My Childhood Trauma

You were no more than eleven years old then. Your parents firmly believed that you are innately talented in literature. Pretending to succumb to your parents’ enthusiasm, you enjoyed to recite your own rubbish poem. Your way of writing poem was so ignorantly simple; you stopped one line if it seems 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. Cast your mind back to those days, it is definite that the teacher’s reason for compliment was quantity—you wrote three, or even for poems one day, if you felt “It was the day”—rather than quality. One day, your teacher recommended you to upload your poems on the Internet. So arrogant you were, you thought that not to share your poems was a waste of your great talent. So you searched the Internet and joined a literature society.

The society members, who seemed to possess a high standard of literature, 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 you had not known that such word exists before. Observing frequent updates of members’ comments, nevertheless, you thought that you should at least pretend to understand those convoluted poems. You, thus, started to write rubbish comments; choosing the most comprehensibly-seeming titles, you uploaded a complete sham—“Humans sometimes tend to be solitary. T_T But you succeeded in sublimating your solitary into the literature, and I’m sure that you won’t be lonely ever again!” or, “I think you caught a nice glimpse of clear autumn day :D”, etc. And you were satisfied with yourself. Good grief!

A month passed, and you noticed that the club members were so generous that they never slandered on other person’s work. Gaining confidence, you decided to upload your own poem. Among numbers of poems that you had written, you chose one that seemed the best, corrected it slightly, and uploaded the poem. Alarmed, you checked the club in five minutes interval, and when a notification said one new comment was posted, you rushed in one second.

“I enjoyed reading your poem. It was full of childlike innocence,” the kind comment made you be puffed up. Some “adult” enjoyed your poem. As more cordial comments were posted, you gained more confidence to upload more poems more frequently.

And one day, you accessed to the Internet site with usual feeling of expectancy. Scrolling down the cordial comments, smile overspread your face—and then, suddenly, your face was immobilized with shock. No, this cannot be true. An anonymous member was saying:

“You call this a poem? Good god!”

Running away from the site, you cried for hours. As you calmed down, you accessed back to the site, and the manager of the society site had already took needed measures. The member who slandered your poem was withdrawn by force, and the manager wrote an announcement of apologies for the users who must have been angered by the secluded member. You, so childishly, posted another 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 and stopped to upload your poems or to write rubbish comments on other people’s work. A few days later, you left the club.

Years passed, and now you are eighteen. You were rummaging the computer files, and accidently, you found out numbers of poems that you had written so arduously in your young days. Reading the poems again, you appreciated the society members whom 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 once treated poetry, for giving up writing so easily and rashly just because of one comment. Slipped from your fingers so easily, your once-so-valued literature is just forgotten vestige now.