I’ve never had some revelatory or climactic story about the first time I knew I was a writer or poet, but the boxes and shelves with reams of notebooks, journals, and loose-leaf paper in the corners of my home paint a different story. I spent most of my extracurricular time during high school entering and winning poetry contests. I took several creative writing courses in college, but before publishing my first collection of poetry, being an author had not been a long-lived dream of mine.
Writing, and more specifically, poetry, has been a deeply spiritually driven compulsion to immortalize the musings that seem to drop into my stomach and wrap themselves around my heart and lungs. I cannot sleep or breathe without writing them. But my story is not about me. Nor is this my attempt to use my platform for discipleship. It’s simply a woman finally understanding where her intuition comes from and making space for the still-small voice of wisdom that calls her to use her gift to tell a bigger story.
That story is about perfect timing. More importantly, I think the moment you publish your first work is your ideal timing. I have referred to myself in more than one setting as a recovering perfectionist. Still, I want to note that my definition of perfection here isn’t about high-achieving or the progress-stalling meticulousness of striving for the unattainable. Instead, it’s about the ability of happenstance and coincidence to leave you speechless.