Don’t Tell Rupi Kaur She Looks Tired

In your poetry, you talk about love, heartache, depression, abuse, womanhood, and immigration. What’s been the most meaningful exploration?

The poems about women make me the happiest, but what heals me is when I write the difficult topics, my journey [with] sexual abuse and toxic relationships. It’s cathartic at the time that I’m writing them.

But I feel like each of my books is a different era of my life. Milk and Honey I published at 21, and it’s about those 21 years—that very loud, unfiltered expression of love and pain. And then The Sun and Her Flowers was a much-grown version of me. Yet it’s timeless because I’m talking about us: the women who came before me, my girlfriends, our wounds, and the aches of so many others. Home Body was a full-circle moment. I learned how to be vulnerable again and write the book that I needed to read.

In Home Body, you talk about how we treat our bodies like machines—planting seeds in the ground and expecting flowers the next day. What does self-preservation look like to you?

I would say that moving slowly and being still are two of the biggest things that can help you be present. And I only started being present last year. I was always living in the future and worried about the next thing. Chapter three, “Rest,” is me trying to teach myself what self-preservation looks like and what it should feel like. And a large part of it was learning how to redefine what productivity meant. Realizing that rest was a part of that. And having fun and learning how to play is the most productive thing I can do because if I’m not having fun, if I’m not living, then there is no poetry.

Do you feel like burnout needed to happen for Home Body to exist? And I guess that raises the bigger question of whether creatives have to feel the lows to create content.

Burnout is not needed at all. Even just saying it makes me feel burnt out. While writing The Sun and Her Flowers and being on tour for two years, I was in complete burnout mode. And the only reason I was able to write Home Body was that I recognized that I was not doing well mentally. And I fixed it through meditation, therapy, and all things self-care involved. Yes, many artists believe that if they are happy, they’re not going to create work anymore. I felt that too after releasing Milk and Honey, but I’m realizing now that I actually can’t write when I’m not doing well. When there is pain, it is tough for me to be creative. I have to be mentally fit to dedicate years to writing a book.

There’s a piece in which you say, “No one is in more denial than the white man, that regardless of evidence still thinks racism, sexism, and all the world’s pain don’t exist.” How do we encourage the next generation of youth when we ourselves are tired?