“I’m on a transformation journey. I recently got divorced. I have two wonderful kids. And I realized it’s important for me to become more in tune with who I am.

“Leaving a relationship to focus on me has been a challenge. But the wisdom that has come out of that, it’s like, I’m enjoying who I am. I’m learning more about myself.

“The goal is to be free. When I turned 30, I got my first tattoo. It’s just the words Be Free, but it symbolizes so much. It means letting go of past versions of me — how I viewed myself and how others viewed me — and embracing my most authentic self. That means being true to myself, despite what others may think or feel. Despite the path set out for me or the path I set for myself.

“To become the best version of me, I have to heal. I have to learn. I have to do the work.

“I’m 31, and I feel like I’ve done so much in life. But I still have so far to go. Sometimes I overthink that part, and I don’t appreciate how far I’ve come. So now I try to practice gratitude. It’s made me more centered. Because when I reflect on my life, I have achieved a lot.

“My goal now is balance. Balancing who I am on the days when I love myself and on the days I don’t feel so great about myself. We all have flaws, which we try to keep hidden from the world. But they’re still part of who we are. Instead of hiding them, maybe we should try embracing them. Because even though I may think I’m flawed in so many ways, another person may see beauty in that.

“Journaling has helped. I’m always in my head. I’m always thinking. So it allows me to get the majority of those thoughts down on paper. It’s a way to release those emotions, process them, meditate on them, and move on.

“Sitting by the water and journaling is a practice I want to do more often. Just for healing and clarity. I’m searching for that inner peace.”

— Synethia Edinborough

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“I see the question all the time: what do you want to be when you grow up? But I tell my son, that’s the wrong question. It should be: what do you want to be now? Your mind is going to keep changing as you get older. So it’s best if you try different things and experience as much as you can as you’re growing up.

“My parents were very encouraging like that with me. So I try to be the same way with my son. He runs triathlons. He does taekwondo. He plays music. He creates videos with Legos. He likes wildlife photography. So we’ve gone to Yellowstone, Colorado, New Mexico, Utah, Nevada, Arizona, Mexico, all over, and he takes pictures along the way.

“He’s always reading and writing on these road trips. And he loves writing stories. He kept at it until one day he said that he’d actually like to write a book.’ I told him, ‘If you do, I’ll help promote it.’ He started the book before the pandemic, and he finished it last year. I helped with editing, and we hired an illustrator. The book came out in April. It’s called, ‘The Prophecy of Three.’

“I’m so proud of him. I asked him, ‘Do you know how old I was when I wrote my first book?’ He said, ‘How old, 50 or 60?’ I said, ‘No, baby, I never wrote a book.’ So it’s quite an accomplishment.

“He writes for fun, and he’s really into it. But tomorrow it could be something else, which I think is great. I want him to do whatever interests him. I don’t try to influence him.

“I don’t know what he’ll end up doing in life. But for now, whatever he wants to do, I just try to be supportive and show him the way. He keeps suprising me. I hope he stays that way. I hope he keeps on surprising me with the path that he chooses for himself.”

— Armando Toledo

Ozzie Toledo, 12, is entering seventh grade at Cedar Bayou Junior School. His book is available on Barnes and Noble. The illustrator, Zach Zellars, is also from Baytown.

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“For me, it all began with the thought of a rabbit: Alice’s white rabbit from Lewis Carroll’s 1865 book, ‘Through the Looking Glass,’ and how Alice was this curious girl who took chances. Especially into the dark tunnel of the unknown. I respected and related to that more than once in my life, and importantly, during quarantine from COVID-19. Learning to take chances, whether I jump, hop or leap. (Thanks, bunny, it’s infectious.) I’d bypassed the 3-inch caterpillar, Absolem, with his magical mushrooms and hookah, and the ever-grinning and disappearing Cheshire Cat. (It’s that grin plus the teeth — creepy.)

“So the shutdown eventually became mandatory. I already knew how to be isolated and in a dark place. Easy peasy. And when it was announced that consent to travel was needed for essential workers, things really began to snap into place. The easy peasy part for me is clinical depression and anxiety disorder. I’d already been battling with communication in various ways. Masks excluded, until now.

“Then about a month into quarantine I woke up one morning, stood up, and collapsed to the floor. I screeched as I hit. I don’t screech. Maybe a B movie scream queen, but never a screech. I have a disintegrating lower disk and severe osteoarthritis in my hip. Nerve damage. Fun stuff. Migrating from wheelchair to attempt long walks also has been a riot. I’m a sarcastic humanist, go figure. So here I am limited in inconceivable ways, and that damn hole I imagined of Alice looked real comfortable. Corona? Bah! COVID-19? I’m already a zero-to-zip isolationist. I thought I didn’t miss others. I also knew it was not a good place to be. Crazy, not stupid, huh? ‘We’re all mad here!’ says my beloved Mad Hatter, and I knew something had to change. My insurance offered me free counseling, and I was exuberant. Coping skills and treatment planning had me setting goals.

“The Cheshire Cat also says, ‘I’m not crazy, it’s just my reality is different than yours.’ Smart kitty. We’re all different and have different needs. What I love most about our planet is all the cultural differences. Even during the world quarantine, or in spite of it, we’re all battling the same thing. Which gave me an idea. ‘Why sometimes I’ve believed in as many as six different things before breakfast,’ Alice says. See, that’s my girl. I’d always kept a journal, and had written my uncle and aunt in New Mexico when I began to add family and friends, including pen pals as far away as Idaho and Tasmania. And they wrote back. Snail mail rocks! I threw in a surprise in the form of drawings. I began to sketch-pencil, add colors, and I’d even make cards and draw on envelopes.

“So my paradox began with my own world crashing down until I realized that I knew how to crawl out of a dark tunnel and daily reach out to others in a different, yet the same, place. Stepping out of self is the best experience of my life. It’s new adventures from all over the globe, right in my own looking glass.”

“It’s no use going back to yesterday because I was a different person.” — Alice

— Susan M. Plake

The post ‘Down the Rabbit Hole’ appeared first on The Baytown Project.

“We had three senior dogs, and we lost all of them because they were just at that age. One of them, Pablo, was a medical response dog. I trained him because I have two brain aneurysms. I was having neurological events where I would lose vision and drop to the floor, have no balance, just projectile vomiting until my electrolytes would be depleted. So the last event was real serious. I fell at Lee College, and Pablo went through the whole building to find the one person who could help me. I ended up going to the ER. While the ambulance was coming, and they kept trying to talk to me on the phone and keep me alert, Pablo kept pulling at my hair if I wasn’t responsive. He knew it was a grave situation.

“I haven’t had problems in years. But I knew how useful a medical response dog could be, especially with David dealing with Parkinson’s. His gait is so deteriorated and falls are such an issue. We got Percy about six months ago. Within a week, we could tell that he had the temperament and the intelligence to be a medical response dog. He knows that David is frail, and he is constantly checking in. Where is he? Is he upright? He notices that David’s going to fall before David falls. So we immediately started training him. The goal is for him to pass the public access test. So not only can he help us at home, but also when we’re out and about. I’ve been training him with a lot of help from the regional trainer for PetSmart. I’m building on everything that she teaches me.

“I have a master of fine arts in creative writing, so I’m working on my own narrative about this whole thing. I think it’s very ironic that we’ve been training a dog to protect us in public when we’ve not been able to be in public because of the coronavirus pandemic. But he’s the one who gives us hope that we’re going to get out of here. We keep training every day with that goal in mind. And it’s funny. We always sing with our son, Alex, ‘Who Let the Dogs Out.’ And now we joke that we’re waiting for the World Health Organization — the WHO — to let us out.”

— Kathleen Sydnor (with David Whitcomb and Percy)

Kathleen and David are retired. She was an English and humanities instructor at Lee College for 25 years, and continues part-time teaching Humanities on the Go, a program she developed. He practiced law 25 years for the Department of the Treasury (Internal Revenue Service) and Department of Justice.

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• Good days, bad days with Parkinson’s

• Seeing world through autistic son’s eyes

The post Medical response dog watching for falls appeared first on The Baytown Project.

Overwhelmed by the daily COVID-19 updates, the stresses of four adults living together in a pandemic, and five pets beneath our feet, I am doing a lot of self-therapy with ink, specifically poetry. Poetry is my journal, my written reflections of riding an emotional roller coaster when yesterday feels more like hope than tomorrow.

Pandemic – Suspended

Across the street life moves
in the same strange distance
January didn’t demand.

Suspended, life on pause, I can’t
imagine tomorrow’s landscape
while spending all my courage on today.

Current events and history converge
on my doorstep, one too fluid to reach answers,
the other grumbling, “You never learn.”

Social distance, ironic unity of a world
using separation to fight an enemy
whose weapons are invisible.

— Susie Clevenger

Susie is an author and poet. See more of her work at susieclevenger.com.

The post Poetry reflects emotional roller coaster ride appeared first on The Baytown Project.

“I’m a senior at Texas A&M, studying animation. That’s my stuff. I like drawing and writing. As a kid, you’re always doodling. For me, it never really stopped.

“I didn’t take it seriously until my freshman year in college. I wanted to be an astronaut. But when I figured out I was really bad at math, I decided I wanted to be a paleontologist. When I realized that needed a lot of math, too, I went with my passion instead.

“My be-all, end-all goal is Disney. I’d love to work for them as a storyboard artist. I just got rejected from an internship there, so that’s a little wavery. I made it to the phone interview. That’s the last step. That’s when I got cut. Disney is very particular with who they want. When I was on the phone with them, they were like, ‘You can’t have any unnatural hair color.’ I was like, OK, I’ll chop my hair off. Then it was, ‘You can’t have any ear piercings.’ I was like, all right, I’ll take off my earrings. Unfortunately, it just didn’t work out this time. The good thing is, I can apply again in January for a fall internship.

“I’ve got like a 10-year plan to get to Disney. It involves me being a teacher for five years. I’m going to get my master’s in education. I’m super excited about the opportunity. It’s a year-long program. As you’re working toward the degree, you’re also student teaching and being paid salary. If all else fails, I see myself being a teacher. I’m really passionate about reading, writing and literacy. I know a lot of people don’t like to write and have struggles with writing. So I feel like I could help with that.

“Overall, I’m going to follow whatever calling I’m led toward. I don’t think I’m ever going to give up art, even if I never end up making it to Disney. I think that’s the really cool thing about being an artist or a writer. You can do it no matter what.”

— Troy Breaux-Hare

You can find some of his art at ilios_art on Instagram.

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• Boy Scouts ‘best thing that’s happened in my life’

• He’s trying not to stress out about the future

The post Plan A: becoming an artist at Disney appeared first on The Baytown Project.

“I’m a blooming author, I guess you could say. I actually have published two books, the first one in 2017. I had the idea for it back in sixth grade and wrote it then. I kind of lost focus with the project for a bit. Then in 10th grade, I picked it back up and rewrote it to completion, edited it, self-published it, and put it out there. It’s called ‘The Magic Discovery.’ It’s about this girl, and she’s introduced into the world of magic. She discovers that there are two main groups of magicians. They’re neither good nor bad. They just have different beliefs on how magic should be used. And she discovers that there’s a deep divide between them and … sorry, no spoilers. I feel like as I was writing, I was unconsciously creating a metaphor to represent America today, how divided we are.

“My second book, ‘The Fall of Magic,’ is the continuation of events in the first book. And I’m almost done with the third book, which is the final one in the series. It’s about 500 pages, last I checked. The writing itself is done. It’s just the revision that’s taking a while.

“Another thing about my books is that I have mixed elements of Japanese culture within them. I’m studying Japanese at the moment, and I’m going to take a trip to Japan soon. I hope to eventually move to Japan and work there.”

What do your parents think about that?
“They’re probably worried. But they support me.”

— Madilyn Lawrence

Madilyn, 18, is a student at IMPACT Early College High School. She was born bilaterally and profoundly deaf. Her books are available on Amazon.

Related:

• Perseverance helps student overcome deafness

The post Young author mixes magic, Japanese culture appeared first on The Baytown Project.

“I probably got my love for writing from my mom. She’s a retired English teacher. I’ve always wanted to write. I remember writing plays when I was young, and having my sister and brothers act in them. In elementary school I won a writing contest for a story about a troll trying to eat a Thanksgiving turkey. The winner was supposed to read the story on the local radio station. But me and my friend were the last two people in the class to get chicken pox, and I wasn’t able to do it. So my mom bundled me up, put me in the car, and turned on the radio so we could listen to my teacher read my story. 

“As I got older, my mom and grandmother bought me journals, and I would fill those with all kinds of stories and poetry. When I write poetry, it’s often about things that I’ve experienced or observed out in the world. Like one time, I met this homeless veteran who lived underneath the freeway. He told me how he had lost both his daughters in one day. They were killed by a driver. His oldest daughter was 21, and she died on her birthday. The other child was 16. He had a tattoo of two gravestones on his arm. I noticed that his shoes were all torn up. I had bought some steel-toed boots to do some work at my house. So I went to my car and gave them to him. He tried to thank me, but I told him it wasn’t necessary. Later on, I learned that he had passed away one night out in the cold. People were just walking by, not realizing or even paying any attention to him. It was so sad. So I decided to write a poem about it. I posted it on Veterans Day a few years ago, with the hope that more people would realize what these vets are going through. And that maybe we need to do more. Maybe we need to feel more.”

— Clarissa Fielder (Liberty)

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The post She expresses her feelings through her poetry appeared first on The Baytown Project.

“I’ve always written poetry. That’s how I dealt with my emotions, putting things down on paper. It started when my grandmother died. I didn’t know how to deal with that. It was the first time I really felt so much hurt.

“So I just wrote something about my grandmother and called it ‘Heaven Hall of Fame.’ I read it to my family at the Christmas get-together. I had copies for all of them. They said, ‘Rusty, that’s a beautiful poem.’ I really didn’t think of it as being poetry. That’s just how I got my feelings out.

“But I used that talent the wrong way for years. I would write these women something real nice and pretty, trying to set me up with them. Then this lady here, when I met her and eventually let her read one of my poems, she said, ‘You ought to write a book.’ People had told me that before. I always thought, yeah, OK, whatever. But when she said it, I thought, yeah, let’s do it.

“It’s called ‘Jesus: Keep It Simple.’ There’s a poem on one page and questions to go with it on the other page, with a place to write notes. Through the poems you can seek answers, and through the questions you can find solutions.

“I’ve done so much to help destroy other people’s lives by getting high with them, introducing them to marijuana, introducing them to other drugs and stuff. Now it’s time for me to try to reach people in a different, more positive way.”

— Russell “Rusty” Jenkins

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The post Poet helps others find solutions to their problems appeared first on The Baytown Project.

“I don’t usually start writing the beginning of a poem. I start in the middle and build around it. No matter how you approach it, you want every line to be impactful. You want to say something that will move someone.

“I feel like my best poems come whenever there’s a sudden change. I don’t adapt that well, so writing about it is very helpful. A neighbor recently committed suicide, and I wrote a poem that talked about some good memories and how we’re going to really miss him moving forward.

“I also write a lot about relationships. Starting at a young age I would really dive into my relationships, which probably wasn’t the greatest idea. But I’m in a much happier relationship now. I think you usually write about what you know, and I think I know about love. As much as a 20-year-old can.”

— EmmaLee Newman

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• Local poetry community making itself heard

The post Creating poetry helps her deal with change appeared first on The Baytown Project.