Upcoming News: My Poetry Collection and Perspective on Life

I’ve currently been working on a poetry book over the course of my entire teenage and young adult years. Ultimately, without realizing it, with my little works of poetry or prose I was making a collection of pieces right before my eyes. This is one of my upcoming projects and I am more than excited to see my work come to life. Even more so, to be read by an audience such as yourself.

I had so many works from over the past decade that I’ve wanted to publish, but I never had a name or even an idea of how to put them together. That’s when the name Beautifully Scarred came to life.

Beautifully Scarred is a collection of poems that are all my raw and unfiltered thoughts about the complexities of life; the ups and the downs, the despair, the love, and the heartbreak. It represents the times I couldn’t take it anymore and the times when I didn’t want to give up. It is my life in a nutshell expressing every emotion and significance that broke me, bent me, and put me back together.

At first I wrote these collections to get through my own emotions and my own pain. But, as an adult now, I realize that my pain wasn't lonely. There are so many people out there who have experienced what I have experienced or are going to. I wanted to be the representation that life in all its hell is absolutely not worth giving up. Beautifully Scarred is for anyone that has at least once thought about ending it all and continuing anyway despite the battle ahead.

I hope to have this book complete in the upcoming year, but for anyone interested here is a piece that I’d like to share:

Excerpt of Beautifully Scarred:

I’ve always begged to be rescued. To be dug out of the grave that I was pushed into. My arms weren’t strong enough to dig my way out. My helplessness wasn’t enough to give me the hope to break out of the coffin myself. I just waited…and waited.

For someone to help me. For someone to take me away from the darkness. For someone to release all the pain and suffering I’d endured. For someone to give me enough strength to even want to try. But, the longer I waited, I sunk deeper and deeper into the ground. It brought me to the harsh reality that no one was ever going to save me.

That if I wanted to get out, I’d have to do it alone. And that hurt more than being in the grave itself. Because I'd been abandoned all my life, I just wanted support. And somehow I had to find a way to have the will to continue this unbearable fight alone.

So I did, with every fragment of fight I could muster. I did, I dug myself out. Not for anyone, but myself. Because, I deserved a happy ending.

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Sometimes life isn’t as crystal clear as it may seem and a lot of the time plans do not go the way you’d expect. I’ve started to learn that more and more everyday. Life is like a crop, you don’t necessarily have control over it, but you can add variables to make it less brutal. You can give it sun, you can water it, and make sure the soil is good enough for it to grow. But, you can’t always determine the outcome. In the same way, when events happen in your life, you can’t control it all the time. But, you can make use of what you have and try to keep moving despite it. You can continue to assess how to handle it.

I never want to be remembered as someone who experienced terrible trauma in my childhood and throughout my teenage years. I want to be remembered for how I handled it. For how brave I continued to be despite everything I’d been through. I want to be the person that people can look to as an example that shitty things don’t have to ruin you, they can simply break you. But, you have the power to put the pieces back together.

I had a hard time coming to terms with the fact that even if the things people did affected me so young, I could no longer blame them for my failure. I could only blame myself. If I didn’t win in life, it was my own demise not because of someone else. And that responsibility felt terribly unfair. But, I got tired of being bitter and waiting on the people who hurt me to pick up the pieces. I got even more tired of being depressed, hateful, and horribly lonely.

Self reflection sometimes requires terrible pain and this pain today is a reminder that I am the maker of my own story. I want a good life. I want my dreams to come true. That requires effort, work, and even more pain. I used to think those things were impossible for me. Too far to reach because of how unbearable it was to even breathe, let alone write. And here I am proving to myself that I can.

I’m nowhere near being the person I want to be or being the writer that I will become, but making small strides to be that person everyday makes a massive difference. And if I can do it, anybody can. It just takes one final breath and the determination to find your peace despite the unknown.