I Felt It Before I Understood It: Pages From My Becoming

Sometimes your heart understands what happened long before your mind finds the words for it.

I Felt It Before I Understood It: Pages From My Becoming is a poetry collection about the emotions that arrive before the explanations do.

The heartbreak you felt before you understood why it changed you.

The anger you couldn't name.

The grief that showed up in unexpected places.

The love that made you softer.

The moments you thought you were lost when, really, you were becoming someone you hadn't met yet.

Written across different seasons of my own life, these poems capture surviving, healing, growing, loving, grieving, questioning, and slowly learning to trust yourself through it all.

They weren't written from the finish line.

They were written from inside the becoming.

Why you'll want to read it

Because sometimes you don't need a book to explain your feelings.

You need one that understands them.

This collection is for the person who has ever felt something deeply but couldn't quite explain why.

For the person who looked back months—or years—later and finally understood what an earlier version of themselves was trying to survive.

For anyone who has questioned whether they're healing “correctly.”

For anyone whose growth has included backtracking, starting over, changing their mind, grieving people they still love, loving people they had to leave, or becoming someone they never expected to be.

These poems don't ask you to have everything figured out.

They give you permission to exist in the middle.

Inside these pages you'll find

• 💔 Heartbreak that doesn't disappear just because you understand it

• 🌱 Growth that isn't always graceful

• 🌙 Grief, anger, love, hope, and everything between

• ✍🏽 Reflections from different versions of becoming

• 💜 Words for emotions you may have struggled to name

• ✨ Reminders that uncertainty doesn't mean you're lost

Read it from beginning to end.

Open to a random page when you need something to sit with.

Underline the lines that sound suspiciously like thoughts you've had yourself.

Come back later and discover that a poem means something completely different now than it did the first time you read it.

Because that's the thing about becoming:

You understand old versions of yourself differently once you've lived long enough to meet the next one.

For anyone who has ever felt lost, misunderstood, overwhelmed by what they were feeling, or caught somewhere between who they were and who they're becoming...

these pages are for you.

You don't have to understand everything you're feeling yet.

Sometimes you feel it first.

Understanding comes later.