Author: Maria Ramos

 The poem “Dumped” by Pat Mora is the author of the poetry book Dizzy in Your Eyes. This poem is about a person who is so in love with their partner and suddenly gets dumped. All the speaker is feeling is pain and the thought of this as a catastrophe. This was a poem that I read when I was younger and I always liked Pat Mora as a poet due to her Hispanic background. This poem hits home currently because I just recently got out of  a 5 year relationship and it has been very difficult to get through it especially being in quarantine where I can’t just hang out with my friends to distract myself. A second poem that I recently discovered is about dealing with anxiety by Jennae Cecelia, it’s kind of a self reminder to myself to not let myself overthink. Its pretty much very straight forward poem for anyone having anxiety to just look at and kind of remember that they are not alone. 

My current home setting is very much quite and calm as I’m an only child with just my parents. I haven’t been out at all except for groceries and necessities. My mom is a little bit worried about the current situation being that my dad is older in age, that’s my moms concerns, so she’s being very cautious and a bit of an extreme germaphobe. But I understand her. But being that my whole daily routine has changed, I find myself doing a lot of nothing all day instead if being at the gym or at the park with my dog or even out with friends. I just hope this doesn’t last too long because my birthday is coming up and being stuck in the house is not something I’m looking forward to.

An embarrassing moment I went through during my childhood was the time I was competing in nationals with my competitive dancing group. This was back in 2008 I used to be in a pro salsa dancing team, specifically Colombian salsa which means there is a lot of tricks and stunts that are part of the dance. I had so much pressure on my myself because we had a finale stunt that was mainly my responsibility to execute. It was almost like a pyramid where I had to jump from the top and roll down into split carried by my two partners. We had practiced for about 2 and a half weeks and everything was good, every practice was almost perfect. So we were pretty confident in doing a good job. When the day come obviously there were nerves but I was pretty confident and excited because during nationals were able to rank for international competitions. After one hour and a half of being in hair and makeup and costume preparation we we’re all ready. We were second to last to go on stage, so we were practicing a little back stage. When it was our turn we prayed really quick and ran to our starting positions. My stunt was last and as I get ready to climb up to my jump I slipped and fell on my partner, with all the nerves and shock we got up and kept dancing with the rest of the group. This was my time to prove myself and I messed it up. I was so embarrassed to fall in front of everyone and scared for the consequences. Luckily the fast recovery got us at least 2nd place.

My experience with memoir writing was the best, I feel like when writing a memoir is so expressive and I am able to display my personality in a way where the reader is able to tell how I think or even how I speak. In my writing I can use emotion by showing instead of just telling it. Everything becomes more personal and maybe even relatable to others. In other writings you aren’t always able to write about something personal because it has to be general and about a certain topic. Memoirs give me more freedom and make me enjoy writing because for someone who doesn’t always like writing long research papers this doesn’t feel like a dreading experience more like a talk I am having with a close friend.

The one time I chose to stay anonymous was actually an unfortunate situation. I was in my sophomore year of  Highschool, and I had noticed a certain student in my school for a while we had a few classes together. But she really never was social with the rest of us. Until I started to reach out to her and told her to hang out with my group of friends. After a while I started to notice other poking fun at her and basically bullying her. This went on for a few months until I put myself in her shoes and said to myself if it was me I would want to get helped. What I decided to do was make a small care package for her to kind of hep her out with what she was being bullied about. Yet I didn’t want her to know it was me because I didn’t want her to think she needed to pay me back in any type of way or that she owed me something. In order to remain anonymous I decided to surprise her on her birthday and leave the care package inside her locker with the help of my principle.

I am a huge introvert but when I find someone that I feel like they are like me I am the total opposite. This is why it’s sometimes difficult for me to step out of my comfort zone and actually approach someone and make the first move to become actual friends. But this wasn’t the case when I met my best friend back in freshman year of high school, everyone would always judge because he’s a boy and there’s a huge misconception that a boy and girl can’t be close friends. But to us that didn’t matter. He was like the boy version of me. Throughout all of high school we were always together, even made sure to take the same exact same classes. We are both so shy around others that when we are together its just a explosion of energy. His name is Kevin and even though we don’t get to hang out like we used to we still try to speak every other day and keep each other updated especially in deep conversations. He is the one of few that knows me more than anyone and we come to each other for any tough situation we are having.  I care for him like my brother even though we act like we a little more sometimes its just cause we joke around and also care for each other so much.