Back in 2010, I went through an extraordinarily painful event. My high school sweetheart and I, who had gotten married in 2003, split up and got a divorce. In the beginning of that painful process, my emotions were difficult to understand and control, and they had a funny way of busting out when I least expected them. My coping mechanism or strategy or whatever you want to call it, was writing poetry. I started a blog at freestylehaiku.com, and over the coming months, I wrote dozens of poems.
The website and the project has continued. It is seen me through happy times and sad, easy times and difficult, and it is helped me document and crystallize my emotions. I think it actually helped me understand my emotions more clearly, because I had to try to find simple words to express them. I’ve identified different stages or theme that I felt fit with my life at certain times, and I collect the poems that I write in those times into chapters.
In the past 10 years, I’ve written over 1200 poems, in about a dozen chapters. I must admit, that sometimes what I lack the energy, I don’t write poems as much as I would like. In 2020, for example, with the pandemic, I wrote far fewer poems than I would’ve expected. The challenges of daily life, the emotional challenges I face with my partners, and the ethical and social questions that the pandemic highlighted seems to have drained a lot of my writing energy.
That’s okay though, because the only person that I have to answer to in regards to this project, is myself. I have no deadline I have no requirements and it doesn’t matter if I write a poem or 10 tomorrow. It’s very freeing, but at the same time, I do want to write more. I want to write my poems regularly.
Perhaps as this pandemic ends, when I’m once again going out and doing things, hanging out at coffee shops, and meeting new people, I’ll find it difficult not to write poetry in every waking minute. I do have plans for the project and the poems, but it requires a lot of work, and right now I just don’t have the energy nor do I have the time to put into it.
The important thing is that I keep the project close to my heart, and I keep working on it. Someday in the distant future a millennia or two from now when I pass on to the next great adventure, how do you so happy that I started this project, and I doubt I’ll care much if I hit a million poems, hundred million poems, or only 10,000 poems.