I began writing rap lyrics in grade 8.
I was going through a really tough time with some personal things, and I missed a lot of school because of it. I lost a lot of friendships, gained a lot of enemies, and suddenly became immersed in the music of Eminem. Rap became an outlet of sorts, where I was able to express a lot of the pain I was feeling in an artistic manner, and get decent support because of it.
This continued through grade 9 and grade 10. Whenever I felt the need to vent my frustrations, I would either pick up a pen and paper, or open up a new notepad document on my computer.
I even got pretty good at it. I got to the point where I was mixing different rhymes inside a sentence or two, and they all had a really good flow to them. I viewed it as art and as expressionism. I viewed it as a way of getting people's attention. Sometimes that attention was good, and sometimes it was bad; but it didn't really matter to me, because all I wanted was the attention.
Those raps were very dark, because for years even before I left school I think I was in a fairly dark place. I really didn't like myself, and felt that I needed everyone's approval to be considered a worthy human-being.
So eventually the lyrics of my raps sort of came back to bite me in the butt, and the blatant "misinterpretation" of some of the lyrics was one of the driving forces in me leaving school, fueled by someone's extreme distaste towards me, but that's a totally different story.
When I left school in grade 11, I continued to write raps for about 3 or 4 months, until I got to the point where I felt I sort of plateaued in terms of my ability to express myself through them. The constant need for rhythm and rhyming sort of hindered my ability to truly express what I was feeling, so I turned to blogging.
I've been blogging for exactly 3 years now, albeit infrequently. As times got darker, my blogs became not just a place where I could write and then post those thoughts to the world, but where I could read over my own thoughts and see from a different view what I was going through. Reading my own pieces often brought me to tears, just seeing how dark of a place I was in, but it helped me better understand that place and has continually been a source for helping me appreciate how far I've come.
I've written a lot about mental health. I've typed the words "anxiety" and "depression" multiple times. I've written about what happened that caused me to leave school. I've written a letter to myself from 5 years ago, outlining some of the struggle I'd go through, but that I'd ultimately make it through it.
I've gotten a lot of feedback on my pieces. One blog I remember writing in particular got retweeted by a fairly big mental health advocate, and I remember getting probably a solid 30 @ replies from others who had struggled with anxiety as well. That's something that I'll never forget, because as much as I may write for myself, hearing other people take comfort in that someone else has gone through something means the world to me.
Writing is this beautiful, powerful thing that we've been given. To make up words, and now, in this day and age, to put them onto a large platform gives us this extraordinary amount of power.
Writing, when done right, is more than just words. It's a big "I'VE BEEN THERE" to people who struggle with things you're writing about. It's a big "CHECK THIS OUT, WE SHOULD PROBABLY CARE ABOUT THIS CAUSE" when writing about something people may not know about or fully understand. And in my opinion, being good at writing really only comes down to one thing: Humility.
You can use all of the big, eye grabbing words in the dictionary. You can spin a yarn for miles on words and majestic images that people ohh and aww at in their minds, but nothing will ever beat having the ability to say "This is who I am, these are my thoughts. I'm not perfect, but I'd like to share my opinions with you." Writing isn't about who's better at painting pictures with words, it's about how you can connect on an emotional and human level with the people reading what you wrote. Making those people feel what you felt; making people care about about the subject you wrote about, is exactly the power that we have with writing.
I'll end on this quote:
“There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.”- Ernest Hemingway.
