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This article is written by a student writer from the Her Campus at Ashoka chapter.

You realise you’re a poet when you love the idea of loving more than the idea of being loved, and when grief comes with a comforting hug of creativity which you devour like a home cooked meal after a long decade away from home.When you taste the heat in the liquor at the forsaken tavern and it reminds you of every other time you have written and craved to write. When you see a perfectly ordinary person and label them worthy of being a muse. When you feel more than you sense, when you delve in sorrow more than you cry, when you smile at the smallest and most seemingly insignificant thing around you. 

You realise you’re a poet when you accept the destruction that writing poetry brings to your soul and slyly adorn it with the name of healing, and when you live inside your mind more than your body. When you realise you are but your heart, nothing else defines you. 

When you lose yourself in music and feel the lyrics like they were your own, you realise you are a poet when you feel like Jane Austen when you enter a cafe and order a tiny overpriced tea cake and feel nothing but a moment of bliss that is selfishly, and purely just yours.

When shades of wooden architecture and tales, fake and real, of centuries past excite you more than the current mundane so devoid of dreams and magic and when you choose a person to live within for a period of time, painting them in the most beautiful shades of paint and words on your little notepad, even magnifying their flaws so magnificently that they don’t remain flaws anymore.

When you take shelter inside people, one by one, and immortalise the hell out of their touch, their marks, their prints on your life.

When you feel there’s nothing wrong with detaching yourself from reality to simply sit back, observe, and transform the grey you see into the most romantic, symbolic representation of life you could come up with and when you become a reservoir of memories and habits of those you love and you dip yourself in this reservoir when you’re idle.

When every thing you have ever felt is yet as strong as it was the first time you felt it.

You realise you’re a poet when you’re a walking contradiction: you’re wiser beyond your years, with a soul as grey as the shade of death, yet so evergreen and young that the shade of multicoloured candy in the summer excites you to the point of squealing.

When you appreciate the small gestures of kindness even if they aren’t directed towards you, when you’re foolish enough to reside in an endless list of fables and believe them to be real somewhere, somehow.

When you’ve stopped trying to explain yourself, when you’ve stopped understanding yourself.

You realise you’re a poet when you realise there’s probably a chance you’re not even real, that you’re not even here, and you realise you’re a poet when you’re okay with that.

Stuti Sharma

Ashoka '24

Stuti is a third year Psychology major and Creative Writing minor at Ashoka University. She loves writing and can be found impulse-buying jhumkas, unnecessary outfits and fridge magnets, and consuming the most absurd media ever. She is the token mom of the group surrounded by walking reminders of how short she is. She already loves you.