I focus on the end of my first engagement in my current poetry series. I explore pain and devastation associated with that event, as well as my evolution and growth after. The relationship—a bad one for most of its duration—ended three years ago. And I’m just now ready to put some of it into words.

I started attempting to write about it around a year after the relationship ended and quickly saw that I couldn’t. If I turned a piece from that era into my college creative writing professor, she would mark it with a big, red “F” and tell me to try again—with good reason. A character must change to create a good story, and this character had experienced absolutely no change.

The hurt and anger and devastation were still raw, and I hadn’t even begun to heal. I remember thinking to myself at that time, “I’m not healing, and I don’t want to.” The pain was still too intense to think of it for any length of time.

But at some point, that hurt began to fade just enough to allow me to think it through. As I processed, I wrote poetry. At first, I focused solely on that relationship and that relationship’s pain. But as time went on, my subject matter expanded to other romantic connections and how they impacted me. I even explored the female friendship that became my salvation in the end. I was surprised when I began to write about my hopes for future love and even more surprised when I began to write of good moments from the relationship.

Eventually, I realized the end of that relationship was the best thing that could have happened to me. It brought feelings of insecurity, distrust, and pain into my life. And worst of all, it made me feel inadequate and less-than.

The most surprising and beautiful gifts that came out of the relationship’s end are the absence of those feelings in my life and a promise to myself that I will never let another person bring them back into it. And, honestly, I believe poetry gave me those gifts. Putting my feelings into words revealed insights I wouldn’t have seen otherwise. Today, I’m thankful for poetry.