If you have been living under a rock, you may not be aware but I have been writing, editing and releasing a collection of poetry. In fact I am releasing three this year! This is explaining the first (And essentially “darkest” one) and what you may need to be aware of.

Before I begin to jump into some subjects of this book here is your trigger warning. The subjects that are in this book and what I am about to talk about are hard for most to deal with. A lot of us have dealt with them and lived them and a lot of us just find they are hard to form opinions because there is a stigma around them. There is various reasons for me to have written this particular collection however the subjects here are tough for most to read or accept too.

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One of the reasons why I wrote this collection was for myself. That is because apparently I had a lot of feelings that I needed to express. One of the subjects that has a dominant theme in the categories would be that I write about domestic violence. If you aren’t familiar with it, I was in an abusive relationship from the time that I was 18 to just after I turned 20 years old. It sucked. It was hard. I never really talked about it. And this was a way for me to release and spread how I felt. I know that people too who maybe felt like I could were unable to understand why this happened to them, They may have felt like they deserved it like I did, or they make have been in similar situations too. I feel like by writing a lot of these things I have let myself understand that these things did happen and they were real.

Another subject that I talk about is drug abuse. A lot of us know what it may be like to have family members who have been addicted to various means or maybe themselves. When I was in high school towards my final years I loved to take ecstasy. Was it a problem? Sure. Did no one know about it? Not really. I just hid things from people and made it seem fine. Doing it at parties or with friends or even working at Burger King with a few people working or the manager too. This is something that I talk about too in this particular blog in detail.

These poems also touch on subjects from a self harm, bullying, death and losing family members, illnesses like cancer and depression. I am not going to sit here and say I have a diagnosed mental health issue. I never sought help and I dont feel like I needed to. Maybe one day but for the time being I just never did. I feel like when I write it was something similar to throwing something away. I felt like I was able to write how I felt and that I was giving a weight that has been weighing me down.

I wanted to write this selfishly for myself however I have a feeling that maybe, just maybe, others will also feel like they too feel that they too will be to understand though that there is more people out there who also feel the way that they were feeling. So often when we are in situations we all bottle things up, and we blame ourselves. We feel like we are alone. Due to the stigma of these subjects people either wont take us seriously etc. Not this time. I am writing this as a way of exposing and hopefully breaking barriers that these situations are more known than we may want to lead on to be.

I know that some people are not going to be interested in this. That is totally okay too! I know that this book is not for everyone either. I have put a lot of disclaimers in and trigger warnings including some sub-subjects in the table of contents. That way you can choose if you want to read particular chapters or skip through them. Kind of think about the popular Chicken Soup for the Soul books and how they ranged in many subjects and what not. Now a days people like to have the trigger warnings so that they can prep themselves or skip readings. That is what I am doing here. I want people to be fully aware that what they are reading may effect them mentally and be challenging for them to continue.

I also want to be blunt and harsh when I wrote them too. I didn’t want to write about situations where they seemed to sugar coats them. Domestic abuse, death, feeling lonely are all situations where they should not be sugar coated. They are supposed to be hard to deal with. I didn’t want to make a domestic violence filled relationship seem to be “That bad” because it was. It was bad. It was something that took me a very long time to get over and a very long time to come to terms with it.

I hope that when this book goes out into the online world that many too can find some sort of peace in reading it. You are not alone. Your feelings are valid and that you are fully able to feel whatever way you are feeling. I also want to show that through The Darkness comes light. There is a way to get past anything life throws at you and if writing poems like myself are a way to cope so be it, if you need to seek professional opinions and treatment, that is also alright too! There are many ways with dealing with life’s darkest and hardest subjects. This is my way of dealing with them.

If you would like to purchase the book you are more than welcome to do so here, though the link is for the Canadian site you may need to be redirected to the Amazon sited for your Country to be able to purchase a copy for yourself!