By TyShawnna S. Williams for Insidemyweedbag.online

I saw this question posed as a daily prompt and thought it would be amazing to write about, especially since this is a relevant topic my therapist and I have been discussing at length. Recently, I’ve been putting myself out there along with my writing, sharing my thoughts and stories with others in hopes of connecting on a deeper level. During one of our sessions, she asked me who was the person that made me realize my writing was good, thus inspiring me to want to be a writer. After reflecting on this, I’d have to say that was Ms. Cassandra Broadus, my 9th grade Creative Writing class teacher. Her passion for storytelling and her ability to draw out the creativity in her students made a profound impact on me. She encouraged us to explore our imaginations and to express ourselves freely, fostering a nurturing environment that allowed my talents to flourish. Every time I submitted a piece for her feedback, I felt a rush of excitement and validation, as if I were discovering a new part of myself. It was through her guidance and support that I began to believe in my abilities and dream of becoming a writer one day.

She was this super cool slam poet who just so happened to teach at my school, in addition to being in the Army Reserve at the time. She always had a super cool pair of sneakers on, particularly these composition notebook style Dunks that I begged my daddy for and I still can’t find to this day. Although she was the youngest teacher I had in my high school career, her impact on my life and love for writing outlasted her peers by a landslide. The poets and writers introduced to us in this class, like Zora Neale Hurston, Kai Davis, and Jasmine Mans, are still some of my favorites today. I found myself spending the summer after her class not only writing lots of poetry of my own but obsessing over these writers. Before her class, I had been writing quite a lot but only stereotypical/predictable things I felt people would be willing to read from me. Even in writing as much as I did, I would only share it with like 4 friends, if that; my family couldn’t have told you the plot of these stories, poems, or books I was writing.

Besides the large amount of exposure to rich writing I received, I also took a lot of nuggets of wisdom about being a woman and life. I was in a very awkward stage in my life, even for me as someone who would consider themselves to be a consistently awkward person, but she did not see me as my peers saw me. She spoke life into me and my writing in many ways, often encouraging me to dig deeper into my emotions and experiences, urging me to turn the seemingly mundane into pieces of art. In being who she was, she showed me how to be myself without fear of judgment, instilling in me a sense of confidence that I had previously lacked. As I have been putting my writing as well as myself out more and more these days (not on here I know I know but that is also changing now that I have a new position and consistent schedule), I find myself thinking about her quite a lot. Not just in a writing sense either, but about her personhood, how deployment affected her, does she have kids now, you know those things. I often wonder how she has navigated her own journey since our paths crossed, and I feel an overwhelming sense of gratitude towards her for the role she played in my development as both a writer and an individual. I don’t know if she knows it or if I’ll ever get to tell her, but she made a profound impact on my life and writing. It is my hope to be able to tell her just how much one day, to express the depth of my appreciation for her guidance and to let her know that the seeds of wisdom she planted have grown into a flourishing garden in my life.