I’m ten days deep into a challenge I gave myself for National Poetry Month to write one poem a day and post it, rough or not, all month long. So far, I’ve managed to post daily at my IG poetry page, and “almost” daily here at Substack on a poem page. I’ll be doing a ten-day wrap up poetry post at my website today.
What has surprised me about this challenge is that it has been easier than expected. I thought it would be incredibly hard to write a poem a day, but it hasn’t been so far. Yes, some days I’ve been late about it. Some days the poems I have written and shared are rough bits of words and I feel like they suck, but yet, somehow, writing them and decided it’s okay if they suck even when I’m posting them has taken the edge off of writing them.
Not sure how that would make sense, but I think it’s kind of like how I feel about being on stage. I used to be terrified of being on stage, and then after challenging myself to take part in school plays and auditions, and then continuing to do that off and on as an adult, I finally realized, I’ve already made a fool out of myself a hundred times, or a thousand times, so … if I do it again, I know I can handle it.
I’ve fallen backwards on stage, feet up in the air, backside to the audience in front of over a few hundred people for a special presentation for a Vacation Bible School “Funday Sunday.”
I’ve fallen forwards getting onto a stage.
I’ve ummed, nervous-laughed, blushed, cried, and forgotten my lines on stage in front of hundreds of people.
I’ve also had a few times when my everything came together and went right, when I cried on purpose for a character part and had the audience cry with me, when I did a pratfall on purpose and made an audience laugh on purpose, when a song has come together just right with the praise team at my church.
Somehow, in all of these stage moments, I have lost the edge of the fear that used to grip me. I’m not going to say I’m never afraid, but it’s not the same. Fear doesn’t get to own me on stage. I mean, yes, if you saw me at my first open mic night in 2019, you might have thought it did. I still struggle some days, but again, it doesn’t own me like it once did.
Fear has continued to be a challenge in other areas more prominently - phone calls, interviews, talking to someone I haven’t talked to in a while, attempting to write song lyrics, sharing my poetry, etc.
Somehow, writing poetry drafts and sending them out into the world has helped me overcome fear this month, much like going back to the stage again and again when I’ve been afraid. I’m less afraid to share my poems, even if they aren’t all as pretty as I would like them to be, even if other people don’t like them. It’s okay. I like them; even in their rough shapes, I like my poems. And that’s enough.
This comes down to why I write them. I write them because they give me a different way to express my thoughts, my imagination, my faith, and my creativity. When I send them out into the world, yes, I would like to be read, but I can’t expect anyone to love my poems the way I do, or to get out of them what I get.
The creative moment, the faith part of actually writing something down, the hopeful part of sending it out into the world, these are the good moments, the life-giving, wonder-filled moments.