I am a poet. I pride myself in being able to say that now because a few years ago, I never would have had the courage to tell anyone that I wrote poems. Just because I can say it now, does not mean that if you ask me to read a poem, you will get to read one. I am more comfortable identifying as a poet, but I am not comfortable sharing my poems.
Reason number one as to why I won’t show you a poem is because I am insecure. I am insecure about my writing, and about almost every other part of my life. This means that when you ask to see a poem, you may not think it is a big deal, but to me, it’s a huge deal. What if you don’t like it? What if you think it’s terrible? What if you walk away from reading it and think that it’s the worst poem you’ve ever seen? What if you have an idea of what it'll look like, and it's nothing like it and you hate it?
Reason number two is that I am a perfectionist. I am never done editing my work. Whether it is a poem, or an article, or an essay, or any other piece of writing, I will always find something I want to edit. I will read my work over and over and over and still find something wrong with it. Every single time I read my work, I add a word, or a sentence, change a word, or delete something. When I reach a point that I am semi-comfortable with it, I will move on to the next piece, just to come back to the first one and find ten more things to change.
Reason number three is that my poems are the one place I can let every emotion escape onto a page. This means that most of my poems are dark and sad, because those are the emotions that most people don’t like to see. If you’re happy and smiling and laughing, people want to be around you. But if you’re sad, they don’t. So I've learned to bottle up the sadness and the pain and to tuck it away until I can let it spill onto a page and into an intricate piece of writing.
Reason number four ties into all the others, because since my poems tend to be dark and sad, there are only a few people I trust enough to read them and I know they won’t judge me. For these people, I can send them a poem and ask them to edit it for me, and they will send me back little changes or big changes, but they will also stand behind the work and say that it's beautiful. They will also understand that when I say I am writing, it means that my bottle of sadness and pain has gotten too full, and I need to let some of it spill out. So they wait, and send messages of encouragement, and wait until I am done and ready to show them. I know that even if I do not show them, they understand what it means when I'm writing and what it means when I have writers block.
So I am a poet. And I am very happily a poet. But I am an insecure poet, and I hope you do not expect to see one of my poems. If you want to see them, you'll have to wait until I trust you enough to send them to you. If you reach that point, I can only hope that you appreciate them as much as my brain does when they have finally escaped onto the page.
