Why I write

The strange alchemy of words contained

I’ve been writing for as long as I can remember. When I was little, I’d gather stacks of my dad’s old printer paper, staple them together, and make little books filled with stories or lists of my favourite things. At five, I went through a phase of, let’s call it ‘creative exaggeration’ in my school notebooks — apparently, I had a grandma in Australia, got chased by a crocodile, and conjured up a baby brother for myself. The illustrations were equally bold: me with hair down to the floor and giant pink bows (unfortunately I had a wonky bowl haircut, classic 80s child).

Since then, the thread of writing has never really left me. I studied English Literature at university, trained at the London School of Journalism, worked with clients as a copywriter, and now, as a life coach, I help people ‘retell their stories’ in more empowering ways. Alongside all this, I’ve filled stacks of journals — crammed with insights, doodles, prayers, dreams, lists, angry capital letters, and moments of stream-of-consciousness reckoning. On the page, words that feel jumbled in my head can take on a clarifying, cleansing power.

But over the last ten years, I’ve realised that poetry has become my true home as a writer. If my journal offers a space for pouring out, poetry offers a container — a way to distill and focus on what really matters. Through becoming a mother, living away from home, surviving global lockdowns with small children, getting married again, grieving losses, navigating illness in my family, and finding ways to keep starting over, poetry has been the place I turn to. It offers just enough distance to glimpse beauty in a moment of pain, or insight in the midst of devastation. Most recently, it’s offered me a way of processing grief and trauma in a way that no amount of talking therapy (as beneficial as that has also been!) was able to do.

Form as liberation

Some see poetry as restrictive, its forms hemming us in. But for me, and of course for many writers, form itself can be liberating. It creates a doorway into difficult experiences, giving us just enough structure to face what might otherwise feel overwhelming. Poetry becomes a way of understanding the many selves we carry, not the biographical facts we share with the world, but the hidden truths. As Seamus Heaney put it, poetry is ‘a revelation of the self to the self…with the aura and authenticity of archaeological finds.’* For me, it has been a way to alchemise, compartmentalise, and sometimes even heal parts of myself my rational mind could never reach.

Hiding versus sharing - my continual conflict

Still, for years something was missing. I kept my words hidden, believing they were ‘just for me,’ or might be misunderstood, or worse still, understood, but just not liked (hello, rampant people-pleaser). That familiar inner saboteur whispering: Who do you think you are? (as I would ask my husband for the nth time: Are you sure this doesn’t make me sound like a w*nker?) But I’ve come to believe that if poetry is alchemy, then sharing is the second half of the process. Releasing words into the world — however few people see them, however much I want to hide under a rock afterwards — transforms them again. In the sharing, there’s beauty: in the courage it takes to put words out there, in the compassion we offer one another when our stories resonate, in the subtle way pain softens at another, deeper level when shared. It’s the true meaning of ‘catharsis’ perhaps, that cleansing or purging of emotional release when we express strong emotions and feel some kind of shift occur.

Which is why I still feel both nervous and excited that my first poetry chapbook, Sunlight Later, is finally out in the world. The vulnerability is real — much of my writing is deeply personal. But perhaps that’s also its power. Poetry has been, for me, what Gregory Orr so beautifully describes as ‘a voice that calls us forward, out of our sorrow and suffering’**. If my words can do that for even a handful of others, then sharing them matters.

Telling the truth

These days, I try to tell the truth in my writing (no Australian grandmothers) — to find the slant or message in an experience that daily life alone might not reveal. Writing shows me the white-hot heart of truth I most need to face. And sometimes, that same truth is exactly what someone else needs too. Maybe it resonates, or sparks a conversation. Or maybe it lands in a completely different way but in a way that can still unlock something in the reader.

So I’ve come to see there are two parts to this process: the writing itself, and the sharing of it. I know why I write and what it gives me. But why share? That’s a question that I’ve spent the last several weeks pondering - I’ll keep you updated!

*Heaney, S. (1980) ‘Feelings into Words’, in Preoccupations: Selected Prose 1968–78. London: Faber and Faber.
**Orr, G. (2002) Poetry as Survival. 1st edn. Athens: University of Georgia Press.