"The Anthem of a Teenage Life" by Danwa Timon

Photo by Peter Herrmann on Unsplash

I am welcomed to a new world of challenges
where friendships I had are gone,
like balloons in thin air.
I feel like I lost everything
including myself.

My connections with people start to feel distant,
creating thunderstorms in my head,
shocking me with heavy amounts of blame.
The clocks have become impatient
and everything I have done feels permanent.

Mountains of faith I had in myself
start to crumble.
Every dream I had doesn’t exist anymore.
It’s like a book with blank pages
making me wonder
where are the words that bring life?

In my teenage brain,
society has taken over my mind
with unrealistic standards
made to blind me from the truth
and pull me into a tunnel
where no light will be found.

Danwa Timon is 15 years old and lives in Portland, Maine, where she is a rising junior at Deering High School. Danwa is the first child in her family to be born in the United States, her favorite poet is Maya Angelou, and she has a passion for justice and is thinking of studying family law in college. Danwa’s inspiration for her poem was a time in her sophomore year when three friends began saying she was a “bad friend to them.” Being cut off from them was so painful, she said it felt like “a dagger cutting me to pieces,” and felt lost and as though they “led me to a tunnel with no light.” Eventually, Danwa found new friends, new priorities, and is becoming “a better version of myself and helping those along the way.”