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poetry

Joy

A poet wrote about meeting her younger self for coffee and launched cathartic viral trend

Women are creating healing "I met my younger self for coffee" poems as they reflect on how far they've come.

If you could meet your younger self for coffee, what would you say?

Life is complex and our feelings about our lives even moreso, which is why we humans so often turn to art as a means of processing it all. Poetry in particular has the power to distill complexity into a beautifully simple form, allowing us to succinctly express feelings that are difficult to describe. As Robert Frost wrote, "Poetry is when an emotion has found its thought and the thought has found words," and a skilled poet can help us all find words for our own thoughts and emotions.

A poem by Jennae Cecelia from her upcoming book "Deep in My Feels" has kicked off a viral wave of poetic expression as women reflect on how they've grown and changed since they were younger. Cecelia's poem begins, "i met my younger self for coffee at 10:15," and goes on to describe a lovely, compassionate interaction with her younger self, all while contrasting that younger self with the woman she has become.

People loved the poem so much they used it as inspiration for their own "meeting my younger self for coffee" writing exercises, and the various iterations, at once so personal yet universal, have taken TikTok and Instagram by storm. Some are just written on blank backgrounds as images. Others are videos with the poem overlaid and music in the background.

But what they share in common is the sentiment of wanting to let our younger selves know it was going to be okay. That life is hard but there are good things coming around the corner. That whatever she's feeling or going through now will someday just be a memory.

Some poems have come from women who are still young but fully adult now, speaking to their teen selves.

@jasbethany_

I’d do anything to talk to my 15 year old self 🥲 #nostalgia #coffee #youngerself

Others come from moms in the thick of parenting, reassuring their younger selves that their dreams of having a family have come true, while others show that they took a different path than they planned and it turned out fine.

@katrice_taylor

🤎 #imetmyoungerselfforcoffee #momtok #momsoftiktok #blackmomsoftiktok

The trend is moving people to tears, offering hope to people who are still in those uncertain younger self years, when the possibilities of life seem endless and yet so much feels impossible. Many are finding solace in seeing people's before and after stories, as they serve as a reminder that life is malleable, that the future isn't set in stone, that people can endure and overcome.

@puffy817

Why did this trend heal a little bit in me while I wrote it IB: @Jennae Cecelia Poetry #coffeewithmyyoungerself #parati

Many resonate with the message that whatever struggles we're dealing with now we likely won't be in the future. And, of course, there will always be new struggles we're dealing with but with age and experience we hopefully learn about our own strength to endure. We also hopefully still have dreams to catch.

Cecelia says she is glad that her poem has inspired so many people to create their own versions of it, adding a rightful request to be credited for her work. She shares that the poem is part of a new collection of poetry that she describes as "a dream come true." Her previous poetry books have been self-published, but for this book she landed a deal with a publisher and is thrilled by the idea of having her book available in bookstores and not just online.

"This book is personal" Cecelia says. "It’s a reflection of love, loss, growth, and all the emotions we’re sometimes afraid to name. It’s a reminder that vulnerability isn’t just okay—it’s necessary. Inside, you’ll find poems that sit with you in life’s highs and lows, including the one about, 'meeting your younger self for coffee'—a favorite in the collection."

You can find "Deep in My Feels" for pre-order on Amazon and you can learn more about Cecelia and her work at jennaececelia.com.

A woman can't get out of bed.

Living with depression and anxiety is hard enough, but things are made much worse when the people we depend on minimize or discount the disorder. It’s prevalent for people dealing with depression to have parents or loved ones who say that they are just faking it for attention or that they just need to get out of bed and start living life.

If it were only that easy.

When people say these things, it can be extremely invalidating and cause further stress, anxiety and confusion for the depressed person.


Writer and performance artist Sabrina Benaim did an incredible job of explaining what it feels like to have your depression and anxiety invalidated by a loved one. In 2014, she delivered an award-winning piece at the Toronto Poetry Slam called "Explaining My Depression To My Mother," which has made countless people with depression feel seen.

In the poem, she beautifully explains the difference between depression and anxiety.

Anxiety holds me a hostage inside of my house, inside of my head.

Mom says, “Where did anxiety come from?”

Anxiety is the cousin visiting from out-of-town depression felt obligated to bring to the party.

Mom, I am the party.

She also explains why her happiness is beyond her control.

Mom says, “Happy is a decision.”

But my happy is as hollow as a pin-pricked egg.

My happy is a high fever that will break.

Mom says I am so good at making something out of nothing and then flat-out asks me if I am afraid of dying.

No.

I am afraid of living.

Benaim's powerful poem helped earn the Canadian team the top prize at the 2014 Toronto Poetry Slam. After her performance went viral, she became a vocal advocate for anxiety and depression, performing tours in the U.S., Australia and Canada. She has also published two books, "Depression and Other Magic Tricks" (2017) and "I Love You, Call Me Back" (2021).

Demetri Manabat/TikTok (shared with permission)

Demetri Manabat's "Barbie" poem makes a powerful statement.

Usually, when you hear a man say he doesn't want his son to play with dolls, you have a pretty good idea of what beliefs sit beneath the sentiment. It's not unreasonable to assume that some combination of misogyny, homophobia and problematic ideas about masculinity are at play in such an attitude.

That's why an unexpected turn in Demetri Manabat's spoken word poem, "Barbie," caught people's attention.

Manabat referred to "Barbie" as "a poem about dolls" in the caption of a TikTok video showing him performing it on stage. He opens the poem with a provocative statement: "My sons will never play with dolls. In fact, I refuse to let my sons play with dolls."

He goes on to explain that if he ever catches his son with a Barbie or a Bratz doll or a Polly Pocket or Cabbage Patch, he would set them straight, "knowing that's not how God intended" for men to act.


The audience sits quietly through all of this, and a heavy pause lets them stew in his words. But then the twist comes as Manabat explains the why behind his feelings about his sons playing with dolls, and it's one heck of a gut punch with an absolutely knock-out last line.

Watch, all the way to the end:

@demetrimanabat

“Barbie” A poem about dolls. I hope you enjoy. Much Much Love Always & Forever Demetri #barbie #poetry #doll #spokenword #writing #writer #lasvegas

Is it any wonder the video has been liked over nearly a million times in three days on TikTok alone?

People in the comments were as expressive about their feelings as some of the live audience members who called out during the poem.

"I was like booooy, you better be goin somewhere with this, and yall he WENT somewhere," wrote one commenter.

"This is one of those poems you have to stick around for. I hope millions stick around for it, sir," wrote another.

One commenter simply wrote "*deletes paragraph*" as a joke about how they were initially responding to the poem when it began. Another wrote "*trust the algorithm, trust the algorithm*" in a similar vein.

Lots of people shared the lines that hit them particularly hard.

"'My boys will not make toys out of women.' This is a very amazing and beautiful piece. More people need to hear it," wrote one person.

"'Treated like a woman well before she was one but never taken seriously long after she became one' has me in tears," shared another.

"'Stretch marks tattooed across her skin as a result of reaching so far across the universe she bridged heaven and earth.'" another wrote.

"'Is the child inside of her not dying, too' felt like everything just got knocked out of me. That was one of the strongest lines I've ever heard," shared nother.

Poetry has the power to speak truth in a way that helps us understand ourselves and our world better, and spoken word poetry in particular, with its rhythmic storytelling, is a powerful tool for synthesizing complex thoughts, beliefs and feelings. Manabat could have said, "Without understanding the true value of women in real life, boys playing with dolls could symbolize men seeing women as plastic playthings to be handled and controlled and casually tossed aside," but that wouldn't have been nearly as effective as the picture he painted with his poetry and that last line—"My boys will not make toys out of women, so I refuse to let them play with dolls until they actually understand the difference between the two." Phew.

Here's to the poets who put humanity into words, and here's to conscientious men who give voice to the struggle too many women have endured for generations.

You can follow Demetri Manbat on TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, and X.

Joy

The beautiful thing that happens in Amsterdam if you die and have no one to attend your funeral

The Lonely Funeral project was started by poet Frank Starik, who wrote, "Everyone—and this is the point—every person deserves respect."

Canva

Every life deserves to at least be acknowledged.

Funerals can be many things—a sombre mourning, a celebration of life, a time for family to honor a loved one—but one thing they should never be is unattended.

But the reality is that some people simply don’t have people. Maybe they’re estranged from their family and have outlived all their friends. Maybe they fell into a life of drug addiction and lost all of their close connections. Maybe no next of kin can be found or they just happen to die in a life stage when they have no one around to attend their funeral. Whatever the reason, some people's send-offs from earthly existence are purely legal affairs with no personal touches whatsoever.

Two decades ago, some poets in the Netherlands decided that was an unacceptable ending for a human life. In 2001, a poet named Bart Droog began attending the funerals of people who had no one to attend them and honoring the dead with a poem based on whatever was known about their life. A year later, Dutch poet and artist Frank Starik took the idea even further, launching The Lonely Funeral project to ensure that someone who cares consciously acknowledges the life of a person who has died.


The idea was to create a network of poets who would find out whatever they could about the person, write a custom poem about their life and read it at their funeral. As of 2018, over 300 "lonely funerals" had been attended by poets in Amsterdam and Antwerp (where Flemish poet Maarten Inghels launched a Lonely Funeral project seven years after Starik's).

The Lonely Funeral project has continued to expand to other countries as well. Scottish poet Andy Jackson has begun writing poems for "lonely funerals" and attending them in his hometown of Dundee and he hopes to expand the project to the rest of Scotland.

"I feel everybody deserves something humane at the end of life" he told the BBC. "Nobody should be completely unmourned. If we want to live in humane country these are little things we can do for people. It becomes the job of the community."

A natural question is how the poets know what to write if the person was all alone.

"They would have a passport, some details from the police or from social services, a photograph or some information about their life maybe," Jackson explained to the BBC. "Something that would give away something of who they were that a poet then could use to form the basis of a piece of work that would actually celebrate the real person—not somebody you couldn't identify."

Starik and Inghels have even published a book, The Lonely Funeral: Poets at the Gravesides of the Forgotten, which includes poems for 31 forgotten lives and descriptions of their funerals—a small piece of dignity offered to perfect strangers.

There's perhaps nothing more beautiful than the impulse to recognize someone simply for the sake of their humanity. It's a reminder that we are all connected in some way, even if it's just by the reality of life and death.

As Starik wrote in his preface to The Lonely Funeral: "We do not know to whom we say goodbye, so we feel no pain. But everyone—and this is the point—every person deserves respect."

Leave it to the poets to remind us of the inherent worth of every human being and to honor it with such a simple, selfless service.