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Aella
@Aella_Girl
When I was ~9, my mom put me in a group-homeschool class for poetry writing. I remember they gave us the instruction to write metaphors, how one thing was like another random thing. I thought this was weird, but I did it - I picked random things that had vague traits 1/
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Aella
@Aella_Girl
in common and wrote a series of lines that said "x is like y" in flowery language. I remember thinking it was stupid, or trivial? Like, it was extremely easy to do and I didn't get why they wanted me to do it. It wasn't meaningful or moving for me, I wasn't interested in it. 2/
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Aella
@Aella_Girl
But after the class was over they pulled me aside and said I was one of the best and they wanted to move me to advanced class, and I remember being so confused. I believed all the other kids must have done poorly because they were actually trying to write fun, meaningful things 3
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Aella
@Aella_Girl
and didn't have the heart to follow the shitty boring rules they wanted us to. In hindsight, this is really interesting to me. As a child, pulling creative metaphors was super easy, but also boring and meaningless, and adults praised me for it because *they* valued it, 4/
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Aella
@Aella_Girl
and didn't care about whether I enjoyed doing it or if that's the kind of poetry I found really engaging. It's also interesting how meaningless the metaphors were when I was a kid. Why were they so trivial for me, but so important to adults? 5/5
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Aella
@Aella_Girl
Replying to
@mattxcurtis
no, they're meaningful because they feel like they're guiding me into something surprising, and there's a sense of deep satisfaction when identifying a new and cool way things are connected. But that didn't seem to exist for me as a child with poetry I guess?
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Aella
@Aella_Girl
Replying to
@FunkyDuffy
i mean tbf i still think other kids must have been good at it too, it's just i was uniquely good at fully committing to rules and context that were set for me, and the other kids had a "they can't possibly mean we're 'actually' supposed to do the not-fun thing"
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sumanth
@reckoner165
Replying to
@Aella_Girl
Relatable. I suspect that being good/"good" at something is often wholly unrelated to enjoying it. It's possible to do both, but that isn't quite the default
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Andrew Rettek
@oscredwin
Replying to
@Aella_Girl
I had a very similar experience at that age. I ended up avoiding poetry after that since it never really worked for me and other people saying I'm good when I can't tell felt like it would disappear as soon as I was counting on it.
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Sig H.
@IAmSergeyR
Replying to
@Aella_Girl
I can certainly relate to what you are saying. As a child. I immediately got the grasp of drawing at abstract. In spite of not even being able to draw a smiley face. I still refuse to draw in any other way. Unless, I am asked for a signature. Then I draw a horse. As I am artistic
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Bella Rudd
@BellaRudd1
Replying to
@Aella_Girl
Finding metaphors was easy for me too, but finding ones that worked together to convey an image or message was a greater challenge. I actually found more meaning in exploring the structure, rhyme, and meter of poems. it felt like cleverly solving a puzzle.
Arkhan
@Arkhan_XTDL
Replying to
@Aella_Girl
This story is basically my life. I do stuff trivially and I assume terribly. People think I'm a genius and expect the world from me. I think they're insane and don't trust their praise of the random bullshit I created. That's just....my whole existence.
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