the dead kid in me

Everyone has grief that they carry and sometimes we have anxiety and depression about anticipatory grief. The thing that I've found that helps is knowing we are all in this, someone has gone or is going through the same thing.

Poetry helps us with that too. Writing. Reading. As James Baldwin said, "You think your pain and heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, and then you read."

I think poetry is a way of carrying grief, but it's also a way of putting it somewhere so I don't always have to heave it onto my back or in my body. The more I put grief in a poem, the more l am able to move freely through the world because I have named it, spoken it, and thrown it out into the sky.

Everyone has grief that they carry and sometimes we have anxiety and depression about anticipatory grief.

The thing that I've found that helps is knowing we are all in this, someone has gone or is going through the same thing.

Poetry helps us with that too. Writing. Reading. As James Baldwin said, "You think your pain and heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, and then you read."

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— Ada Limón interviewed by Lauren Leblanc