I Did Not Choose Poetry — It Chose Me

There is a particular kind of loneliness that lives in the chest like a stone. Not the loneliness of being alone in a room, but the loneliness of being surrounded by people and still feeling utterly untranslatable. For most of my life, I carried that stone without knowing what to do with it. I smiled at dinner tables. I answered emails. I said “I’m fine” with such conviction that I almost believed it myself.

Then one evening, sitting on the floor of my apartment with a journal cracked open across my knees, something strange happened. Words came — not perfectly shaped, not literary, not even particularly beautiful — but they came like a dam breaking. And when I read back what I had written, I recognized myself for the first time in a very long while.

That is what poetry does. It does not wait for you to be ready. It arrives in the middle of ordinary Tuesday nights and asks you to be honest.

Why Poetry Heals in Ways Other Words Cannot

I want to be careful here, because I am not a therapist and I would never reduce healing to something as simple as writing a few lines in a notebook. Grief is complicated. Trauma is layered. But I do believe, from the inside of my own experience, that poetry offers something unique that prose and conversation sometimes cannot.

Poetry works in compression. It takes an enormous feeling and finds the smallest, truest container for it. When you are in pain, your thoughts are often enormous and shapeless — a fog you cannot navigate. The act of writing a poem asks you to choose. Which word matters most? Which image tells the truth? That choosing, that deliberate reaching for precision, becomes a way of making meaning from chaos.

“The poem is a small machine for feeling,” someone once told me, and I have never forgotten it. You step inside it and it runs, and by the time it stops, something in you has shifted.

There is also the matter of permission. Poetry gives you permission to be fragmented, to be elliptical, to leave white space where the words run out. You do not have to explain everything. You do not have to wrap your experience in a tidy narrative arc. You can write three lines that mean everything to you and nothing to anyone else, and that is enough. It is more than enough.

Reading Poems When You Cannot Write Them

I know that not everyone feels called to write poetry, and I want to speak to you too — the one who flinches at the blank page, who says “I’m not creative” with the same practiced certainty I once used to say I was fine.

Reading poetry is its own form of healing. There is a phenomenon I think of as the recognition moment — that sharp intake of breath when a poet puts into language something you have felt but never been able to say. It is startling and comforting at once. It means: you are not alone in this. Someone else stood in this exact dark corner and found words for it.

When I was grieving a loss I did not know how to name, I read Mary Oliver obsessively. I read Lucille Clifton. I read Pablo Neruda in translation, imperfect and still devastating. I was not studying them. I was using them the way you use a hand extended across a gap — to steady yourself, to cross over.

“Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?” Oliver asked, and I sat with that question for three years before I could begin to answer it honestly.

If you are going through something hard right now, I gently invite you to find one poem. Just one. Let it sit with you like a quiet companion. You do not have to analyze it or understand every line. Simply let it be near you.

A Simple Practice to Begin

At Ink to Mend, we believe that the creative tools for healing should feel accessible — not intimidating, not reserved for people with MFA degrees or impressive bookshelves. So here is where I invite you to try something small.

The Object Poem

Find an object near you right now. A coffee cup. A worn shoe. A photograph. Hold it, or simply look at it, and ask yourself: if this object could speak about my life right now, what would it say? Write for five minutes without stopping. Do not edit. Do not cross anything out. Let the object carry the weight of whatever you are feeling, because sometimes it is easier to speak through something outside of ourselves before we can speak directly.

The Letter You Cannot Send

Think of something you have never been able to say to someone — or to yourself. Write it as a poem. It does not need to rhyme. It does not need to be long. It only needs to be true. You never have to share it. The act of writing it is the medicine.

The One True Thing

Open your journal and write at the top: “The one true thing I know today is—” and finish it. Just once sentence. Then write a poem that expands that sentence into a world. Even three lines. Even two. Start there.

You Already Have the Language

Here is what I want you to remember, especially on the days when healing feels impossibly far away: you already have language. You have been using it your whole life to describe what you see, what you love, what you fear. Poetry is not a foreign country — it is the oldest road home.

The poem does not ask you to be well. It asks you to be present. It asks you to sit down, pick up the pen, and tell the truth as best you can on this particular day. And in that small, courageous act of truthfulness, something begins to mend.

I am here, writing alongside you. Always.

With ink and tenderness — Hanan