There was this show I used to watch on Latin Nickelodeon with my brother and sister while I was in high school. It was called As Told By Ginger and it was centered on this teenaged girl named Ginger who would write about her experiences dealing with high school and friendships and boyfriends in her diary. I remember one episode particularly well; in it, Ginger writes a poem to enter into a poetry competition, but the poem has dark undertones and she is eventually sent to a psychiatrist to talk about whether she views herself as the girl in the poem. By the end of the episode, Ginger has very insightful things to say about writers and their relationship with the subjects they write about. I was haunted by this episode when I first saw it. It must have been one of the first times that I was challenged to think about what I was writing about and how it related to what was going on in my own life. It also opened up so many new possibilities for my writing; it gave me the permission to write about dark, scary, sad things without feeling like there was something wrong with me. We are so impacted by the things we experience as children and young adults. Negative comments, radical new ideas, television shows and cartoons and songs: these all can have something to do with the people we become and it’s good. We are ever-changing beings, made up of jumbled memories and feelings, constantly experiencing new things that continue to impact who we are. I like being a jumble.
