Thirty Days of Inspiration ♥: Day Four: An Open Letter to the DMV

To Whom It May Concern:

I must say, of all the horrible things I have ever done in my life, the road rules exam was the absolute worst. Now, don't get me wrong, I love using driversed.com. Using the tests here? Not so much.

Can I please ask you, why, after paying a whopping thirty dollars to take the test online, why I would I be kicked off my exam, that, mind you, I PAID, capital PAID, for and was not allowed the opportunity to even COMPLETE? Why, tell me, why? I would also love to know, why me and dear friend both took the test online just now, were both kicked off (me at thirteen questions, her at twenty) when we both forgot to answer the right answer on our own information that has nothing to do with driving. For questions that should not even be asked. For example, I was asked how much I weighed. I, of course, forgot how much I weighed since I applied a few months ago. But, no.

I inputted the wrong weight. I’m sorry that I am too fat for your exam. Society is clearly coming to an end.

And to allow you to understand the anguish I felt when I was kicked off of the exam (THAT I PAID FOR), I will describe the scene.

Exam: Please input your weight. [___________]

Me: What the hell did I put then? When was the last time I weighed myself?

(enters random number and clicks next)

Exam: F*ck you.

(Exam clicks out)

Me: …......

(beat)

What. The. Hell. MY MONEY!

This is the beginning of a long life struggle with the DMV, I see.

I hate you, DMV.

A Poem

Refugees

They stood tall against the bush

because the forest was too thick to see through.

Watering cans filled with good intentions,

they whispered, “Don’t depend on the mountains

to sing answers disguised as hymns.”

They knew better than to take the middle path.

“Could you say the birds led you the wrong way?”

The youngest stood apart and wrote in the dirt:

“Would you skim the borders of the other

direction, to taste the lies the rivers weep?”

Would you see that gold has made you a fool?

Would you test the cloud’s path against the horizon?

If you met a boy who wrote

his dreams in the language of the stars,

would you press your fingers

that were stained with the blood

of wit against his temples?

Or would you ask him to sit?

And see how he would taste

the difference in the mountain’s tears?

Thirty Days of Inspiration ♥: Day Three: Rejection

So, being an artist (specifically, a writer), you find that more times than not, you will have to deal with rejection.

And I'm writing this post to shed some light on why rejection inspires me.

Now, I'm going to put it out there, I was rejected from a major arts organization, one that-for some reason, in the back of my mind-I was nervous about, and felt insecure. I sent in all of my non-fiction works that, in my opinion, displayed some of the most painful and heartfelt moments in my young life as of now.

So, the shock of recieving a letter that I started screaming and jumping when I saw, and finding it as a whopping rejection of all three pieces..It put me in a bad place.

Before you jump to conclusions, I didn't resort to extreme measures and hurt myself or burn my portfolio or something. I did something worse.

I doubted myself.

I sat in my room for hours, poring over the fact that someone rejected what I plainly considered my heart and soul. It was writing that I cried over as I wrote. It was writing that forced me to go back and retrace the places where I had to grow up, where childhood just kind of stopped for me and would never be the same.

And it was rejected.

Now, this isn't the first time I've been rejected. But to be rejected from a place I so badly wanted to win made me realize a few things.

Midst my tears and heartbreak and self doubt, I had a sort of revelation. And it's something I want everyone to understand.

First, I had to realize that the reason we don't get things, or we are rejected, is plainly to see whether or not we have the strength to accept the challenge of accepting ourselves. I realized, little by little, that my self worth or my talent should not be measured on such subjective terms. I, we, all of us who have ever been rejected need to see that at the end of the day, we are the only people whose products matter most to them.

There is a power in everything we say or do. And I intended to use it.

That weekend, I sent out almost every piece of unpublished work to any literary magazine I could find.

Now, I want you to try it too. Every single time you have ever been rejected, don't take it as an insult. Take it as a challenge to prove them wrong.

And prove yourself right.

xoxo

Dalia

Thirty Days of Inspiration ♥: Day Two: Immeasurable Strength

What really inspired me today was the immeasurable strength some people possess in this world, despite how many hardships are thrown at them. I was reading this article on Yahoo! yesterday about the Clark brothers and their rare disease that forces their bodies to regress over a period of time. They grew up as normal boys, responsible adults but at some point in their 50's and 40's both brothers began to, as Yahoo! dubbed it, age backward.

It was easy for me to imagine how rough it must be to raise your boys all over again and I commend their parents so much for being able to go through something they never, ever imagined happening to them.

I'm going to keep this post short because I feel like this is almost something that needs no explaining.

Please remember that out there, no matter how seemingly bad our lives are, there are people dealing with harder.

Thirty Days of Inspiration ♥: Day One: Writing

I haven't posted much about it, but I felt like it was time to let you all, whoever reads this, know this.

I am a writer.

One of the biggest influences in my life, writing has stuck with me since the beginning. I can actually tell you that I started out hating writing. I hated writing essays, I wasn't good at writing stories, and I just felt like it was a waste of my time.

But I loved reading.

Reading was a way for my little mind to explore the different aspects of the world and taste the flavors in the world that were a little out of my reach. I've read everything from Because of Winn-Dixie to Nancy Drew to literary classics like Wuthering Heights (which I could not finish because, despite the beauty of it, eighth graders are not meant  to be reading a book with words they had to write down, look up, and re-read). The point I'm trying to make is that words are what inspire me. They are also, now that I've been introduced to Creative Writing, the outlet for my inspiration.

Writing has become such a vital point in my life that I just don't know where I would be without today (cliché). I was always one of the most brilliant academic people in my learning career as of now, with dreams of six figure jobs and being a jackass-kicking professional, up until I was-and this is where ish gets cray-chosen to be the speaker of the words. Sort of like Speaker of the Dead except less creepy. Once I fell head over heels in love with writing (kudos to Speak by Laurie Halse Anderson for inspiring me to write my first poem), I just knew it was what I wanted to do, what I will be forced to do for the rest of my life because once you go black you can't go back, know what I sayin'?

But, yeah. Writing is the purest form of love and expression for me and so that is why I thought it fitting to make my first post about what inspires me to be writing.