Submerged in student debt, I traded my desire for privileged peeves my entitled ego cannot vent in anything other than verse.

I picked my path,

Do not make excuses or apologies for how I exist,

And yet, I am wrestling myself to release my wild.

Here is how this woman has banished her wilderness:

1. I chose comfort over creativity, complacency over courage.
2. I am my own axis, and what if I cannot keep myself spinning?  There is no one to rev my momentum, no pushes or pulls into progress.  I am my own inertia.
3. What if I’m not good enough at what I love?
4. I had to feed myself.
5. I’ve creatively starved myself
6. I am in debt.
7. Debt substitutes for excuse in my mind, fills in for fear, is the explanation for all the things I do not possess the courage to command.
8. My soul is art.
9. My ego is convention.
10. Deep down, I don’t believe I deserve the life I know I am capable of living.

I lament all the things I have the power to change,

All the talent I have, and all the gall I lack to do something with it.

I am a tragedy of privilege.

Fleeing the fear of normalcy,

Of wondering how many substitutes I can swallow before my life becomes sub par.

How do I not settle?

Not sink into something short of self?

I feel the tracks to regret beneath my feet,

I feel the intersection splitting where my heels used to meet.

In my rumbling, riveter gut, I know the answer.

I know it in my bones,

The ones with my grandmother in the marrow,

“Revolution.  Set yourself on fire and make soil from the ashes.”