I have a clear memory of the moments before I opened the classroom door on my first day working as a teacher. I was holding my notebooks tightly to my chest, my left hand hovering over the handle with trembling fingers and my heart beating like a bolero. I remember telling myself: "This is the sum of everything you worked for. This is the moment where the life of your dreams begins." But life has a way of transfiguring plans into surprises. What lay ahead wasn’t fulfilment, but a short-lived chapter in an environment that wore down the edges of my spirit, revealing to me, above all else, the type of teacher that I did not ever want to become. When I look at it in retrospect it's almost amusing. I was trying, quite desperately, to write out the novel my life as though each decision and every choice had led me directly into that place, like a carefully-written novel. I thought that I would look back with tenderness, seeing the turning point where everything aligned. But it wasn’t. Life, as I have learned, rarely unfolds so neatly.

This was a habit that I subconsciously carried for years. As a girl, every accomplishment was attributed the purpose of bringing me closer to the grown-up I was inevitably fated to become. The first pair of bar shoes with small clicking heels. The first sweep of red ink across a school notebook. The first train ride without supervision and the wide world opening itself for discovery outside the window. In adolescence, it deepened. Each diary entry about a first kiss was written as the beginning of the perfect love story I would someday recount to our children. I believed my life was a novel, with its story slowly revealed in thoughtfully written chapters. And I was constantly waiting for the next page to reveal a hidden meaning. I envisioned myself as the heroine, constantly striding forward, always having perfect awareness of where I had been and where I was going. But, with time, I started to notice that life doesn’t bend neatly into perfectly divided chapters. It sprawls and repeats itself, leaves pages blank, and abandons stories mid-verse. And when I found a situation where I could not force it to be something it wasn’t, I began to wonder if I had lost the thread of my own story.

The emptiness I felt stemmed from my attempt to erase all the messiness. The contradictions between who I envisioned myself to be and the mistakes I actually made, the characters who entered and left my life without closure, the meticulously planned life changes that promised new beginnings and then led nowhere. Literature class has long taught us to see life through the lens of a classic dramatic arc: A new situation arises, tension grows within it, it reaches a peak, then all subsides and a lesson is learnt. Then, it often is in these terms that we frame our inner narratives. They are the measurement we use to attribute to our lives a personal sense of progression and emotional growth. But they also entangle us in expectations and self-assumptions. I reached a point where this perception of my life felt limiting and unrealistic. I felt a necessity to escape through the margins of my own story. But, fortunately, stories are not bound to having a single shape. They can meander, repeat themselves rhythmically, and divide themselves into verses. And these are the stories I always loved most. I came to the conclusion that I wanted my life to be something else: My life is a poetry book, not a novel.

A poem doesn’t owe you clarity. It doesn’t bend to the will of explanation or tie itself neatly at the beginning and end. Instead, it moves in its own quietude, leaving pauses where the breath catches and the unsaid whispers secretively. When I started to perceive my life as a poetry book, I let go of the need for certainty, the craving for answers shaped into closed circles. I stopped demanding that every moment be a pathway to somewhere brighter or that every turn be a declaration of triumph or defeat, each wrapped with a lesson like a bow. Instead, I linger. I allow the shoes to remain shoes and the kisses just kisses. I let the lines spill out spontaneous words, reversing all my anticipated syntaxes. Some pages present me with restfulness and others beauty, loneliness, grief, boredom, hope and gratitude. None greater or lesser than the next. There are occasions of happiness and disappointment, but they don't represent my full selfhood, only brief moments in time. When you define your life by way of a single narrative, you are tempted to let its outcome define you. And I have recently learnt that I do not want to live a life made to be categorised, I just want it to be authentic and well-lived.