Writing Poetry
This week has been busy. I’ve been having trouble finding time to sleep this week, which means that I haven’t found time to craft. I’m coming to the time during the semester where I just don’t want to do anything, where I feel like difficult enough just to get by, let alone try to express my feelings.
Times where I feel particularly empty or stress are usually the times that I turn to poetry as a need rather than a want.
I started writing when I was younger because I struggle to communicate in the same ways other people do, and I felt desperate to be heard. Even though I didn't show anyone most of the things I wrote, it felt good to have expressed my feelings at least in some way.
I started writing poetry specifically when I was about 12. That was about the age when I started to become aware of myself and process my experiences. I wrote about my feelings of shame, about people who had hurt me, about funerals and my own death. I looked back on those poems recently and felt scared about how dark my everyday thoughts were.
In the past, I’ve laughed about how angry my seventh grade poetry was. But instead of focusing on how cringey that was, I think it’s more fair on myself to say that I was allowing myself to feel emotions that I only ever knew how to suppress before. I was a depressed kid, and poetry gave me an outlet.
Over the years, I’ve tried to find a balance between using poetry as a way of communicating those difficult feelings and using it as an artform. I’ve learned how to incorporate rhythm and sound play into my writing and spent a lot more time reading good poetry. Treating writing as a craft has allowed me to communicate more, and in more subtle ways.
When I started writing as a depressed kid years ago, my biggest hope was that I would be able to help someone else with my writing. I felt that if even one person could read one of my poems and benefit from it, if I could make someone feel that they were not alone, then all of the pain I had experienced would be worth it. I used to say that I would have deliberately chosen to have depression if what I could communicate because of it would help another person.
Somewhere along the way, I also decided that I wanted to be the next F. Scott Fitzgerald and write the great American novel. Maybe those two things were going to fit together. I’m not entirely sure.
I didn’t choose to have depression, and I no longer have a savior complex about my writing. I want to be an encouragement, but all of those dreams seem out of reach.
I’m still writing poetry, though. Something about it speaks to my soul in a way nothing else can. Poetry is the one creative act that I don’t know if I could live without. I still hope that fulfilling that need could bless someone else, but I’m learning to value myself as a person, too.
I love to write poems, so I will write.
