Describe the Indescribable Feeling

English is a strange language in many aspects, like spelling, pronunciation, grammar, but here I am going to talk about what I feel when I read English poetry. Actually I don’t even know how to describe it, but describing a thing that is difficult to describe is what I want to do to improve my writing.

When a person lives in two different cultures and two different languages, he or she often encounters such indescribable feelings, something like I know this is different from that, but if you want me to elaborate in a way that can be easily understood, it is hard. This is why I often advise people not to write about diversity since it is not easy to describe. Even if one can describe it, it is difficult to describe it in an interesting way. Even if one can describe it well, it may not even attract people’s attention since people tend to like the cohesion and the assumption of one culture. Mixing two cultures together may disrupt that cohesion or assumption.

There is a hidden rule of subtlety in English which seems to favor rhyming but not rhyming too much, and approve of the unrestrained heartfelt way of playing with words but only to a limited point. Somehow this makes me feel that I don’t feel the immediacy or the urgency of the language through the sound effect, but have to wait to build up something inside me as lines after lines proceed. That is my imperfect description of my feeling of reading English poetry.

However such lack of immediacy is gone with more recent poems, especially poems published by young people. For example, “All The Words I Kept Inside” by P. J. Gudka, in which the lines like “they were all unhappy too” and “I’m the only one who can fix me” reverberate in my heart immediately. My mind suddenly steeps in memories, recalling occasion after occasion when I watched all the unhappiness. Those who pretended to be happy were probably even more unhappy than others. I remember I met an old acquaintance in the grocery store here who was eager to boast about her sons and her house, but I could feel that she was unhappy. My refusal to join the “happiness pretension” deeply offended her. At one point, I made a grimace when she talked about her husband. I knew her husband from quite a while ago. He was exactly the kind of husband our mother warned us about. I should not have grimaced, but I couldn’t help it. She was even more offended. She used to be such a vivacious girl, who was fun to be with, but years later, she became so … I don’t know how to describe this in a polite way. So I choose not to describe it.

The line “I’m the only one who can fix me” also reminds me of my delusional fantasies of somebody descending upon my life to fix my life for me. That happened a long time ago when I was weak and confused and aimless. I wish I were as perceptive as Pooja in my twenties, but I was so ill-educated back then. It has taken me many years of painful searching for directions to arrive at where I am today.

I feel that Pooja is extraordinary. So I don’t agree with her when she says “I’m just painfully ordinary.” She is a brave girl, the kind of girl I would have wanted myself to be when I was in my twenties. She understands the pressure, the malaise, the narcissism of the world. She understands the immigrant trap that most immigrants fall into and cannot crawl out of. She bravely chooses her own path, rejecting the choices that most people would have made. I believe in her. She will have a much happier and accomplished life than those who yield under pressure but pretend to be happy, or those whose “right” choices are nothing more than expediency.