The Poem I Didn't Know I Was Writing About Myself
There are poems we write intentionally.
We know what they are about before the first word reaches the page.
Then there are the other poems.
The ones that seem to arrive from somewhere deeper.
You write them.
You read them.
You put them away.
And only much later do you realize:
I was writing about myself.
I have a few of those.
Perhaps more than a few.
When I wrote them, I thought I was writing about a person.
A feeling.
A memory.
A fictional voice.
Sometimes I thought I was simply trying to make something beautiful.
I didn't always recognize the person hiding inside the poem.
It took distance.
It took time.
It took becoming someone slightly different from the person who had written the words.
Then I would return to the page and suddenly see myself staring back.
That is one of the strange things about writing.
The page can know things before we do.
We think we are describing someone else, but our own fingerprints are everywhere.
In the choice of a word.
In the sadness we give a character.
In the particular kind of silence we keep returning to.
In the ending we refuse to give them.
Perhaps that is why writers leave fingerprints.
Not only in what they say.
But in what they cannot stop saying.
There are themes I returned to again and again while writing I Wrote So I Would Not Fade.
Silence.
Abandonment.
Longing.
Love.
Fear.
The desire to be seen.
The desire to disappear.
The strange contradiction of wanting someone to find you while being terrified of being fully known.
At the time, I didn't always understand why I kept returning to those places.
Now I do.
I wasn't simply writing about them.
I was living inside them.
Sometimes a poem becomes a mirror before we realize we are standing in front of one.
That realization can hurt.
It can also be freeing.
Because suddenly the words make sense.
The sadness has a name.
The metaphor has a history.
The person in the poem has your hands.
Your memories.
Your fears.
Your voice.
I think this is why I never wanted my writing to become too polished.
Polish has its place.
Craft matters.
Words matter.
But sometimes too much polishing can remove the fingerprints.
It can make something beautiful without making it true.
I wanted these pages to remain human.
To show where the sentences shook.
Where the thoughts repeated.
Where the writer was still figuring out what he meant.
Because I was.
I still am.
There is a certain vulnerability in realizing that a poem you once considered separate from yourself was actually telling your story.
You can no longer hide behind the metaphor.
The poem has already found you.
And perhaps that is the gift.
The poem says what you couldn't.
It carries the truth a little farther than your voice could.
It gives shape to something that existed only as a feeling.
That is what happened to me.
I thought I was writing poems.
In some ways, I was writing evidence.
Evidence that I had felt these things.
That I had loved.
That I had lost.
That I had been afraid.
That I had hoped.
That I was still here.
Maybe that is what writing ultimately leaves behind.
Not an explanation.
A record.
A collection of moments that say:
This happened inside me.
I was here when I wrote this.
I felt this deeply enough to give it words.
There are poems in my book that I understand differently now than when I first wrote them.
Some feel heavier.
Some feel kinder.
Some make me wonder how I could have known certain things before I was ready to admit them.
And some simply make me grateful.
Grateful that I wrote them down.
Because sometimes we forget who we were.
Sometimes memory becomes blurred by everything that comes afterward.
But the page remembers.
It keeps the version of you who wrote the sentence.
It preserves the feeling before time rearranges it.
And occasionally, years later, you return to that page and meet yourself again.
Not the person you are now.
The person you were then.
You may not recognize everything about them.
But you recognize the handwriting.
The voice.
The ache.
The hope.
And you realize that perhaps you were never writing about someone else at all.
You were leaving yourself a message.
A message you were not yet ready to understand.
Maybe that is why I still believe in poetry.
Because sometimes the poem knows us before we know ourselves.
Sometimes it tells the truth before we are brave enough to.
And sometimes...
we write a poem thinking we are describing someone else,
only to discover, much later,
that we had been writing our own name between the lines all along.
— Jean T. Hatoum
Author of I Wrote So I Would Not Fade and J’ai Écrit Pour Ne Pas M’effacer
If these words felt like home, the rest of the map is in the book.
And if you are able to, supporting my journey helps me afford the medication that keeps my own fractured ember burning.
I’m not finished surviving out loud. 🕊️
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