Poetry, Prose, & Peonies

In order to find my voice again I needed to confront her, the child in the wilderness who’d been abandoned by everyone, including me. 

This year, I’ve been in an absolute drought in terms of my writing practice. Life’s demands became pressing, work exhausted me, and then I got injured. Again. I don’t know why this particular injury got me in a funk but I found myself drowning in depression just as the rain began to subside and the sun peaked out its warm face. 

I tried to use the time I needed to spend in bed to my advantage. I jauntily opened my laptop, cracked open a fresh Word document, and then stared into the eternal abyss of the blinking cursor. It seemed to be taunting me, daring me to put a word down. So I closed my page and watched Netflix instead. One day turned into a week, and that week turned into a month and I hadn’t written anything at all. 

Then I remembered the article I wrote a few years ago, When Bodies Cause Writer’s Block, and decided to take a look at how helpful my own advice would be. I implemented my recommendation to take a break from trying so hard to write and absorb as much information as I could. 

So I read. I read a lot of things. Mostly romance books since they were light, and gave me access to the summer I was missing from the confines of my bed. But I also had a craving to write, and would stare at the blank pages of my journal, unable to even “mechanicalize,” as I put it. I was so anxious that I couldn’t even think about opening a voice note or a video and recording my thoughts, because to be quite frank, I wasn’t having many thoughts about anything.

I just wanted to lose myself in doing something with my hands so I started two crochet projects I’ve yet to finish, sat for hours cutting out paper and collaging until my eyes hurt, and played enough video games to burn a hole into my cornea. I couldn’t change my environment or go outside, so I attempted to bring an essence of play into my day-to-day. 

It helped decrease some of the depression I was experiencing, but I also realized it was a layered issue. It wasn’t just the injury, the lack of sun, the passing summer, or the cancelled trip to Paris for my birthday. I was also deeply, crushingly lonely. 

Since moving to London, I’ve made a few friends, and they are wonderful people that added colour and shape into my life. But because of my injury, I was unable to go out with them. There were summer travel plans I couldn’t participate in. Life was life-ing and I was stuck at a standstill. 

But I wasn’t about to stay stuck.

With my new-found time off, mounting depression, and a desire to change my mindset, I started looking for group activities to join, classes to take, and began a journey to chat with as many people as I could online. I ended up making a new friend and following an Instagram account called Inflection Point London (IP). 

I loved the vibe of the page, the images that were shared, and the inspiring prompts that were posted. On the day I saw my doctor and found out I wouldn’t need surgery, I received a message from the IP admin inviting me to a bi-weekly writer’s group in Islington. 

Walking into that first session was nerve-wracking. I’d never really ventured into North London at all, had never been to Islington, and didn’t know anyone. I showed up to a random house and thought, this is how a Netflix documentary starts. But I couldn’t have been more wrong. 

Selin came down and introduced herself. She is one of the warmest people I’ve ever met. I was the first one there, and met everyone as they filtered in one-by-one. I wasn’t the only one who was there for the first time. All of us were writers, whether pursuing it as a career or just igniting a creative spark for fun. We sat together and wrote about the theme of the day, “held.” 

My hand burst across the page and I ended the first half of the session with five poems. Then we shared our work and it was so interesting to see how diverse each interpretation was. Every person had lovingly crafted either a poem or a short story with the idea of being held, or the things we hold, or the things that take hold of us. Then we dove into the second half where we viewed a photo series by a talented photographer, Ana Mendieta, whose images of body silhouettes in nature prompted a further five poems from my pen. 

There was something so primal about the experience, sitting and meditating on a word, on an image, and conjuring art from my own interpretation. But the sharing in that experience is what I loved the most. So I went back again, and again. 

Selin told me that she was putting together a writing retreat, and without hesitation I knew my answer was yes. Inflection Point evoked its namesake in my practice, creating a marked increase in writing from the moment I joined, and the thought of an entire weekend in the countryside to focus on my work was exactly what I needed.

I went into the retreat expecting to change my writing habits, to encourage a new flow, to change my environment with the same philosophy that helped me to write almost thirty poems in two months. What I wasn’t expecting was the deep, emotional work, the psychological shifting, the personal effect this retreat would have on me.

On the first day we all got to know one another, shared some musings, and began crafting bonds. I participated in some of the most stimulating conversations I’ve had in years. The group was small, but the vibes were astronomical, and I was so happy to be in the English countryside for the first time with these amazing people. 

There was one person in the group who I feel became the catalyst of my self-realization, in part because of their electric personality, and also due to the intensity of our conversations. Oscar and I spoke about childhood, identity, trauma, human rights, personal autonomy, the fear of being perceived, and the strength it takes to be outwardly celebratory of yourself. We spent the weekend off and on chatting, but kept circling back to one another. 

As with all other humans, I’ve suffered in my life. I’ve survived. I’ve done work to cut away the necrotic trauma that threatened to force the rest of my life down a septic road. After years of therapy, I assumed I dealt with the bulk of the traumatic experiences I’d had in my childhood, but it was through these intense conversations, I realized, perhaps I hadn’t sealed the tomb. I realized that there was a piece of me that died, the old facade of youth, that needed to be buried. I realized that as far as I’ve come, as much as I love my life now, that I needed to grieve the girl I used to be, and love her and cherish her for the dreams she had that I can no longer carry. 

These conversations worked in tandem with the retreat workshop planned by Seedlings Magazine which focused on childhood, play, and sanctuary. We began by collaging in the morning, ripping pages out of books, tearing photos into the shapes we wished, and sitting in a state of play, in a state of mess, in line with our inner child. While putting my piece together, I realized how much whimsy my inner child was missing. I found some images that pulled at my heart and created a piece I’ve now entitled ‘The Derelict Child.’ 

I was the derelict child, the one who could never be good enough, even when I was perfect. The person who needed to be more quiet, more still, more godly, more loving, less judgemental, less whimsical, less me. I wasn’t meant to be perceived because, “children are meant to be seen and not heard.” Over the years “children” was replaced by “girls,” and then “women.” And I know I’m not alone in that experience. I am not the first nor the last woman, girl, child, person, to be handed this atrocious mentality, and I am not the only survivor that has survived in silence. 

But I did not remain silent. I became boisterous, strong, and opinionated. Now, people know me as a chatty gal rather than the silent child with my nose stuck in a book. I was able to come out of survival mode and actually talk about the experiences I’ve had. But there was still something missing. 

The second half of the Seedlings workshop took us for a walk in the woods. We were thinking about Sanctuary, the place of safety and peace that we held as a child, and the things that drove us to need it. All of my conversations began flooding back, the discussions of my childhood circling my thoughts like water down a drain. I walked deep into the forest until I couldn’t hear or see anyone and I just felt the grief of who I used to be. I realized that the child version of myself was so sad, and that the only sanctuary she had was her imaginings, the ghost kingdom that she invented for herself to hole up in. 

In order to find my voice again I needed to confront her, the child in the wilderness who’d been abandoned by everyone, including me. Dressed in all black, it seemed suitable for me to throw a funeral for the girl I used to be.

So, I wrote an elegy to her – that child version of myself that held so steadfast to her silence that it choked my ability to write. I saw her and held her and cried for her and let her go.

Once the thoughts had cleared through and drained from my hand, the thunder clapped above me and I knew it was time to go. I grabbed my things and began to walk and watched as the blackening sky began chasing the bright day into rain. 

Oscar and I circled back to each other once more, reflecting on our musings we’d written in the woods, until the rain began pouring down upon us. It was freezing and yet I felt like somehow the sky had blackened just to wash my slate clean. It was an outpouring, as my feelings had been. As we were heading back, another friend of mine slowed down to walk with me and we were chatting about the workshop, the weekend, the whole retreat, when the sun began to peek out and a large rainbow shone above us, bending over the path back to the house. 

When we returned inside, we all dried off, and gathered to read out what we’d written in the woods. I was not planning to share until my two friends shared what they had written. Their vulnerability and candour opened the door for me to share the poem that had been building inside me for over a decade and I just let it spill out. 

My brain expected ridicule, shouting, and slamming doors, but instead I found openness, a shared sense of vulnerability and understanding, and relief washed over me. 

I had done the hard thing. I’d said it out loud. I had buried that child version of myself whose wonder died along the way. The sky didn’t crack open, even if I did a little bit. But being that open made me feel free. I realized that the reason I’ve been so blocked so many times, the reason I find it nearly painful to place pen to paper, is because there was a child version of me who was scared to be ridiculed and humiliated. I thought I laid her to rest, but she was waiting for me to see, that for her, silence was protection.

It felt like the rain and I had to fall in order for the rainbow to cross the sky.

I don’t know how to put into words the level of gratitude I have for this retreat, for the people who shared this space with me, and for Inflection Point. I’ve been stuck, time and time again, and maybe it’s because trauma is more than just in the mind. Trauma is in the body. Trauma is a living thing if you let it be. But it’s not my trauma anymore, it’s just the facts of my past laid out in plain sight. 

I don’t know how this revelation will settle in my life, but I do know I feel ready. I feel ready to let it go, to allow my pain and joy to collide and distill itself into a new creation that is far from who I am and what I’ve known. I let something go this weekend, and in the wake of this childhood version of myself, I found a woman reeling in the childlike wonder she was forced to give away, holding steadfast to new dreams and embracing the unpredictability of whatever these creations hold. 

And like Oscar said to me on the last night of the retreat, “maybe what you needed was to place that little version of you on a boat and let her sail away, because once it’s out there, it’s not yours anymore and you’ll have let it go.”