1995
1995 was the year I turned twenty. Looking back at the poems I wrote during that time, I can see a young man trying to find his place in the world, understand the people around him, and make sense of his own thoughts and feelings.
There is a lot going on in these poems. Relationships, friendship, rejection, loneliness, identity, growing up, and the uncertainty of what comes next all feature prominently. I was trying to understand myself as much as I was trying to understand everyone else. Sometimes, I seemed to know exactly what I wanted; at other times, I struggled to work out where I was going or what I was supposed to be doing.
Love and relationships feature heavily. There is a real desire for closeness and connection, but also a lot of hurt and confusion. Poems such as Leaving, So Much Rain, Should I Remain?, Remote and Reaching Out capture something of that emotional landscape. I was often looking for reassurance, trying to understand why things happened as they did, and wondering what it all meant. There is a vulnerability in those poems that I can recognise now, even if I might look at some of the situations differently with the benefit of time.
But 1995 wasn’t just about relationships. There was also a growing awareness of myself and the world I was living in. Poems such as Factory Humans, Think For Yourself and Just a Teenager suggest that I was questioning expectations and trying not to be defined by other people. I wanted to be my own person, although I don’t think I always knew what that meant.
One of the things I notice is how often I return to the past. Childhood, old friendships, memories and earlier versions of myself appear throughout the writing. There seems to be a tension between wanting to move forward and wanting to understand what I had left behind. Perhaps turning twenty made that more apparent. I was no longer a teenager, but I was still working out what being an adult was supposed to feel like.
There is also a strong imaginative streak running through the poems. Space, skies, ghosts, journeys, light, strange places and unusual images appear again and again. Sometimes I think these were ways of expressing feelings that I couldn’t quite put into ordinary words. I could take an emotion and turn it into a landscape, a journey or something slightly surreal. That imaginative side of the writing is something I still find interesting.
Not everything is heavy, either. There are moments of humour, observation, optimism and affection. Poems such as Happiness (Is You) remind me that happiness could be found in quite simple things: a telephone call, being close to somebody, or just feeling that things might be okay. Tomorrow, Looking Up and There Is Always Tomorrow show that, even when I was struggling, I hadn’t entirely lost sight of the possibility of something better.
As I move through the later poems, I can see a mixture of determination and tiredness. There are questions about the past, the future and the person I was becoming. Some of the writing feels restless, as though I was trying to get something out of my head before it became too much to carry around. Other poems are more reflective, almost as if I was standing back and watching myself.
There is another aspect of these poems that I find particularly interesting now: the fact that I was writing so much. It wasn’t simply a matter of occasionally sitting down to write a poem. It was an ongoing process of recording, revisiting and trying to understand my experiences. Looking through the archive, I can see how one thought leads to another, how a feeling resurfaces in a different form, and how certain questions seem to follow me around.
In that sense, these poems are more than a collection of individual pieces. They are a record of my thinking at twenty. I didn’t necessarily have the answers, and I wasn’t always sure what I was trying to say, but I was making an effort to understand. Writing gave me somewhere to put those thoughts, and perhaps a way of seeing them more clearly.
I also notice that I was both living through these experiences and observing them. I could be caught up in something emotionally, yet still find myself looking at the people involved, the circumstances and the wider picture. That tension between feeling and observation runs through much of the writing. It is something I recognise as part of who I am.
I don’t think these poems tell a straightforward story of growing up. There are contradictions, repeated thoughts and feelings that seem to go round in circles. But perhaps that is what makes them an honest record. Life doesn’t always move in a neat direction, and neither does the way we understand ourselves.
Reading them now, I can see how much I was trying to work out at twenty. I can also see the beginnings of things that would stay with me: the way I observe people, the importance I place on relationships, my tendency to question things, and my need to put experiences into words.
Some of the poems are stronger than others. Some are rough around the edges, and some might make me wince a little. But I don’t want to rewrite the person I was or pretend I had everything figured out. These poems belong to that time, and their value is partly in the fact that they preserve it.
1995 was a year of searching, questioning, feeling and trying to move forward. I was twenty, and I was still finding my way. Looking back, I think that is what these poems capture more than anything else.
