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.