What do you do when the life you've lived-your songs, your poems, your proof-disappears? Years after a home break-in stole thousands of pages of writing and recordings, the author opened a forgotten green folder and found a handful of survivors: a random selection of poems and songs written between ages twelve and twenty-seven. Raw, unfiltered, and honest.
This collection is a time capsule of becoming-of a young person learning how to breathe through grief, of a young person teaching oneself to speak on paper when the world punished them for feeling. The poems were never revised for elegance or hindsight; they appear here exactly as they were first written. Together they create a memoir-in-verse that moves from the claustrophobia of loneliness to the oxygen of spiritual guidance.
The through-line is simple and profound: writing can save a life. In these pages, you'll meet a voice that kept itself alive by telling the truth when truth had no safe place to live. You'll hear what it sounds like to stand with one foot at the edge and still choose the page; to be told your feelings are "too much" and still refuse to go silent; to be broken open and somehow become more whole. The result is not a sanitized narrative of triumph, but something braver-evidence. Evidence that you can outlast the dark. Evidence that what you feel is not a personal defect but a human fact.
The recovered-folder origin gives this book an urgency you can feel. Each poem arrives not as a polished artifact but as a living dispatch from the moment it was born. Read them straight through for a cumulative story of survival, or one at a time the way you might take a breath: when you need it most. Either way, you'll find lines that echo long after the page-reminders that strength isn't loud, healing isn't linear, and hope often speaks in a whisper that says simply: Hold on.
Read this if you've ever:
- Felt too sensitive for a world that rewarded numbness
- Needed proof that someone made it through what you're facing
- Wanted the intimacy of a diary with the craft of poetry
- Searched for language that names grief, rage, rupture-and the stubborn light that follows
Why this book:
Because these poems weren't written to impress; they were written to survive. Because the ones that remained did so against the odds. And because in reading them, you may recognize your own younger self and feel, perhaps for the first time, that you were never alone.
Open the folder. Meet the survivor. Take what you need-and keep going.
