My Childhood Trauma -- Revision

You were no more than eleven years old then. Your parents firmly believed that you were innately talented in literature. Pretending to succumb to your parents’ enthusiasm, you enjoyed to recite your own poem. How you “wrote” poem was ignorantly simple; you stopped one line if it seemed to prolong too much, stopped one stanza if you made four lines, and then, voila! Just in five minutes you composed a poem.

Not only your parents but your teacher also praised your poem. Looking back those days, you now know the teacher extolled your poem’s “quantity”, not “quality”. You wrote dozens of poems whenever you felt “It was the day”, and showed all of them to your teacher. One day, she recommended you to upload your poems on the Internet. You, in childish arrogance, thought that not sharing your poems would be a great waste of your talent. So you searched the Internet and joined a literature society.

The society members all seemed to possess a high standard of literature. They uploaded their own poems or novels, and shared ideas via writing comments. You still remember how embarrassed you were when you read the members’ pieces for the first time. They used a whole chunk of abstruse vocabularies that made you be flustered. Observing frequent updates of members’ comments, nevertheless, you thought that you should at least pretend to understand those convoluted poems. You, thus, started to choose the most comprehensibly-looking poem and leave sloppy comments—“Humans sometimes tend to be lonely. T_T But you succeeded in sublimating your solitary into the literature, and I’m sure that you won’t feel alone ever again!” or, “I think you caught a nice glimpse of clear autumn day :D”, etc. And you were satisfied with yourself. What a shame.

A month passed, and you noticed that the club members were so generous that they never slandered on other person’s work. You, in confidence, decided to upload your own poem. Among numbers of poems that you had written, you chose one that seemed the best. Then you slightly corrected and uploaded it. You nervously waited until a notification popped out that first comment was posted. You rushed in one second to check it.

“I enjoyed reading your poem. It was full of childlike innocence,” the kind comment made you be puffed up. An “adult” liked your poem. This comment was just the start; other members also posted cordial comments. Every time you saw a new comment, you gained more confidence to upload more poems more frequently. 

One day, you accessed to the site with usual expectance. Scrolling down the lines of comments, smile spread over your face—and then, suddenly, your face was hardened in shock. No, this could not be true. An anonymous member was scorning:

“You call this a poem?”

You turned off your computer and cried for hours. As you calmed down, you accessed back to the site. The manager of the site had already retrieved the situation. The member who slandered your poem was withdrawn from the society by force, and the manager left a written apology for the angered users. You posted another silly comment under that announcement: “I’m terribly sad T_T I wrote that poem so arduously and was treated so poorly T_T”. For sure, nobody consoled you after you posted that comment. You suddenly lost all of your confidence. You stopped to upload your poems or to write childish comments on other people’s work. A few days later, you left the club.

Years passed, and you became eighteen. Last week, you accidently found out numbers of poems that you had written in your young days. Reading them again, you appreciated the society members who so generously bear those shabby works; you smiled away the malicious comment which once you cried over for hours; you blushed over your childish idea to post “I’m terribly sad T_T” comment. But most of all, you regretted, as thinking about how preciously you valued poetry, of giving up writing so easily just because of one comment. Your once-so-valued literature is now nothing more than a forgotten vestige that slipped out of your fingers.

[ Writer's Comments ] I fixed some grammatical errors and shortened the sentences, following Woochan's advice. If there still remains any error, please feel free to point out! :-)