When life gives you bitter fruit, write poetry.
Reading is an exercise in empathy; an exercise in walking in someone else’s shoes for a while.
When life gives you bitter fruit, write poetry. Not the kind of poetry that dances around pain or dresses it up in pretty little metaphors. No, the kind that bleeds, that rages, that bares itself with all its raw, jagged edges. There’s an honesty in taking the bitterness handed to you and transforming it into something beautiful, something that feels like a scream but is quiet like a whisper.
Some might see my words as melancholy, dreary, drenched in sadness, but this is my version of optimism, my way of making lemonade from these bitter lemons. I used to pretend the hurt didn’t exist, to push it down, to gloss over it with hollow platitudes, which struck me with the tragedy of teenage depression, back when it wasn’t something we spoken of so freely. Back when my pain was the unspoken elephant in the room, and we all choose to ignore it.
But now, after a decade of experience and hard-earned wisdom, I choose to sit with it, because those feelings we ignore always find a way to resurface, to demand attention. So I allow myself taste its sourness to let it stain my fingertips and teeth.
Life didn’t hand me lemons.
Life gave me grace.
Life gave me resilience.
Life gave me determination.
But, let’s be honest—it also gave me pain, handed to me in overflowing handfuls. And everything else? Everything else I carved out with my own hands, scraped together from the remnants of broken dreams and shattered expectations. I crafted my resilience from the nights spent crying into my pillow, my grace from the moments I chose kindness when bitterness would’ve been easier, and my determination from the times I was convinced I couldn’t take another step, but somehow kept going.
Strength does not mean hiding your weaknesses or never showing the cracks. True strength is vulnerability, it’s peeling back the layers and letting the world see you as you are — scared, bruised, bitter and open. Because it’s in those cracks that the light gets in. It’s in those fractures that we find the threads that connect us to one another, the invisible lines that make us feel seen, heard, understood.