About the Young Writers Project
YWP, an independent nonprofit based in Burlington, Vermont, engages young people to write and use digital media to express themselves with clarity and power and to gain confidence and skills for the workplace and life. YWP publishes about 1,000 students’ work each year here, in newspapers across Vermont, on Vermont Public Radio and in YWP’s monthly digital magazine, The Voice. Since 2006, it has offered young people a place to write, explore and connect online at youngwritersproject.org, which has only one rule: Be respectful. For more information, please contact YWP executive director Geoffrey Gevalt at ggevalt@youngwritersproject.org.
Eva Rawlings, a rising senior from South Burlington, writes about triumphing over an eating disorder and finally feeling free. She read this piece at Poem City in Montpelier in April.
Her
By Eva Rawlings
[L]ook at her scars, they are not mine.
Wrists smell of blood, and of perfume and wine.
It stings me to think how one’s eyes get so cold,
Wrinkles her brow, makes her look far too old.
Watch as her friends try to help but they pry,
So she pushes them out just to make herself cry.
Tosses her pizza, her soup down the drain,
The thought of one bite she believes is her bane.
This girl is so lonely, sleeping all day,
I wish I could tell her she’s wasting away!
That things will get better, as everyone said,
That the tear spots won’t stain on the side of her bed.
There will be a day that she’ll sleep without wails,
That some day her cheeks will not look quite so pale.
When her limbs feel so weak, mind too sick to go on,
I wish she would know that it soon will be gone.
That she will find someone who wants her to eat,
Who won’t be repulsed when they go to the beach.
That one day the panic, the worry and fear,
He will talk over, only his voice she’ll hear.
The scars and the tears and the ribs poking out,
I couldn’t be that, I mean, look at me now!
Because now my mind is so wonderfully free,
I just can’t believe that that girl once was me.
Check out the May issue of The Voice, the Young Writers Project monthly digital magazine. Click here.
