The Beauty in Pain: How Poetry is Helping Me to Heal

Last weekend, I took myself out after spending a lot of days holed up inside. It was probably one of the hardest things I’ve done in a while because the state of my mind making it difficult to do basic tasks.

I went to my favourite bookstore and spent a good while browsing the poetry section. I already went in there in mind to get a book by my favourite poet, Lang Leav. I ended up leaving with four books – Love and Misadventure and Sea of Strangers by Leav, The Space Between Us by Courtney Peppernell and Zack Grey, and Wild Embers by Nikita Gill.

So far I have made my way through Love and Misadventure, which had me reminiscing and forced me to address some painful moments. But it gave me comfort, that someone has felt what I have been feeling. It gave me the inspiration to write and write a lot more.

But it is Gill’s book that challenged me. She writes with a ferocity and honesty I haven’t experienced before. It hurt me. It scared me. It forced me to confront parts of my past I had buried deep within myself.

The way she writes about trauma, women, and independence is so refreshing. With every word I felt just as empowered as I did the pain of confronting hard truths.

It’s the way she writes about fairytales and greek goddesses reimagining their strength. It was her poems, Alice and Wonderland, Artemis and Athena in that series that really struck a chord with me. Alice is a fighter, a fighter for change and she fought tirelessly. Artemis cannot be placed into the box you define for her, it just causes her to fight against it more. She always finds her way back from pain. And Athena, she’s the girl who is lost in stories, there is a softness about her.

I was like that. I remember being like that. That version of me feels a lifetime ago. I see glimpses of her on some days. I am trying to get back to being her. To be back to that strength. Nikita’s words are helping with that.

Poetry helps with that. I struggle to read fiction and I can’t read the political and historical non-fiction I used to read in a normal world because it’s just too hard to read about how hard the world is or has been.

Wild Embers has an honesty in its poems that I didn’t know I needed to hear. Gill’s words tell women we are enough, and we are most powerful when we see that in ourselves. She tells us we are not too much. The very poem with that name was something I needed to see. Too often women are told that they are too much. That we feel too much, that our vulnerability and passion is too much to be handled. She makes this perceived weakness a strength, that there is courage in this.

There is something beautiful in the love and pain of poetry. There is real life in those words, and like music, it helps me feel my feelings. It is a therapy that helps me write and get all of those thoughts and feelings out of my system for that small moment.

I just hope I can start writing happier things again because, despite the beauty in pain and the bravery it takes to be that vulnerable, I want to be able to write happier words because I know I can.