“…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.
As the autumn sun entered the lounge of my ground floor flat in one of the nicest Surrey towns I have chosen as my home on my own accord, some memory mosaics from previous autumns reached the horizon of my consciousness creating a bittersweet net-effect on my humble soul. These feelings were not restricted to this seemingly innocent scene alone: hundreds of other random scenarios were contributing to the overflow of these contradictory nostalgic emotions.
The relived former experiences were building up a downright powerful effect on my prevalent self demonstrating a raw and unprocessed baggage I have been silently carrying with myself for a while. Even though I decided I will only fill my life with chansons moving forward, the rumination was so intense when these nuances were evoking a genuinely poignant memory composite out from my brain storage – it always forced me into my highly protected mental cave.
‘Only good people feel guilt’ – I read somewhere and this was my go-to thought whenever I was bogged down in self-deprecating train of thoughts yet this sentence has never made any difference on my perspective of the recent past. Guilt is a powerful feeling that can affect our sensible judgment and I was always famous for not being strong on self-compassion therefore it made a bigger impact on my views. It wasn’t easy to identify these emotions purely as remorse that I felt about leaving something behind, I wished for the past to have less of an overwhelming effect on my present self with reaching a state of peace within my sacred self so one day, I could look back on the past happenings with no deep lamentation which was heavily intoxicating my soul.
I found that creative writing has definitely helped in the process of capturing, analysing and interpreting of my emotions during this distressing time. Writing is something that was my only form of self-expression throughout the years and practised it since childhood not just because this form of creativity has given me a huge amount of pleasure but because it functioned as a healing-therapy that helped structuring my thoughts in a way to understand them better. When I left my home country back in 2012, my mind was fully occupied by the excitement of discovering the world’s rich existence through experiencing a brand new culture – this long awaited adventure was really needed to stimulate my creative side. Whether it’s to express the interesting aspects of a new environment, the culture shock and it’s invisible obstacles or the joyful bacchanal my soul would be dancing when the new impressions are overflowing my senses. These moments, are literally the best raw materials for any creative process and I was aware that these will enrich my life further and provide me a brand new perspective on the world. Writing is my safe haven at all times and it has never disappointed me especially in the uncertain times I experienced on my journey and now in the phase of my life when I needed to re-invent myself. Mashing up disparate notions and producing a distinctive letter concentrate out of my thoughts in an unconventional way always made me the happiest individual on the planet as I only feel really alive when I write. I realised throughout the years that the nostalgic memory nuances are inspiring me the most and I have a natural affinity to use these to create those immersive lyrical soul experiences we human beings can all feel at our core. Although I wasn’t actively writing throughout this last decade, yet there were a few beautifully produced creative writings published on my blog during this time despite all of the harsh realities of finding the immigration dream.
As I embarked on the journey of going deeper into myself with the purpose of conducting a honest self-discovery, I couldn’t shake the feeling that the past’s stability was just a mental ballast that functioned as a source of balance in the stormy waters but at present it was preventing my soul-zeppelin to reach higher landscapes in the world’s rich existence. I have recently read a book about Self-worth that really resonated with my metaphor. It was saying that learning to let go is very similar as riding a bike with training wheels to support our balance. We lean in too much on the support initially, with the sole purpose to feel secure, even what makes us secure is not really serving us. And then, as our self confidence builds, we gradually lean in a little less until we finally reach the point when we no longer need the training wheels. External stability is an addictive illusion – only our internal compass can make us feel totally secure. It took me a while to realise that the time has arrived when I finally need to release this mental ballast and learn to live the rest of my life without it even if stormy waters will affect my sensitive boat again. Best case scenario, I will learn to rely on my inner strength as a static force in a dynamic world in this new chapter with eventually finding my new compass in myself and I will be my best friend and local companion in this unlimited experience-adventure as we call life.
Outside the bud 