Feelings & Poems is a mental ebook I released on the 9th of April, Easter Sunday.
This post will be a sneak peek into how the ebook all started. So let’s dive into a chapter of my life, precisely two months ago.
One thing I learned earlier when writing was never to take criticism in a defensive light. I have a post on Criticism ¿¿¿ in which I shed more light on the topic. Reading it might help you gain more perspective on handling criticism.
In that post, I speak about another post which I read that day that said,
‘Never let criticism get to your heart or compliments get to your head.’
Since that day, I adopted that philosophy, it wasn’t always easy. I tried to always remind myself that criticism made my work better so I tried to always detach emotional sentiments from criticisms I got.
So I asked a friend who was also a writer to read a piece I wrote for publication and tell me what she felt about it.
One thing I loved about this said friend was how we were able to establish this in our relationship. We had an unspoken agreement to always be truthful to one another when we asked for feedback on our writing.
Emphasis on truthful and not hurtful. The truth doesn’t always have to be said in a way that is mean or destabilizing.
She told me that the piece was nice but it felt detached. Like I was inviting people in to see me than closing the door once their hands wrapped around the doorknob. [These weren’t her exact words but for some reason, this analogy explains it better.]
At first, I was a bit confused and didn’t understand so I took some space from the piece and came back to read it a week later. This time not as the writer but as a reader and I understood what she meant.
The work was good but it lacked that deep emotional connection. So I decided to try to write short snippets analyzing various emotions.
I didn’t have the time back then to actively do this during the day so I started writing them down on my notepad just before I fell asleep.
I would pick an emotion and discuss it while also adding a bit of my experience into it if I had any.
This became a fun little task for me but I would always be appalled when I wrote some pieces so dark I was surprised I could come up with them. I always told myself that I would never post it so it didn’t matter how deep I got or how close to home it hit.
What started as a night-time ritual evolved into an activity I did whenever I felt an intense emotion or I needed a break from writing all day. I always wrote in my notes and when I was outside and my note wasn’t near me. I would use my Notepad app.
Soon after this evolved into short poems although I couldn’t quite name them, I didn’t bother with this. All that mattered was that I was writing. Soon enough, my friend approached me saying she was beginning to see changes in my work.
This positive reinforcement made me all the more excited to continue. Then I took a course on the strategy of content marketing.[ Which is such a great course by the way]
It was this course that gave me the final push to turn this little experiment into a poetry ebook. I was more sceptical as the last time I had encountered a poem was in high school and I hadn’t read a lot of mental health poetry books but I knew that I was going to do it either way.
I had to keep on reminding myself that it didn’t have to be perfect and that I just needed to focus on delivering. It was one of the reasons why I left the publicizing of the ebook until almost a week before the release even though all the promotion materials were ready a month before.
Every time I opened my laptop to write about it or post about it, I froze and changed my mind. I kept telling myself there was no need to publish it and I was doing fine by just writing it and keeping it to myself.
After much procrastination, I just decided to send out the post talking about the ebook and that’s what really set the ball rolling as there was no going back and there was no way I was going to fail to rise to the occasion.
While the fear of how successful the ebook will be crippled me, the thought of not sticking to my word haunted me more and that’s how Feelings & Poems was born.
You can get your free copy of the ebook below.
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