How I Overcame Sorrow in My Writing

By Junelie Velonta
HAPI Youth Ambassador | HAPI Scholar

In the afternoon that I wrote this, I came across an interesting Facebook post circulated by my writer friends. Though I had no way to check its source, people say that it was from Mary Oliver’s  “Blue Pastures.” It talked about sorrow, something many are familiar with, and sometimes, though unaware, are attracted and attached to.

Until around 3 years ago, I used to write exclusively about sadness, loneliness, abandonment, and a whole list of other sad things. I thought, at the time, that they were the only emotions I could write about; after all, they were the emotions I experienced the most.

So, from the ages of 15 to 21 – around seven years of my life – my writing did not grow. In a sense, neither did I. When you focus too much on the emotions you want to write about but not on how well you write them, your works become stagnant as you occupy yourself too much on “speaking” and leave very little space to “listen.”

Listening is a large part of writing (though not many people may be aware). The best poems, after all, only show their full strength when given a voice. Most of the best modern works are joys to “read aloud” in your mind, and if you actually orate them, you’d find that the syllables drip into words and the words flow into sentences; paragraph after paragraph becoming a living river or a tranquil lake. But you can’t hear the river when you’re breaking down by the waterside.

My first true poem (that is, the first poem that I was proud of making), was not about sadness or grief or any other sad thing. It was about moving forward, and moving on. I wrote it in January of 2020. By my standards today – more than 2 years later – it was an amateurish take: its rhythm was awkward and its pace needing many meetings with an editor. But, among all things, it was my breakthrough point, a start of something new. It was growth.

After that, I began experimenting. The thing about achieving breakthroughs is that doing it once does not guarantee that you’d be on the stairway up right away. You need to speak as well as listen. You need to read as well as be read. You need to understand not just what you are writing, but also yourself: What do you want to write about? Who do you want to read it to? Are you speaking in your own voice, or are you imitating someone else’s? Who are you? What do you want to do?

It was only after answering those questions did I begin to be sure of who I am as a writer. Talent is given to many. Without cultivation, however, talent wilts and dies, which is why it is not uncommon for a high-school batchmate or a college acquaintance, whom many have considered talented, to post in social media about how “they were so good then, what happened to them now?”

In many ways, the best and most remembered pieces of literature are those that broke through sadness, pain, and showed a path forward: a future. Sure, you can write about sadness, about stagnancy, about rot, but that is not all there is to life. See the long-dead carcass in the forest, but also see what goes beyond it. See the flowers growing beneath the bones. Writing, after all, is about growth.