Essential Question: How can I express the last four years of my life through poetry?

I have learned that to write is to practice empathy. In writing, you assume the voice of whatever cannot speak. In many cases, this is the voice of people who exist only in the boundaries of your own mind. In some, it is the people of memory, others the people of imagination. Sometimes it is no person at all, but an animal, or a plant, or the kitchen table. In my case, it is my younger self, which has not yet earned the years to speak. 

I practice empathy for my younger self; I understand him by reliving his experiences, by stepping into his dreams and watching for all the things that could make a poem. In doing so, I am suddenly carrying his neuroses, his fears, and his insecurities. In some ways, I have found that they are similar to mine, in others not so much. In every case I am thrust back into old memories, most of which I have kept purposefully as such. As I am writing these poems, the silent swallowing of introspection that I used to fear is now my lifeblood. It is central to waking up each day and writing. Thus, every day I am wandering the canals of 9th grade, 10th grade, 11th grade and beyond. This process has become as much reflection as it is creation. 

I was writing of the spring, the April of my second year in one of these poems. After 10 minutes I was two-thirds through this poem, writing stanzas as though they had been already on the page, and I was simply tracing the letters. At the peak of this mountain, though, I set down my pen. Because I suddenly realised I had fallen completely back into that cruel April, that my voice had been substituted absolutely by that of my younger self. This was the empathy that stopped me in my tracks: a form of controlled madness, or a complex art of mask-macking. I had learned the words for which I had been searching, and in doing so relived their meaning.