Whirling Thoughts, Weird Ideas

Why I Started Writing Poetry And What It Means To Me

*Trigger Warning*  Mentions of self-harm and cutting

So... I haven't updated this book in forever and when I did update it was mainly crack, hmmm-

Okay so this chapter Poetry! Specifically why I started writing it and what it means to me. At the moment I'm pretty blocked, even though I feel all the emotion and I want to write, it's just not flowing right. I might still upload it, but I don't really know if I want to yet :/

I guess I've always been interested in poetry, I just loved the rhymes I guess, they were just so fun. I kinda started writing my own poetry about 4 years ago when I was 13 and the poetry was really bad. I still have it, but I don't think I'd ever show it since it's so cringey and bad.

What really made me fall in love with poetry was this poem I found on youtube called Explaining My Depression To My Mother A Conversation by Sabrina Benaim and it really hit me hard especially because I tried talking to my sister about what I was going through, but she brushed it off and told me that I was just copying her because I'm bored and I'm overreacting and a lot of other hurtful stuff that really made it all worse.

That was when I realised that talking to people and trying to get help from them wasn't an option which led to very bad coping mechanisms like self-harming. I'm not going to get too into it here since it's already hard for me to write about this part.

I started writing poetry again last year (in good 'ol 2019) when I was going through a very rough part in my life and it turned out pretty good so I posted it on Instagram and for some reason people liked it so I continued writing and posting it.

I changed a lot of the poems I posted in my first book because I wrote them with my bf in mind and it was too painful to post the original versions because it felt like such a sad reminder of what I lost and I didn't want to remember it.

Writing helped me stop cutting especially after I wrote a short poem about self-harm and cutting and my aunt saw it and she was really upset and she told me to find better coping methods, so I wrote more and soon enough I stopped self-harming completely and writing turned into my new coping mechanism.

I remember when my parents found my Instagram they weren't really happy with my poetry and stuff which kinda crushed me because my poetry is something that's really important to me, it's gotten me through a lot of rough times and I'm kinda scared of what might happen if I stop writing. Writing to me feels like water, I can't survive without it.

Now that I'm writing my 4th poetry book (I still can't believe I'm on my 4th book and it's barely been a year 0-0) I'm now mainly focused on connecting with my readers and trying to help while also trying to heal, this is really hard since I've been having a lot of breakdowns and relapses lately, which was why I made my 4th book.

To me my books feel like little time capsules of emotion and it sort of feels like my diary to be honest. It shows a lot of growth, but also a lot of pain and hardship I've faced. Re-reading my own work is enough to make me cry a lot because of how much emotion I weave into the words and also the memories that have been captured and preserved in each chapter.

People have asked me how I manage to put so much emotion into my poems and honestly I don't really know how I do it. In all honesty I blame my trauma for making it so deep lol (that will maybe be another chapter), the only way I can think to explain how I make it so emotional is I write when I'm going through a breakdown, or going through super strong emotions. I just write down what I feel in the moment on whatever scrap of paper I have next to me and later on edit it to rhyme and flow better before uploading it.

A lot of the time music plays a pretty big part in it, like I'm listening to a certain song it'll trigger me in a way that I feel the need to write down everything that's on my mind. That's why I have a lot of songs put into the chapters, I'll also write in a few lyrics that really hit me hard and the ones I relate to the most.

So yeah that's pretty much the reason why I write poetry and why it's so important to me. I'm sorry for not updating in months thing's have been pretty busy and I dunno, I guess I just lost motivation to write something other than poetry. I hope you enjoyed reading this!