Breaking the Skin: Pamela Zimmerman

I remember being a teenager, realizing for the first time that everyone sees things through their own lens; there is never anything that two people can experience in the exact same way. Every perspective is unique. This troubled me greatly, because it meant accessing reality looked and felt different depending on who you are. It took much longer for me to realize that just as other people can't know my experience because they are not in it, so also other people's terms and slogans cannot describe it. I have to find my own words, my own descriptions. Poetry gives me the ability to put my experiences and emotions into words that make sense to me. With poetry, I can use phrases I have built to describe the things I know. Poetry is an outlet for my personal perspective.