1. You can always change your mind; there is no wrong choice.
2. Listen to your heart and your emotions.

These are the two lessons I’ve learned this past year in my core, lessons I didn’t quite expect to come to fruition in the way that they did. But standing here over halfway through the year, I inhale deeply in the knowledge that these two mantras are true–and I share this in the hope that it will inspire you if you’re feeling stuck, trapped or fearful about your choices.

Two years ago, I made the difficult decision to leave the classroom. At the time, a new opportunity to write in a corporate setting came up, and it felt like the right decision. It felt like a new adventure. So, I took the leap. And for the past two years, I’ve learned about corporate world. I’ve grown. I’ve explored. I’ve had all sorts of new experiences and changed in a lot of great ways. But there was one major problem.

It didn’t feel like home. It didn’t feel right. And in my core, I kept thinking about how I’d left my one true calling.

Like so many of us do, I tried to rationalize it away. I told myself change was hard, that it would just take time to feel at home. I shoved down the voice of my five-year-old self who wanted nothing more than to teach, who would set up twenty stuffed animals on the steps of her childhood home with a chalkboard at the bottom. I told myself that the fact I was running into my former students literally EVERYWHERE wasn’t a sign–and wasn’t making me sad.

But deep down, I knew. The whole time, I think I knew that even though there were so many awesome perks in my new job and reasons to stay, it wasn’t what my heart wanted. So, after some re-evaluation and some soul-searching, I did what I needed to. I listened to my heart–and I turned back around. I changed my mind. And luckily, things fell into place to allow me to do a U-turn and go back to where I belonged, where I felt at home, and where my heart felt like I was meant to be.

This fall, I’m heading back to my alma mater to teach. This time around, I’ll be a business teacher, which feels like it was meant to be; it’s made the past two years in corporate world and also my accounting degree make sense. It’s made my time away feel like it was necessary for me to grow in order to do the best I can in this position. 

And you know what? Ever since I’ve made the decision to go back, I’ve exhaled a breath I didn’t know I was holding for two years. I don’t wake up in the middle of the night anymore in a panic that I left teaching. I feel awakened and excited in a way I haven’t for two years. My heart, in short, is happy, and I feel at peace again.

Making a change is scary but sometimes necessary. But I think the most beautiful thing about this life that we sometimes forget is that you’re never stuck, and no decision is final. You make the best decision you can with the information you have at the time. And then, you listen to your heart. You let your emotions guide you and you do the best you can again. You change your mind. You turn back or turn left or stand still for a bit until the path becomes clear. 

Because this life is too short to be somewhere that your heart isn’t happy. And I’m so excited that even though it’s been a long road these past two years, I’ve been reminded of what makes me happy, what makes me fulfilled, and where I belong. I’m fortunate and grateful to be given a second chance at my passion, at doing what I love. 

I’d like to think that five-year-old version of myself standing at her makeshift chalkboard would be excited that even though I veered off the path for a couple years, I found my way back to the front of the classroom where my heart knows I belong.

Lindsay Detwiler is the USA Today and International Bestselling author of The Widow Next Door, The Diary of a Serial Killer's Daughter and several other novels. To learn more, click here.

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My turn signal flickers as I round the familiar bend, simultaneously ready to be home but not ready to end my karaoke session in the car. The words to the Taylor Swift song blast from my mouth as my husband groans. “Sequin smile/black lipstick/Sensual politics,” echoes in the metal box when my husband speaks up.

“The lyrics make zero sense,” he complains as I put the car in park in front of our Cape Cod.

“It’s poetry,” I proclaim, turning to him as I let the song play a little more.

“That is not poetry,” he argues.

Peeling ourselves out of the car, the words still resonating within me, I think about his argument. And as we lug the groceries into the house, I consider his words—and how wrong they are.

(Expletive!) Poetry
As a former high school English teacher of ten years, I can tell you that for far too long, we’ve scared the youth away from poetry. Stodgy, forced analysis and uppity takes on the masters establishes poetry as synonymous with expletives in many classrooms. The power of words, the feeling behind the words has been haphazardly traded for alliteration identification and iambic pentameter markings. Words from the masters feel archaic and stiff to the modern teenager in many cases.

Certainly, we can try to enlighten our youth to the power of the words. We can help them uncover the beauty of love in Shakespearean sonnets along with the humor of his homely mistress. We can seek to inspire with the “Sail forth” words of Whitman and the Transcendentalist beliefs of marching to your own drum beat in Emerson’s poetry. We can analyze the melancholy in Poe’s “Annabel Lee” and distinguish Emily Dickinson’s punctuation and dark analysis from all the rest.
Still, there is something lost when we try to determine poetry is only from the classical periods, from only a certain breed of writer or format. When we put our poetry in a box of this and not that, we alienate an entire generation of readers and poets, for that matter.

What is Poetry, Actually?
To come to a solution to this issue, we must ask ourselves what poetry is at the core. Is it formulaic writing? Is it old, curmudgeonly lines that we blow the dust off of? Is it tangled mystery with forced concepts?

Or is it, at its root, an unfolding of the heart that speaks to many in nuanced ways?

I know poetry scholars, poets, and avid readers may decide the last definition is undoubtedly simplified. It strips away the power of poetry and the skill. It cheapens it.

But to me, if we can get past the academic appraisals and definitions, I think this generalized definition actually expands poetry in a way that opens up more possibility. By understanding that poetry at its core is about heart, we can make room for change. We can invite more poetry scholars into the fold by opening up our youth to the beauty of the art form. We can stop excluding so many by telling them what poetry isn’t.

We can still hold the classics in high regard. I am not proposing that because they are of a different time or a higher caliber of vocabulary, they don’t have value. In actuality, I believe that every single piece of writing has something to teach us. I also believe to fully understand literature, one must push their boundaries of understanding in order to discover new possibilities. However, this reverence for the classic poetry forms and deep analysis does not mean other forms, other mediums, other styles of poetry should be snubbed.

Poetry, Poetry, Everywhere … and Plenty to Drink
 Taylor Swift’s newer song “Sweet Nothings,” notes:
               On my way home/ I wrote a poem/ You say ‘What a mind.’/ This happens all the time.
She’s not wrong. She did write a poem in her lyrics, one that all walks of life can uncover, interpret, and consider. Taylor’s words inspire and connect. They make us stir at the core and ask: How? Why? Most of all, they help us say, “That’s me.”

Taylor Swift’s songs are poetry. So are Nelly’s. So are Def Leppard’s, and so are Queen’s. So are all the musicians out there.

But it doesn’t stop there. The Instagram poets are worthy of poetic reverence. The commercials, the advertisements, the magazine snippets that move us to tears are worthy of poetry’s label. The words that tumble out of your heart on to a page for no one but you to see are worthy of a pedestal. In short, at its simplest form, poetry is the bleeding of the heart, the outpouring of words into a medium that inspires and moves us. That doesn’t have to appear in a literary textbook or rhyme or really be anything other than that—from the heart.
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The more inclusive we are about what poetry is—the more the appreciation and understanding of the genre’s power can flourish for this generation and beyond.