Times where you wanted to give up on poetry,and if you did,what brought you back?

I've always loved reading poetry, but I only started writing it as a way of coping through lockdown. I think a lot of people tried new hobbies and new skills during that time and that was mine. I kind of hit a wall earlier this year, when I started trying to share my work and it felt like nobody cared. I've always seen poetry, like any form of creative writing, is a thing to be shared. People were sharing and engaging en masse. They just weren't doing it with mine. Why was I bothering if nobody was interested? I'm used to people engaging with my fiction work, so to have silence towards my poems was crippling. I kept reading and rereading pieces, trying to work out what I had done wrong, until I began to hate my work. So I gave up. Lately I've been regarding that body of work (400+ poems) as a kind of therapy I went through in 2020, it's really helped me gain perspective and peace in certain situations. I have settled into a diaristic style that isn't trendy but I like and I've found since I reframed writing poetry as something I do for myself as a form of self care rather than a way of connecting with the outside world, I feel like less of a failure and have become open to exploring it again.

Hence being back here (: