I am a poet. by Taycia

I am a poet. by Taycia - June 2021 Scholarship Essay

“I am a runner. Now, what are you?”
Before I give you my answer you must know some background first. I always hated writing. I hated public speaking. I hated reading, but in my first high school English class on the first day of school, I had to do all three while standing on a chair. I was petrified. I could feel the chair waiting to tumble out from under me. All of my peers' eyes burned holes into my fasade. I wanted to crumble into nothingness instead of reading what I had written minutes earlier. One thing was for certain, I already hated my English teacher for making me do this.
Fast forward to the present, I became the president of the debate team, president of the poetry club, and began taking college-level English classes. I was set on a completely different path than what I had planned for myself. One with lots of writing, speaking, and reading.
Throughout my Freshman year with Ms. Noyce, I was sent to the counselor's office more than once. Not for the reasons that most would assume but because I shared things happening in my life with the writing assignments she gave us. She had unlocked something inside me. I understood my writing didn’t have to be good, it didn’t have to be about anything specific. She had taught me that the best writing is not school assignments but something emotional, something that comes from the heart.
So I went to the counselor's office to talk about all the emotions I never had a voice to express. But after that, I kept expressing. I became a fountain that had no off switch. With the poetry she had shown to me and the resources of writing she gave me I found something deep inside me. A love for writing. A love for speaking my writing outside to the entire world. And finally a love for reading what others had done before me and striving to be better. All of this had come from Ms. Noyce’s teaching. It wasn’t the lessons but the way she gave subtle hints that she cared and gave me pushes forward in the right direction, always giving me words of encouragement.
I joined the debate team and loved oratory and prose and poetry. So many things that I never dreamed of doing, I was contributing to all in one year.
Ms. Noyce was the overseer of the Literary Magazine in our school and we had many conversations about what I could contribute. In the end, I shared three pieces of my writing with the magazine. She was the one who believed in me when I struggled to find my voice and when I started seeing success. From year to year, I got a new amazing English teacher. I began to love English more and more. The thought about founding a poetry club stuck in my mind until one year later I became the president and taught others my love of poetry. I won first place in multiple debate tournaments with my speech about poetry.
I had found my purpose. I had found something that made me happy and that I could teach others the same and create some sort of connection and change. A new path had opened for me. One of mystery and wonder but also of happiness and thoughtfulness. I am who I have become because of my first high school English teacher. I have gone down a whole new path and went out of my comfort zone because of her. She will forever be the reason I found poetry. She will be the reason for all my trophies in debate. She will be the reason for the entire existence of my writing.
I was changed because of Ms. Noyce and now I get to teach and guide others down that path as well. I will forever be grateful to that teacher who made me stand up on that chair in front of the whole class and destroyed my fasade because it made me feel something I never could have before.
“ I am a boxer, that's who I am, that's what I do.” That is how I answered her question at the time. But now, now I finally know how to answer this question.
“ I am a poet, a writer, it's who I am, that’s what I do.”