Letting It Exist

Rejection used to feel like a verdict. Since coming to Canada, something has shifted in me — maybe the confidence that comes from surviving a multitude of things, maybe just the quiet growth of living alone at seventeen. Either way, it no longer feels final.

When my piece didn't get accepted into Load 3 — the magazine of my favourite ENG140 class — I was bummed. Of course I was. My first instinct was to retreat completely: I decided I wasn't going to share that piece with anyone. A group of strangers had deemed it unworthy of print, and somehow that made me feel like it was unworthy of being seen at all. It felt strange — something so personal, written from my own experience, reduced to a quiet no. I understood that editorial decisions are about quality and fit, but in my eyes, it was one of my best pieces. It hurt, even if only for a minute.

Then something shifted. A conversation led to me sharing it, and what came back was simple warmth; nothing elaborate, but enough. It reminded me that writing doesn't live in approval. It lives in being read.

So when I finally got the printed magazine, without my piece in it, I decided to take matters into my own hands. There was something quietly defiant about it — sitting down with a pen, opening to one of the blank pages, and writing out every single word from memory. No one asked me to. No one would know. But if I had written for that magazine, then my writing was going to exist in it, on my own terms. There's a particular kind of stubbornness in that, and I'm not ashamed of it. The first person I showed it to called it one of my finer works, and I beamed. I really did.

For finals week, I couldn't come up with something entirely new. But that's okay. Here's to old works and forgotten words — and to the quiet confidence of letting them exist anyway.

A Stranger in My Handwriting

I reread my old writing the way one might study a photograph found in a drawer; slowly, cautiously, uncertain of what it will demand from me. The handwriting is unmistakably mine: the loops of the letters, the way I crowd the margins, the uneven pressure where emotion outweighed patience. And yet, the girl speaking from those pages feels like someone I no longer know.

She looks like me. The same eyes, the same hands, the same smile. But her thoughts are untouched by the knowledge I now carry. She believes in people with a sincerity that feels reckless to me now. She trusts without calculation. She loves without imagining the cost.

She has not yet learned how cruel life can be, how it waits until you are comfortable, even hopeful, before it strikes. She does not know that people fall away quietly, one by one, like leaves at the start of autumn. She does not know that closeness is not proof of permanence, or that promises can dissolve without warning.

Her words are frozen in time. Preserved. Innocent.

I envy her.

Not because she was happier; trust me, she wasn’t always, but because she had not yet learned to anticipate loss. She did not brace herself for disappointment. She wrote as if the world were fundamentally kind, as if love were something that stayed once invited. I admire her courage now, the way one admires a child reaching for fire without knowing it burns.

Sometimes I imagine wanting to tear those pages out, feed them to a winter fire, spare them from what comes next. Other times, I want to protect them, to keep them intact as evidence that I once existed that way. That I once moved through the world without armor.

There is a quiet grief in realizing you can never return to that version of yourself.

Growth is often framed as a triumph, but it feels more like an exchange. You gain awareness, resilience, restraint, but you lose ease. You lose the ability to love without keeping score. You lose the softness that once felt natural. No one tells you that maturity arrives hand-in-hand with mourning.

Simultaneously though, there is a sort of relief too.

I no longer break the way she would have. I no longer collapse under the weight of every disappointment. Heartbreak dulls with time, leaving behind a careful calm. I love now with knowledge—with boundaries, with memory, with an understanding of what it costs.

Perhaps it is not that I prefer strangers to friends. Perhaps it is simply that I no longer give myself away without knowing the price.

When I close the notebook, I feel both older and steadier. I have shed her, but I have not erased her. She lives in those pages, untouched by what I now know, waiting patiently for me to remember who I was before the world taught me otherwise.

She is not me anymore. But she made me possible.

Isabel Bader Theatre (Last ENG140 Class) | April 6, 2026