How Poetry Saved Me

There was a time when silence was my language.
I carried it like a stone in my chest,
a silence so heavy it bent my back,
so deep it swallowed whole the parts of me
that wanted to reach for light.

The world spoke in voices I couldn't echo.
Smiles were mask I borrowed,
laughter, a sound I couldn't recognize as my own.
Inside, the shadows grew thick,
like a locked room with no key,
like a sky that refused the dawn.

Then came poetry
not as a sudden miracle,
but as a whisper I almost missed.
A line on a page,
a phrase carved from someone else's ache,
and I felt less alone.

I began to write in secret.
Words spilled like water breaking a dam,
sometimes jagged, sometimes soft.
My pen became a compass,
guiding me through the fog of myself.
Images gave form to the feelings,
Rhythms steadied the rush of my chest.
I wrote to breath,
to steady my pulse,
to say the things I could never say out loud.

In poetry, pain became more than pain,
it became pattern.
loneliness found a rhythm,
fear grew wings of imagery,
and survival turned into a story
I could carry without shame.
With each poem, I stitched myself together.
Not perfectly,
but with threads strong enough
to hold when the world shook.
I learned that my voice, once fragile,
was a flame that would not go out.
It could light a way forward,
not just for me,
but for others too.

Now poetry is not only my refuge,
it is my revolution.
It has taught me that language can heal,
that honesty can be brave,
that telling my story is another form of living.

I write because I survived.
I survived because I write.
And today, I stand not as someone broken,
but as someone  remade,
word by word,
line by line,
poem by poem.

Poetry did not just save my life.
It gave me back to myself.
It gave me a reason to live it out loud.