Talking #LovePoems and Overcoming Challenges With Author Sarah Wilson

My name is Saranyelina (some of my friends call me Angie, while others call me Sarah) and I’m from Colombia. I’ve been living in the USA for 21 years, in Boston. I’ve been married for almost 21 years as well, to a wonderful man. He has been there for me during the most difficult moments of my life, like my brain aneurysm, stroke, and internal infection back in 2001.

As a consequence of the aneurysm, I became blind. After a year of being legally blind, I managed to regain a small percentage of sight in my left eye. It’s getting better, but it took many years and I do suffer chronic pain in my head and neck. In 2015 the [doctors] found AVM in my brain (Artirial Venous Malformation) and this year I’ve been going to physical therapy for my balance and chronic pain. This past summer they found skin cancer, so I went through another procedure.

[I believe] life is beautiful and full of many opportunities that we all take for granted, like a simple bike ride, or driving to work, or being able to have babies. It made me appreciate being able to walk freely without worries of falling or tripping. I decided to enjoy the little moments in my life despite the health issues, and I started to write about the way I see the world. I’m color blind, so I see very differently than a regular person, but even though I see all the wonderful things that are in the world, sadly I see that we don’t take care of them.

I write about everything: love, illness, death, loss, friendship, passion, and anything that inspired me. I love to write what I feel because the words will always stay engraved in paper forever. When we vocalize words, I feel they are gone as soon as we open our mouths. I want to print my words forever.

A Piece of Me is a piece of my heart that I want to share with the world. It’s about positive and beautiful situations or moments important in anyone’s life, like being in love or making love to the love of your life with no shame or limits. It touches on the examples, good or bad, that life has taught you through time. It also explores how nice it is to have a best friend and being able to tell her or him how much you appreciate them caring, or how much we can love our parents and siblings. What better way to express those feelings than with words from your heart and soul? I’m in love with love.

I honestly think poetry comes very natural for me. I think I am lucky because everyday I get inspired. I think I was born to write about love. I decided to share my poems and my life because we all know life can often be hard, our hearts break, and we wrestle with hope, our desire for living, and slowly we start to give up.

But I’m not giving up! I’m a fighter, and I want to show the world that everything is possible if we believe and work hard for what we want. It is never easy, indeed, but at least give it a try. This is how I felt when I wrote my first book, and I really hope it is the beginning of many more.

I honestly think the eroticism and love that I use in some of my poems, the passion and loss that you may feel if you read I Crave You or In The Morning. I just want to show a private side of me, I want people to feel what I wrote, to close their eyes and put themselves in that moment in their own lives.

Like I said before, I want my poems to penetrate everybody’s heart, soul, and mind. I hope to rekindle the love of poetry, of romance and inspirational books, even in people who may not think it’s for them.

My favorite poem in the collection is Monday, my first poem. I wrote that poem during my university years. I was in a situation very similar and the memory of that moment is engraved in my mind after all these years. I never thought you could feel so many things in one simple moment, in just someone’s look deep in to your eyes.

Of course it’s very challenging bringing in poetry today because the world is too busy to think deeply about the meaning of love.

We have become very impersonal in some ways, and technology is winning over everything. Nowadays people likes video games with unrealistic lives, or superheroes who will fix everything against evil forces that we already have in the world. Evil, hatred, unkindness, misery, violence. These are tough to deal with. So, I hope to be able to change a little bit people’s views toward sitting down to enjoy a love poem, or a thoughtful one, and I think it will make them feel different.

You will feel love, sadness, loss, and many other feelings that maybe you have hidden away. We need to bring back the possibility of dreaming and make them become true.

You can expect another book, an inspirational book for people disabilities and illness, and for people who’ve lost hope. I want to show them a different way of seeing life, setting realistic goals that will make them get out of bed. I want to help people suffering from depression and anxiety, to help them cope with those feelings because I’ve felt the same way. I want to help the world with my words…life continues after illness, and if we are alive, there has to be a reason why.

I think I’ve finally found my reason, and I want to inspire others and never give up.