Member-only story
Finding Emotional Resuscitation Through Poetry: Grief, Holidays, and Identity
You see them, right? They’re right around the corner, coming faster each year — holidays.
During the holidays, emotions build up, sometimes leaving us feeling trapped with complex feelings that aren’t always easy to name and express. It just doesn’t feel good.
The pain of losing a loved one, the end of a relationship, or navigating perceptions of our personal identity — these emotions can be paralyzing. Finding an outlet for them is not only wise but crucial, and poetry offers a powerful way to release and reshape these feelings into something constructive.
Last year, I found myself overwhelmed by grief. It always starts around mid-September, my late father’s birthday. Surprisingly, last year, I stumbled into poetry. I had no place to put what I was experiencing. It was deeper than a 50 minute therapy session, and significantly more complex and finite, so I did what I know to do. Write. At first, it was just a way to vent, but soon it became something more — a way to breathe creatively in an emotive, short-form string of words full of symbols, juxtaposition, metaphors, abstract thought, humor, quirkiness and more.
The first poem I published on Medium was “How Heavy Is Your World.” After publishing that piece, I began to see a pattern in…
