By When I was in my teens, I wrote poetry daily. Granted, most of it sucked. I was a very different person back then and my exposure to the world was limited to small-town upstate New York and my very religious mind-frame. But, that isn’t the point. The point was in the joy of just writing whatever came to mind.
A good chunk of what I wrote was steeped in the far-right, evangelical Christianity that I was saturated with at the time, but one of the things I learned then was that I could spew my darker emotions, my darkest views of the world, into my poetry as a means of processing those things without poisoning who I was.
It is a lesson I have carried on into my adulthood. A lot of folks who read my poetry ask me about it, about how my poetry doesn’t seem to reflect the person they think of me as. Often it is because poetry is my therapy. And it remains so today.
Sure, I can be fun or silly, or sultry in my poetry as well. But, I think it’s in my darker work that I shine the most, if that makes sense. I pour a lot of who I am into my words and I can spend a long time working over the words I choose to express myself…but sometimes a poem simply falls onto a page and there is no work, only emotion.
That’s why I consider it my therapy, and since going back to writing at least one poem everyday, I’m finding myself on better footing mentally. It feels really good.
Anyway, it’s Friday and payday here in my world, so I’m off to pay bills before starting the day job. I hope this weekend treats you well, Readers, with good food, better coffee and a bit of poetry to decorate your world.
Photo by Álvaro Serrano on Unsplash
Natalie J Case 
I can relate to your experience. I wrote a lot of bad poetry as a teen too and it was a place to put the darkness of Dad’s abandonment and my step-dad’s abuse. I might have looked in the mirror and thought I deserved the black eyes until I turned to the page. It was there in the writing that I found parts of myself to love. And in many ways it saved me.
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