Although I’ve made up random songs on the fly to entertain myself (mostly while cleaning or driving) – I’ve never been much of a poet.
And then BAM, midway through 2023 I had one really terrible, no good, bad client who was incredibly manipulative, belittling, and made me feel like I didn’t know what I was doing. This led to a bout of self-doubt, confusion, and bad anxiety – which I fuelled into poetry as a way to journal my feelings and get it all out of my head. It’s a little ironic that this situation made me more creative, isn’t it?
Anyways… I dove down deep, really really deep, and I wrote some poems.
My anxiety was bigger than me so I started going back to therapy to deal with it, and that’s when I discovered that I had ADHD. Women are often diagnosed later in life because the signs are not always as obvious. For me, the hyperactivity part is in my mind, not my body.
I wrote over 100 poems in about a month. Never been much of a poet but I suppose ADHD can make one do strange things. I managed to tap into some deep flow state because I had too many feelings that needed a place to belong. Flow state, obsession, tomayto, tomahto. The hyperfocus was real.
Most people seem to struggle with sharing their feelings in a constructive way. Once upon a time, long ago, I tried to contain my feelings too hard but my job was too demanding, high stress, too much work, very little reward. So the feelings would either just explode out of me, or I would show no emotion at all. “The person with the least EQ that I’ve ever seen in my life!” is what that boss told me.
So while I would offer them a mirror, what I know to be true is that talking about *feelings* has never come easy for me. Maybe I’m not very good at talking about them, but perhaps having a blog made me more open to writing them down.
Initially I had no intention of sharing my poems, because some of those thoughts were really dark – but I continued writing my poetry. Although they became few and far between, I started feeling lighter when I realised how cathartic and therapeutic writing was for me.
Get those feelings out, don’t hold them in. If they are truly horrible, you can write them on paper and burn them later. You never have to read them again. If you never want to, you never ever have to think about those painful memories, ever again. But if they are good, you can cherish them forever immortalised in written form, like a letter to yourself.
And while I may be scratching old wounds of my own – writing it all down helped me in so many incredible ways. So I thought maybe you could give it a try too.
Who knows? Maybe the next modern-day TS Eliot is hiding somewhere deep beneath your feelings.
The first poem I’ve published is called Conversations with God, If you like poetry, please feel free to give it read and let me know what you think!
Header image by Thought Catalog.
