Canadian poet and New York Times bestselling author Rupi Kaur.
The View from My Window: Nine months into her smash-hit world tour, performance poet Rupi Kaur dials in from Los Angeles to talk about life on the road and her upcoming New Zealand shows.
One of the first things you do when you walk into a hotel room is draw the curtains and take a peek at what it looks like outside. On tour, my resiliency factor is being very much in the present — losing myself in the city I’m lost in. I throw my bags inside my room and I’m off, trying to explore as many neighbourhoods as I can. That’s my ritual.
I deal with heavy topics but don’t think the show is going to be heavy. When I first started performing, a lot of my poetry was about violence and women’s experience with sexual assault. My defence mechanism, the way I comforted myself on stage while being really vulnerable and talking about these things, was to use humour. So we laugh, we cry. But for sure, you’re going to have fun.
When it comes to mental health, I’m honest about my own journey. I’ll tell [the audience] hey, the last time I was in New Zealand, I was really depressed. That’s what my first poem is about. It’s called Depression Doesn’t Knock. It happened to me at a time when I didn’t expect it because my life was changing in such beautiful ways. I’d published milk and honey and I had a new book coming out. Just blessing after blessing. But that was not the experience I was living inside my mind and inside my body. I tried to push that down and ignore it for years.
There were periods when I couldn’t make it out of bed for weeks at a time. I was having suicidal thoughts every single day. Finally, I asked myself, “How long do you think you can make it living like this?” And I gave myself two to three years, because I thought, after that, there’s no way I can handle this anymore. It’s going to win.
When I came to that realisation, I got really afraid, and I was like, hold on, I want to be alive. And I want to feel. That’s the thing about depression; it makes you forget what happiness felt like. You don’t know joy. Everything becomes muted and grey. That’s when I accepted I was depressed and that I needed help.
Like the Type A person I am, I ordered 25 books about depression, found a therapist, and signed up for a meditation course and a bunch of other things. At first, when I was writing poems about depression, I was never going to release them because, oh, my God, I’ll be a laughing stock. People are going to roll their eyes; what do you have to be depressed about? It was actually the conversations happening around mental health during Covid that gave me permission to publish this stuff.
When I found the therapist, in 2019, I told her what had happened in my life and asked if she could point to which of those experiences had made me depressed. She said sometimes it’s not that easy; so much of my life has been in survival mode from the time I was young. Sadly, therapy is inaccessible to many people because of how expensive it is. And in my community, so many of our parents don’t even believe mental health is a thing.
For me, writing and performing poetry has been a tool for healing. During Covid, I was doing Instagram Live writing workshops to feel more connected to the world. In some of these sessions, 10,000 people joined and I discovered that many of them are writers. That planted the seed for my fourth book, Healing Through Words (a collection of guided writing exercises). I wanted to show them that they too have the words to heal.
It’s become a universal theme of this world tour, no matter what country I’m in, that people have gifted me a copy of their own first book, which they wrote and published because of my story. I’ve been just wowed and speechless because, I kid you not, I’ve been on tour for nine months and have a bookshelf full of them now. It’s this whole beautiful movement I wasn’t even aware of.
Many are self-published, like my first book, and these writers are often the ones who tell me they’ve been able to find their voice, feel more free, and move on from hard things. Because we all know healing is not a linear journey. You don’t just write the book and then that’s it, you’re done. It’s a lifelong practice.
— As told to Joanna Wane
* A sexual assault survivor, Rupi Kaur was born in India and emigrated to Canada with her family as a young child. In 2014, she self-published her first poetry collection, milk and honey while at university, after building a following on Instagram. Her books have now sold more than 11 million copies, and musician Sam Smith has one of the illustrations she drew for her second collection, the sun and her flowers, tattooed on his arm. Kaur is performing at the Wellington Opera House on March 23 and at the Auckland Town Hall on March 24 as part of the Auckland Arts Festival (aaf.co.nz).