My poem “Violet Thoughts: Questions with no Answers” is the yielding confession of my habit to overthink every ambiguous social situation in order to paint a black-and-white solution over it. As an aspiring mathematician, the speaker finds the uncertainty and the convoluted nature of personal relationships have become the bane of her existence. My poem is a descriptive free-verse that documents my transformation, from mentally suffocating myself with mind-reading and second-guessing, to finding freedom through surrendering to the joy of ambiguity. The tone of my poem is uplifting. It not only incorporates imagery of nature, including clouds, birds, and the sea, as metaphors of my inner world, but also incorporates colors such as violet, auburn haze, and lavender shades to symbolize the puzzling dazzle of ambiguity. 

In order to illustrate my gradual acceptance for confusing concepts in reality, “Violet Thoughts” employs the devices of asyndeton, metaphor, and repetition to demonstrate my character transition. Throughout the poem, I demonstrated the speaker’s character shift of freeing herself from the pursuit of truth within the convolutedness by writing in a free-verse structure; the lines break apart sporadically with no form. I used three major analogies to illustrate my character transition: comparing confusion with tangles and Klein Bottles, my desire for truth with parallel lines and the plunging watermelon, and my feelings of freedom with beautiful, unpredictable clouds. At the beginning of the poem, I used asyndeton with the phrases “I twist, I turn, I attempt…” to demonstrate my internal obsession with clarity and non-ambiguous concepts. The illustration of the “dark green watermelon that plunges” demonstrates my fanatic state of mind. By using metaphor to compare my mental state with the plunging watermelon, I demonstrate my ill mind-set as it is permeated with my frustration while deciphering ambiguous concepts. Further, I demonstrate a transition of my character from initially being fanatic about non-ambiguous concepts into accepting the reality, the beauty of ambiguity. I specifically separated “Are the most Beautiful” as a single stanza in order to emphasize the beauty that lies within concepts that are often undecipherable. 

         To conclude my poem, I repeated “Are the most Beautiful” to highlight my gradual acceptance of ambiguity, freeing myself from the suffocation of deciphering the forever unknown. I conclude with a hinted aphorism on how one could only be free when one breaks away from over-deciphering the convoluted states in relationships. Perhaps the urge for truth is a mechanism to fill up one’s internal void of uncertainty. Once we acknowledge reality as such that “violet thoughts”—thoughts of ambiguity—are everywhere, we could break free from the internal tangles of desiring a black and white conclusion. The confusing nature of social communication is often ambiguous and suffocating, but the way to free oneself from the internal complication is to accept how sometimes we may never know why things happen. Instead of tormenting oneself in the deep-end of pursuing truth, one could start with simply being genuine and surrendering to complexity.