesn't know you or your story, they are reading thousands of files at a time. Try and elaborate your point concisely and concretely.

- Be yourself: You can craft a story, yes-but make sure it tells your story and there is truth behind it. Show the admissions committee who you are, and make them remember you. They want to get to know you in 600 words, make sure by the end of it they know you and your world.

- Don't try too hard: I wrote an essay that used words in the English language that I didn't even know existed, I tried to sound polished and refined. The essay you read has no special words and no out-of-the-ordinary metaphors. What ended up working for me was the rawest essay I wrote.

ps: HAVE FUN WITH IT. The admissions process is stressful but it can also be really fun and rewarding.

All the Contradictions of My Life

How come what makes me feel alive takes away my liveliness?

I love myself but I can’t stare at the mirror without wincing. I feel but have lost my senses. I am a good person with an evil gut. My heart beats but it stops every time grief comes around. I loathe social media yet I can't live without it. I feel sorry but won't say it. I want to be better but won’t change. My soul is heavy but feels so empty. I miss you but I don't want you back. I love putting my life in words but hate the feeling after I hit send. I speak too much but don’t say anything. In my lies there is truth. My hands touch but I can't feel anything. That night under blue lights when I told you to stay away, I needed you the most. I am fine until the interrogation is over. I love being recovered yet long for my illness. I hate being misjudged but show myself in the wrong light. I believe in myself but don't trust my intentions. I praise but doubt. I swallow my insecurities but spit them out to others. I want to fall in love but don’t trust anyone to catch me. I want to forget you but I hope you don’t forget me. I want to run away but tie myself to the ground. I want to scream but can only bring myself to whimper. I try to convince myself that I love him but I don’t even like him. I want to eat chocolate cake but keep counting my calories. I feel like I am a good person but hold so much unholiness inside. I trust that my friends know me well enough that they know that they don't know me. I wanted to be blonde but couldn't stand any sign of brightness in myself. I want to shine but spill water at my flame. I cry but my tears dry. I despise people but can’t stand watching them suffer. My legs walk but have no clue where they are heading to. I am writing this but my gut is screaming not to publish it. I want to live but can only manage to exist. I want to be different but compare myself to them. I want to tell them how much they hurt me but I stop myself. We did something bad but used "I love you" as an excuse. I have written 106 poems about you but won't let you read them. I can't wait for the future but miss the past. I run away from my past but put up my own stop signs. I hate my addiction but cry at the emptiness they leave me with when sober. We grow up but we grow apart. I get an A+ in every subject but how much do I really know? My best friend wasn't my best friend. I feel better but I can't stop turning the wrapper. I feel better but keep waiting for the avalanche. People die, people close to me die, and I feel guilty because I am alive. I read but can’t read you. I am excited about life but can’t stop thinking about death. I am loving but remain unlovable. My eyes project confidence but my mind says different. I tell you my secrets but I don't trust you to keep them. I convince myself the attacks stop but keep digging holes in my head. I tell myself this is what’s supposed to happen but warning signs are flashing, screaming that I am mistaken. I am strong but I am not strong enough. I am drowning but don't want to get out of the water.