I have had the pleasure to present a poem of mine on my first ever open mic event in Sutton. It was a fantastic, inclusive event and every reading was supporting the work of Sutton Women’s Centre. Looking forward to be doing same performances in London in the near future.
“Redolence is a captivatingly illustrated collection of poetry that explores the complex feelings of nostalgia; the bittersweet lamentation and grief for the lost places of the past. Through candid reflection, these poems give insight into a range of reminiscent feelings, past hopes and the continuous practice of self-reinvention that were the mainstream experiences of the author’s first decade in the United Kingdom. In this beautifully designed mix of poems and illustrations, appreciation and gratefulness also shines through towards individuals who have made a significant impact on the author’s life in her search of true belonging.”
It is an unusual practice to write your own blurb to the back of your book to encourage your audience to read your writing – yet I still think that only the author can persuasively promote a highly personal written, breathing world that encapsulates their complex emotional landscape. With this experimental mindset, I have embarked on the journey to write my own, expressive summary at the back of my booklet to highlight the overarching theme of the 12 poems that I cherry-picked for this compelling project.
There are 2 main themes in my pitch that forms the essence of this booklet. The mainstream emotion of this short poem compilation is revolving around melancholic nostalgia of past memories and the basic need to find true belonging after leaving behind the previous decade’s major milestones. The collection also functions as a heartfelt expression of gratitude towards certain individuals in my life who have made a significant contribution to who I am today – without them, I would not have the opportunity to write about all these past experiences that formed me to the core and supported me to develop a more realistic mindset that I am deeply thankful for.
Each writing has a corresponding illustration attached to it that was designed with the purpose of creating a visual representation of the written world I have tried to build into every poem with vivid and picturesque metaphors and alliterations. All of the illustrations maintain visual consistency throughout the booklet, enhancing the theme of each poem with the same style and shade.
As the majority of these writings in this booklet have been submitted to prestigious poetry competitions that are still ongoing, the first print set is purely reserved for family and friends until I know whether I am a winner on any of these competitions. My goal then is to send these booklets to literary magazines as an introductory tool of my work with the hope of getting them published to a wider audience.
Talking about appreciation as one of the themes of this poetry collection, I am very grateful to Lisa Phillips (Instagram @lisabuzzdesign) for the creative collaboration who has brought this booklet to life with the wonderful design.
“…the act of sorrowful rumination over the relatively recent past, makes my world a bitter but also an enlivening place, as my latent creativity appeared prominently on the vast, promising horizon, enchanted by this burning heartache.”
As 2025 is just around the corner, I can’t help thinking about all of the blessings I have encountered in my path this past year and about the lessons I learnt through several setbacks and challenges. I am not going to detail every single achievements and milestones of my goals here, will solely be concentrating on the creative aspects of the year below.
The quote I started this reflection with is from a poem of mine I have written a few weeks ago, so it is relatively fresh. The reason why I have chosen this piece of writing in the beginning of this blog post is because it has a powerful message that I feel strongly about: even the most challenging situation can have a silver lining and may function as a catalyst for further personal development. Sometimes, it is extremely difficult to see clear benefits of a harsh life experience, but if we keep an open mind, if we let ourselves to freely reflect back on an event from a healthy distance, we can discover tremendous positives in the situation and some may even become a blessing in disguise.
This is the year’s biggest lesson I learnt through a personal experience involving letting someone go who was part of my life for more than a decade: the process was quite difficult but it fuelled my creativity to the highest possible level I have ever functioned at. This inspired me to take a leap of faith and experiment with the English language first time in my life as a foreigner with writing poems about the process of letting my past go. This practice has resulted in several great writings that allowed me to apply to prestiges poetry competitions this year. I have also bought the domain for outsidethebud, and started writing regularly again here which makes me very hopeful again of my creative future.
And what I am going to bring with myself to 2025? I am currently working with a designer on a short poetry booklet design for the poems I have written this year out of the process of letting my past go. I am keen to maintain this creative practice in the upcoming year with actively working on new writings and continuing the applications to poetry competitions.
If you have the desire to play with words and create precious written worlds with your imaginative mind, this post is definitely for you.
Everybody has a story to tell and I firmly believe that we are all able to facilitate the creative artists within ourselves. I would like to share some basic tips that can help you unlock your full potential in terms of creative writing.
1. Read, read, read…
Reading different type of books and blogs that are closely related to your interests are beneficial in the path towards creativity. In addition, exploring the secret tips from professional writers are an indispensable part of this process.
As far as I am concerned, I used to ignore other authors’ writings in my native language because I always felt that I unintentionally lose my own voice and I was desperately trying to maintain my own style and create a distinctive emotional brand.
But the book about Creativity written by a Hungarian professor, Mihály Csíkszentmihályi, emphasizes the fact that your first step towards creativity is to learn the basics in an effective way then spice it up with your own, genuine ideas in order to create something innovative. Most importantly, reading professional writings helps to learn more complicated sentence structures that could be a beneficial practice and helps to be seen more professional.
2. Be inspired…
In order to be creative in our writing endeavours, we need constant inspiration. Everybody is different in terms of needs, but it is our individual interest to discover what really makes our creative juices flowing. Whether it is an interesting book, a professional conference, an art exhibition or just simply a long walk in the forest, it is of paramount importance to be aware of what activities are able to facilitate the creative activity of our subconscious mind. Exposing ourselves to these inspiring activities regularly will help to find and open the doors of our hidden creativity.
3. Have a notebook with you at all times…
As strange as it may sound but my most creative writings were made on trains and buses. The first time when I saw the word ‘Symbiosis’ in an advert from a bus it immediately made me wondered. Unfortunately I didn’t have any paper or journal with me so I had to write my ideas into my phone. Since then I always carry a notebook with myself and pay close attention to my muse whenever she wants to tell me something.
On the other hand, a beautiful journal can help you to feel creative whenever you take a quick look at it. I am really obsessed by colourful and artistic journals so I usually buy new ones.
Lavinia Spalding, the author of Writing Away advises to have a blank journal in order to not feel limited between the lines. It helps you to make drawings and create your own creative world without being restricted.
4. Practice…
In order to find your own voice and distinctive style, you have to stretch yourself and jump out your familiar boundaries. It basically means that you have to try a lot of things so that you can distinguish what is really you. Writing prompts are a good way to practice your skills and explore different styles until you find out your own unique voice.
5. Don’t be afraid of the blank page syndrome…
Chances are that infertile days, weeks, months or years occur without chronicling anything meaningful to the outside, however, it does not mean that there aren’t any ongoing war in the wild woods of the writer’s soul. So my core theory is that a writer’s mind is never empty, it is always observing and analyzing something, it is unstoppable. And the silent periods are indeed an inseparable part of any creative achievement where the purpose of the time is to ripen any meaningful realizations into something innovative.
Whether it’s to reduce worry levels or to lead a happier life, our cognitions should work for us and not against us. But mere decision to forcefully change our thoughts won’t make us feel better instantly. It is our cognitive distortions that we need to identify before we can decide on any meaningful action towards happiness.
We all have cognitive faults in our thinking that are not supporting our happiness. Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT) teaches us that in order to feel better, we need to think better.
The first step towards total control is to catch our automated thoughts and identify any distortions in the process. Whether it’s black & white thinking, filtering, generalising, labelling or catastrophising; the main thing is to be completely aware of their existence.
Once you have captured your dominant cognitive distortions, then you can start the disputing process which is simply an exercise of a few questions to take your mind back to the present moment and find a more realistic view of your current situation.
How can you do that? Please see below an action plan that would be beneficial in this process:
1) Acknowledge the existence of unrealistic thoughts in your mind
We have millions of thoughts popping into our head every day and we tend to accept all of them as valid. This means that even the negative and unrealistic thoughts are regarded as true in our minds. We need to be aware that not our thoughts are worth accepting as some of them may not serve us but are actually causing damage in our emotional world. Identifying the thoughts that are making us upset are the ones that we need to pay close attention to.
2) Find evidences against your unrealistic thoughts
Once the thoughts that are on the unrealistic edge of our thinking are identified, we can then start to work with the different type of distortions. Whether it’s about positive or negative generalisations, we need to remind ourselves that we mostly live in the grey area as not everything is black or white in our lives. And while most of us can imagine the worst case scenarios in several different happenings, the worst rarely happens and most of our worries would not manifest in the real world at all. Acknowledging these facts is the first step towards a happier life as these truths help us bringing back our thoughts to a more realistic state. Once you have identified your cognitive distortions you can be in the position to take action and to dispute the thoughts that are popping into your mind. This involves the process of challenging yourself with several questions to ascertain whether your thinking has reached an unrealistic dimension. Asking ‘Can I see that there can be more than two outcomes of this situation?’ is a useful example question to challenge black and white thinking as it identifies the limitations this distortion is imposing in our minds and helps to realise that life is not revolving around the two extremes only. It is also important to assess how the unrealistic thoughts making you feel – identifying the impact these thoughts have on your emptional wellbeing is paramount to be aware of faulty our cognition is.
3) Do a honest risk assessment of your thoughts
In business, the base of risk assessment is to judge the likelihood of the risk and its impact in order to evaluate how it affects the holistic view. As part of this, you need to bring your unrealistic thought into a realistic state (as outlined above in point 2) and then independently assess how these thoughts scale in the impact/likelihood scale. How likely that the worry will materialise? How much impact would it have on you? This is a prerequisite to proceed with the next essential step.
4) Manage the identified risks
During this phase, you have a couple of options, the first is to identify what can go wrong (what is the worst scenario) and to determine whether this risk is worth dealing with. If the answer is yes, then the next step is to create mitigating plans to deal with the materialised risks and create contingency plans to deal with the possible risks should they become real events. These actions would ensure that you would be fully prepared for any potential threats and so your life is not affected harshly by any of these risks. In terms of catastrophising, you can identify people who can help you if the worst happens which is another way of comforting your mind that you are not alone in the world.
5) Assess how you feel after this exercise
Put your mind back to the original worry – how do you feel now? How would you evaluate the feeling you had before the exercise? Can you now see a more realistic perspective of the situation? Do you feel more at ease and comfortable?
This exercise makes sure you can put your unrealistic thoughts into a different light and so you can feel better after the holistic evaluation
Outside the bud 