Writing, My Saviour.

May 04, 2026

Note From the Editors:

White Rabbit Poetry Society is honored to have theinkspilled as our first featured poet of May. She describes her page as, “An ink-stained corner for poetry, essays, and incandescent thought. Gothic reflections on literature, philosophy, and psychological inquiry. 26 yrs old. Forensic psychologist.” We at the Rabbit feel she is a phenomenal poet and a wonderful writer. Please take a moment to visit theinkspilled, subscribe and read her work.

Writing, My Saviour.

I have been writing poetry for as long as I can remember. It began as a form of escapism, it shifted to understanding what was happening to me, and eventually, a way of exorcising what I refused to let corrode who I was. I didn’t come to poetry; I grew inside it.

Some things don’t translate well into conversation. They sound excessive when spoken out loud, or they shrink the moment you try to explain them. I learned that early, how quickly something real can be misunderstood, or softened into something easier for other people to hold.

When I say I learned that early, I mean that when I was young, home was not a place where language was held gently. It was a place where speaking often turned into shouting, where being seen felt like being exposed. I felt misplaced, unloved, misunderstood, and so I learned to redirect everything inward. I began to conjure my feelings through my pen, writing constantly, anywhere I could, because no one was really looking.

Writing became the place where I didn’t have to reduce myself.

Before anything reaches the page, I see it. Words, metaphors, entire scenes move in front of me with a strange clarity, as if they already exist somewhere and I am only catching up to them. It feels almost cinematic. That is why I carry notebooks with me at all times. These moments don’t wait, and I have learned not to miss them. I carry notebooks everywhere I go, in different sizes and formats, because each one has to fit into the life I am living in that moment. I move between them, return to them, layer them. I scribble in them, press photographs between pages, and note the music I was listening to when a line arrived. Each notebook becomes a contained memory, a lived space. Every piece is tied to a moment I can return to not just emotionally, but physically.

Almost Is The Cruellest Sentence - theinkspilled

What interests me most is what remains, not the moment something breaks, but what the body does after. How does it adapt? How does it carry? How does it continue even when something essential has shifted out of place? That’s where most of my poems live.

I write a lot about the body because that’s where everything registers first. Love is physical. Loss is physical. Even memory has weight if you sit with it long enough. I don’t separate emotion from the body. I don’t think they exist independently.

A Female Liturgy - theinkspilled

The Kind Of Damage I Crave - theinkspilled

My voice shifts because I do. My poetry is rooted in lived experience, but it is constantly shaped by what I absorb: art, music, literature, and the emotional languages I move through. There is a visceral, raw undercurrent that runs through everything I write, but it can turn sharply into something more bodily, more confessional, depending on what is being held. The variation is not distance from myself; it is the full range of how I exist.

I return often to writers who are unafraid of interiority and contradiction, like Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Plath, Mary Gaitskill, Joan Didion, Mary Oliver, Emily Brontë, Walt Whitman, Mary Wollstonecraft, Anne Carson, Dylan Thomas, the Lake Poets, Shirley Jackson, Anne Sexton, Ottessa Moshfegh, and Margaret Atwood. They sharpen my attention, deepens my language, and reminds me that writing can hold both restraint and excess at once.

I’m Your Man - theinkspilled

There is a version of me pressing on a bruise just to confirm it still answers. There is a body that learned to endure being seen and misnamed, that turned survival into ritual. There is a voice that kept its teeth hidden until it didn’t, that understood silence as something that could grow dangerous if left unguarded. There is also the part of me that stayed too long, perhaps, but long enough to understand what it means to remain when something is already collapsing. And somewhere in all of this, there is the quiet recognition that some places never held me, no matter how carefully I tried to exist inside them.

A mouth full of wolves - theinkspilled

I don’t write to resolve any of that. I write because it happened, and because it left a shape. The poems are where I can stand inside those shapes without having to explain them.

Writing is not optional for me. It’s how I remain intact. If I stop, I feel the absence immediately, as if I have turned away from something essential inside me. There was a time when I did stop, after a series of events I could not yet put into language, and it felt suffocating. Like something had been severed. I am not writing to survive anymore, but I am writing to preserve. I want to document what has been lived, not to rationalize it, but to keep the version of myself that endured it from disappearing. I refuse to lose her. I refuse to abandon the self that carried me through. No one, nothing, is worth that erasure.

Note from the Editors:

We want to sincerely thank theinkspilled for her time and showing us her process and inspiration. Although she has taken a step back from daily posting on Substack, we can still enjoy her work here and visit her website. Thank you again theinkspilled.

We are so grateful that you are here. Please leave a message if you are inspired. We would love to see what you write. The White Rabbit Poetry Society is a place to find some inspiration and even some friends. Don’t be shy—add links to your poetry!