Poetry : Words from the Soul

My love for books came from a young age. I know that might sound cliche but it is true and I hold up my hands to it. When I was two years old I 'attempted' to read storybooks to my parents (probably with not much success.) As I grew up this passion inside me only continued to grow as I did. It was a world I just could not escape.

At around 9 or 10 years old, I did the only reasonable thing to do as a book-obsessed child, scan all 210 books that I had in my 3 bookcases into Goodreads. In that moment I had never felt more like a librarian. Then came along my date stamp, which I used to make little notes to know exactly who I was 'lending my books out to' as if I wasn't the only one there.

With my constant reading habits, my imagination and possibilities were being heightened in every single way and it pushed me so much further with the way that I wrote. Short stories soon became my new favourite thing. I was able to create my own far off worlds and magical adventures, straight from my fingertips.

You may be wondering, but Emily, where are you going with this post?

The truth is, that throughout these many years of surrounding myself with books and urging myself to create my own magic through words, I had found my own safe space in the world. The place between book pages, the smell of fresh ink on paper and the soft sound as you turn a new page ; they had all become a new home for me. With this it only felt right that as I continued to grow up, my stories would evolve with me.

Magical adventures became emotional lines about truths I had discovered in the world. My favourite genre switched from fantasy to contemporary and mystery as I lost my sense of imagination and faced a harsh reality. But alongside this, I found a sense of belonging reading between lines of poetry. Not historical poetry from centuries gone that tell tales of love and war (although they are equally as interesting to analyse at times) but instead my own rhythmic lines, flowing from the overwhelming pool of thoughts in my mind.

With all of that in mind, I wrote down all of the poems brewing in my mind into my notes section. Whether that was halfway through a bus journey when I had a sudden spark of inspiration, or perhaps sitting at lunch, thinking over the days events. Sometimes I would write at my lowest points and sometimes at my most joyous. Every emotion that I felt, my poetry reflected just as strong. It became the perfect tool for harnessing every strong emotion that I could not seem to contain. Across the year I started to realise that I was, as I put it in my own words, 'Finding my inner butterfly'.

'Finding my inner butterfly' to me meant daring to let my soul fly. Taking a chance to find who I was and who I really wanted to be. That meant exploring who I was as a person, who I wanted to stay in my life and what journey I wanted to go on. So it only felt right that this is what I would name my first poetry collection.

Whilst it is not yet published (or might never be), it is a collection of 35 of my most emotional and thoughtful poems I have written, and I can only hope that I will be able to share it one day.

But in the end, the most important message from all of this is that if you have a deep enough passion, do not let the hardships and experiences of life sway you away from it. Instead, guide them in, accept them, embrace them and truly use the essence of them to create something even better than you could have before. Maybe you'll try your hand at poetry after this too.