I read this year's EYE OF THE WORLD, and I couldn't help but feel that pang of inferiority again. It made me feel like I was amongst the CAP people again, feeling like I was in CAP heaven, but at the same time, wondering whether I should even be there. Even if writing poetry is about self, there is always that gauge of whether one is 'good' or 'average' or 'just plain lousy'.

When I came back from CAP, I remember trying to write like the poems of my fellow peers, of the instructors, and I started to stray to poetry-under-stress. I forced myself to write like I was writing for a competition each time, for my poems to sound like their poems.

I felt horrible, because after masking my self through my poems, I started to lose that natural style that got me into CAP into the first time. I couldn't write anymore. Nothing sounded like me. And it didn't help a bit that my mentorship entry was rejected, leaving me the only SC girl WITHOUT mentorship (not counting mich, sorry hon). I became part of the 'just plain lousy', because I allowed myself to believe I was.