How Writing Poetry Can Help Us Better Understand Who We Are
The secret is trying to impress yourself and no one else
It’s a nice feeling when someone reads my poetry. Even more so if they comment on it. Which they often don’t. (And that’s fine! We all have preferences about what we like to read.) Knowing others can appreciate what I’ve written is undoubtedly lovely, but I’ve learned over time not to rely on readers for validation.
Writing is a mentally taxing hobby. Unlike crafting or any other hands- or body-based leisure activity, you feel little stress relief while actually engaged in the act.
Honestly, the entire process is a masochistic endeavor. You have an intangible concept you desperately want to shape into some pretty words; you attempt to piece those words together; they appear pedestrian and dumb; you try again; finally, you arrive at something you’re either half-heartedly okay with or, rarely, a line that’s woven together in such a way, you feel as though you’ve discovered alien life. And then you read it again a few hours later and go “meh.” All of this to say: writing kind of sucks. And yet, I do it. Often even. And barely anyone reads what I’ve written and even fewer are moved by it.
So, why do I keep doing it? Why subject myself to this quasi-torture? While trying to unpack the answer, I think I’ve arrived at a surprising reason. And it helped me think of my writing — and myself — in a brand-new way.
When you think of your sense of self and the combination of attributes that define you as a person to you, these attributes are likely to be outward facing, dissected and categorized based on your relationships, or lack thereof, with other people. For example: how empathetic you are; how introverted or extroverted you are; your general temperament. Further, that sense of self is then warped by overarching notions of societal expectation. Though we may deny it, this cultural conditioning greatly affects our understanding of how we think about ourselves and what it means to live a “good life” or be a “good person” — with relation to everything from success to love to familial bonds. We’re constantly, even if subconsciously, scribbling away at an equation, plotting our lives on a kind of graph, wherein people we know (on the X axis) as well as the more abstract “society” (on the Y axis) hold tremendous sway over our idea of selfhood.
But writing, especially writing that you pour yourself into, but that no one reads, feels like this cosmic secret between you and no one else. It’s therapeutic, but its point isn’t to emotionally unload, like, say, journaling. It’s to create something. Something glistening and new that’s never before existed, and then, at least for me, to squire it away. When I finish a poem that I feel captures and gives unique voice to a specific ounce of the human experience, I feel, well, transcendent. Is that feeling amplified by a reader who is similarly moved by what I’ve written? Sure, but such a reaction isn’t necessary or even the point.
Being a writer — a poetry writer, specifically — allows me to be the sun inside my own solar system. To completely decouple how the world views me from how I view myself, at least when it comes to this very particular thing. When I sit down to elucidate a nagging emotion with a poem, my point is to move me. Just me, and no one else. I’m not weighed down by the prospect of others’ reactions. I toil away so I can impress myself. So I can open a tiny interior door to an expansive glowing galaxy, and then close it behind me. It’s a gift in a way, this butcher’s knife, which is able to cleave apart those knotted selves. I’m grateful for it all the time. Self-validation is elusive for me in nearly every other aspect of my life. Except here. Except with this.
Who would I be if I weren’t able to impress myself with my poetry? If my sense of my writing accomplishments was always directed outward? Well, I’d be someone else entirely. Not a lesser person, but certainly a different, more frustrated one.
Perhaps this “secret self theory” is a coping mechanism, because no one has actually ever paid me for my creative writing, and the truth of it could be that I’m just not very good. (Would I be able to live with such a professional assessment? Yes, I think so.)
But for now, I’m happy for that little pinch inside my chest, when the words assemble themselves in a way that feels otherworldly and perfect, and I can jot them down and then put them away. Ready to be revisited anytime I need to be reminded of what my brain is capable of conceiving.
