The Eldest Daughter ✔️

Introduction

I have loved poetry ever since I read Emily Dickinson on a whim in the third grade. Reading her poetry, I felt like she spoke a language I could finally understand. I was given my first journal as a birthday gift when I turned twelve, the forest green suede cover seeming to hold many secrets in the blank pages between. I bore my soul in the words that filled them and wrote my first poem a year later at thirteen. For twenty years, I saved my poems in hopes of sharing them one day. Thank you for reading them.

Being a neurodivergent, bisexual young woman raised in a conservative fundamentalist environment, you can imagine I had a touch of inner turmoil. Poetry is my way of bending words to express the depths of my experiences when they normally fail me.

This collection begins when I'm awakening from childhood and standing at the precipice of adolescence. For the first time in my life, I was forming my own thoughts about the world that varied greatly from the sanitized teachings I was prescribed. I wrestled with ideas about religion, love, and identity.

In my twenties, I disconnected from writing because I was disconnected from the very essence of who I am. I battled an eating disorder that drained me of every life-giving love I'd ever known and, eventually, landed me in the hospital. My poetry was sparse during these years. I started recovery, and, through therapy, I found that my eating disorder didn't materialize out of thin air.

My thirties have been characterized by a return to myself with a vengeance. Unearthing my past without fear, I could see clearly how I was being made to fit into a small box that I would never be happy in, maintaining a generations-deep status quo. Now, I will no longer be the sacrificial lamb walking dutifully to slaughter by my own hand or another's. Through it all, I keep writing.