#1 or Re-Discovering Writing With Poet Rupi Kaur

I fell in love with the poetry of “insta-poet” Rupi Kaur on social media nearly a decade ago. As adult life got more and more busy, somehow life swept me away and I didn’t see much of her publications in the past years.

I re-discovered her only recently through a writer friend, who suggested to try out Rupi’s writing prompts. This collection of guided writing prompts were published in her 300 page book “Healing Through Words” with the intention — as she writes on her website — to “foster creativity, encourage celebration of the Self, help process trauma, loss, heartache, love and healing.”

“Healing is not really a linear journey. It’s messy and there are constant ups and downs. I initially started writing as a form of self-care and healing, not necessarily to become an author.” -Rupi Kaur

So I gave it a try and got hooked on her prompts and exercises, and spend the past weeks with filling the empty pages of my orange notebook. Gosh, it felt freeing! It also took my mind off of not being able to work thanks to French bureaucracy.

Since all I have is free time, I started to read interviews with Rupi about writing and expressing our Selves through our craft (thought she says writing as a craft is just a myth), and how we can use it as a tool of healing.

Chicken soup for the aching soul

I selected a random prompt every day to write about, and worked on them one day at a time in the silence of my apartment. For my greatest surprise, lots of forgotten memories resurfaced.

I recalled a day when I went into therapy in my teens and my therapist couldn’t provide me with her own comforting words, instead she suggested me a poem.

I don’t even know what the poem was about or who was the artist who set it on paper, but the feeling it awakened in me: the ease of the pain of not being alone, that there’s someone else out there who feels the same way.

I longed to be able to express my pains in such a beautiful way. And thought I never felt like my therapy was successful or that it really worked for me, one thing I am really grateful for is that my therapist understood very quickly that I’m not a person of spoken words but rather of the written. So from week to week, I had to go back to her with a journal entry I wrote about a certain topic she gave me.

These journaling home works brought the writer out of me, and in a sense, my therapist was my first reader and her compliments on my writing style and the words I chose to describe my memories and feelings always made me feel good about myself.

Later I stumbled across a book on my aunt’s shelf. A book I was trying to find for ages in the bookstores and libraries but couldn’t.

It was there in front of me all along: Franney and Zooey by one of my favorite authors, J.D. Salinger.

I was madly in love with his book, The Catcher in the Rye. As for many teenagers, it was my Bible. Then I managed to get hold of all his collected works that got translated to Hungarian and discovered a new style of poetry through his character Seymour — the Japanese haiku.

Even back in high school, I firmly believed in “everything happens for a reason”, so guess who took it as a sign when our literature teacher wrote our next topic on the white board: HAIKU?

Ding deng dong! You won! It was me.

The next day I got myself a small notebook that fits in my pocket and a tiny pencil I could attach to it. I carried it with myself everywhere and crafted my haikus while I was waiting for my bus, or riding home, or just sitting in my window sill on a rainy day with my kitten purring on my lap.

How I miss those days! Anyway, I was too shy to show them to anyone, and so I uploaded them on a Tumblr page I dedicated only to my haikus where no one knows me.

From time to time, the memory of my haikus returned from the dark places where my brain banished them and haunted me, making me wonder what could have happened if I would have decided to share them with the world back then?

So now, about 15 years later, here’s my very first (and very badly written) haiku: