Today my eyelids hold more gravitational pull than the belly of Mars. My mind is quite metaphorically on fire. Ironically or fatefully (I can’t tell) during the week of the poetry slam, I have some massive writers block.

However, if you stack a bunch of blocks together, there is potential of building a castle, so I’ve decided to share some of my blocks—slabs of uncured language and thought, in order to create a fortress all of us can exist in.

***
When I was in high school, my Uncle Kevin and I used to hold heavy jam sessions in the car. He was the first man to teach me about Alanis Morissette and prefaced “Jagged Little Pill” by saying, “This was the album that made men fear their lives and their ex-girlfriends.” I watched St. Louis shine through the car window as Alanis wrapped her angst around my intuition.

I was a bit too young to understand why she sounded so broken. All I knew was that I felt the same way. I understood through her cracked voice and trailing vocal tangents what it meant to express something under the surface. I like to imagine that this was the day I became a writer.

***
The other day I watched a news clip of an American woman yelling at a couple for speaking Greek to each other in a store. She kept saying something like, “This is America! You need to speak American!”

As she yelled in ignorance, I thought my brain cells were going to fall out of my ears. But then I remembered the Aegean Sea washing around my feet and felt really sad that the woman yelling had most likely never had that experience. Human empathy is my only hope for survival.

Prior to my arrival to Greece, I inconsiderately didn’t bother to learn any Greek—not even common phrases. The first month there, I was a walking disaster, dressed in err of my native tongue, asking people in their home country to speak my language. I would quietly ask “English?” whenever I needed to communicate, and almost every single time someone would respond “Yes!” politely with ease.

My country rarely emphasizes the importance of being bilingual. It was astounding to meet so many young people my age educated in the rest of the world and well-versed in culture in a way my heritage did not reflect. Leaving the United States helped me understand the way it settles on the rest of the world.

***
I had a great conversation recently about atheism in Nebraska. This conversation was off the record and underground, much like the nature of most atheists living in a state that is dominantly Christian.

I can think of two separate times in a room full of people that I’ve braced myself when raising my hand as the lone representative of an alternative belief system. I can remember only two, because all of the other times I wasn’t brave enough to stand up with an opposing belief to the majority.

It takes a lot of courage to be different, especially in smaller spaces. I don’t know how I define myself, but I do believe talking about what you don’t know and learning about what you don’t know is healthy for your perception.

Question all of it.