I’ve been writing since I was a kid and always dreamed of publishing a book, but felt too self-conscious about things I’ve written to ever take the steps to publish. Short stories, fiction, essays, NaNoWriMo entries, poems… even if they weren’t about me, all felt too personal to share with the world. I worried about what people would think about me, about these little worlds I’d created, and feared being judged or maybe just being seen for who I really am.

Poetry in particular felt like an extremely vulnerable extension of myself. I started writing poems furiously around age 15 as a way to work through feelings and experiences I couldn’t quite wrangle in real life. I’ve gone through various on-and-off periods with poetry over the years— alternating between being too busy or less inspired and, at other times, writing daily.

In 2022 after a couple years long creative drought, I started writing again with the help of The Artist’s Way. I wrote new poems and started to unearth the old ones dating back more than 20 years. I eventually decided to make good on the dream I had as a kid and set a goal to publish my first book by my 40th birthday.

This could end up being the most embarrassing thing I’ve ever done (which, if you know me, is saying a lot). I guess what I ultimately decided is that life is too short to live in secret.

The through line of the riptide to me is about letting go of the fears, self-doubt, and limiting thoughts. It’s like that zen proverb, “let go or be dragged.” If you get caught in a riptide, the only way to survive is to let go and let it carry you instead of fighting against it. You have to wait until it pulls you out far and spits you out before you can swim away and back to safety. To fight against it is to drown. To me, it’s about the cost of not going after the things you want, even if they scare you. It’s also about saying yes to life, rolling the dice and really living, no matter where it takes you, for better or worse.

This book is me finally standing behind my feelings, experiences, and choices, unapologetically. Working on these poems and the creative process of putting this book together has been fun and cathartic. It’s terrifying to release these into the world (fifteen-year-old me thanks you in advance for not judging some of these too harshly), but also exhilarating and liberating. I know for sure now that it won’t take me another 40 years to write my next book.