I didn’t start writing poems with the intention of turning them into a book nor having them published; but rather started writing poems in 2020, a couple of months after we were all launched into a worldwide pandemic. After coming over to Australia from England as a backpacker just before my 19th birthday in 2018, and the world then going into lockdown shortly after my 21st birthday whilst I was living over in Australia; writing poems began as a good outlet for my thoughts, feelings and emotions; and it is something that has sporadically stuck for the last 3.

5 years. .

. After finally deciding upon writing up my poems into a word document, that were previously just scrawled in a journal, 3 months before I turn 25, seems like a good time to turn this in, an end of an era you might say.

They are in chronological order of which they were written, which is often a time in which I am overwhelmed with emotion; that's when my poems seem to flow out effortlessly for me. It's a thing I find, that doesn't work in the same way if I try to sit down and force myself to put pen to paper: I get a certain feeling an inspiration for a poem comes to mind, and I am then filled with the urge to write it down instantly, if I don’t it goes!The main theme of the poems are often centred around mental health struggles and also the struggles of being a human in this modern society.

I was first diagnosed with Generalised Anxiety Disorder in 2020, and have since been diagnosed with severe combined type ADHD in 2022. I have always adored reading and occasionally writing poetry since I was a young child; and I now share my incredibly vulnerable poems (something I didn't think I'd ever do), and the workings of my mind, in the hope that my collection of poetic ramblings may somehow,in some way, help the reader as much as it helped me to write them.

. .

and may also help the reader feel that little bit less alone in their own personal struggles. It has been a terribly hard decision to make to share this, but I think the world needs more people to speak up, to share their struggles, their stories.

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and in that way, I hope, we can all feel that little bit less alone; in those times when our world feels at it's darkest. Sending loveD.

B. Barham.