VIRONIKA WILDE
What keeps me focused is needing to get these feelings out of me, like that's what poetry has always been. When I was a kid, I started writing poems because it was the only way that I felt heard, and it was the only way that I could take what was in me and then write it down and look at it and say, woah, that's exactly what I feel…that's exactly what's going on. I did a lot of other kinds of writing, I mean, my first two books, they weren't poetry. I have two books in the personal growth genre and, you know, I was really focused on helping people back in those days, you know, just trying to be inspiring, and for poetry, it's been like this excavation of trauma, this excavation of who it is that I am and what it is that really hurts me and trying to look at those wounds and making my own medicine.
Some of the poems in this book I have read them to myself, maybe a hundred times, maybe more, and like, every time I read them, something changes, and then, you know, the first, maybe like 30 times I'm crying and then the next 30 times I'm laughing, and then after that, I'm crying again, and then maybe I'm raging and it's this process of making your own medicine and then applying it to yourself, and that’s what poetry has been to me… So everything's really being controlled by my emotional wellbeing, which is really chaotic, but it's also really rewarding. Cause there's a way for me to come out the other side of these really tornado like emotional experiences that used to just take me for a ride and to have some kind of control over it, and that's what keeps me focused.
It's like a three-stage boxing match between me and the demons in my head, and with these poems, I feel like I'm kind of winning sometimes.
…I'm pretty sure when I was a kid, all this stuff that I'm having epiphany’s about right now this year, somebody probably said it to me and I probably ignored it. You know, like that's not what I needed when I was nine. I just needed somebody to come and give me a hug and see me….You know, see me as I was, and not for what they wanted me to be, and I think a lot of kids, even kids who get a lot of attention who are not as misunderstood as maybe I felt like I was as a kid… there's still, people who are seeing them like they're clay and (we're going to make a sculpture out of you). To me, a kid already has something, and it's just a process of discovery of what's in there and what that person's going to become. I think I just want to look at myself like that, you know, like, hey you're okay. I see you. I see you.