Hurt and Healing- A Poetry Contest

I am entering another poetry contest. It’s titled Hurt and Healing; two things that have worked together to shape this life I live. It’s a three poem, five page or less submission. In true Crystal fashion, I have waited until the last week to put anything together and everything I have, I’m too busy judging to appreciate.

Maybe that last part isn’t true. I appreciate it all. When I am in a flow state, I start judging that I am putting it in a contest at all. But to be honest, since leaving social media, it’s kind of the only way to get it out into the world unless I publish and I don’t quite know how to do that yet.

I know self-publishing is quite popular these days, but I also know that is a self-funded project and although I am making more than I ever have, it still isn’t much and I’m still working on getting past my limiting beliefs around money and a lack mindset that I have had my entire life. I’ve started to compile all of my pre-awakening poetry into collections that makes it easier for me to access them.

Hurt and Healing : The Collection

The first poem I am going to submit is titled Shame. It’s a rhyming poem. So far in my writing, I typically stick to poems that rhyme because I often feel like the ones that don’t rhyme come too easy to be good. Not all of them are good to me, but I feel like, I love what I write and the poetry does generally just flow out so easily that I think, there’s no way this can be good to other people. Like, I assume I should feel tortured while writing it. I’ll tackle that thought process in my journal later for sure.

I started one that is still untitled and it does not rhyme which makes me feel wild and unruly and I am kind of loving it. It’s centered around all of the things that I think of when I think of things that make me happy that went unnoticed before my spiritual awakening began. It reads like a list of tiny tenders. Tiny tenders is a phrase that I heard another poet use. She said throughout the day she finds her tiny tenders and keeps them in the notes app on her phone and I just loved it. I had no name for the collection in my phone or the tiny black notebooks that I carry around for the times that would be unacceptable to me to pull out my phone, which lately, is more often than not. I find tiny tenders everywhere I look.

The third poem that I’ve started is messy. Some of it is very unstructured and I struggle with messy. Clutter makes me very uncomfortable and seeing that in my work is new. I’m working on writing without judging myself. Writing without editing while writing is my greatest challenge. That’s why I’m challenging myself with the “Post-a-day.” And why I challenged myself to write the posts in 60 minutes without major editing. Perfectionism is a trait I am letting go of this year. I know it is either a catalyst for my shame, a product of it, or both. Either way, it has to go.

The contest is through Palette Poetry. The rules of the contest state that I cannot publish it anywhere and a blog counts. But once the Hurt and Healing contest wraps up, I’ll share them here! Thanks for reading!