Shattered Reflections: Resilience, Redemption, and Finding Beauty in Broken Pieces with Daygun Schafer

This was his fault.

Allowed you to break open, and then you said the, the poems was, like...

Was that kind of like a further kinda breaking open?

Yeah, for sure.

Being able to kind of express and, yeah, like, being able to share with, help other people, um-

Like, my mom and dad encouraged me from the beginning of when I started writing poetry to get published, because my parents were always, you know, like, they always had my s- supported me no matter what.

Like, no matter whatever endeavor I wanted to try or do, they supported it.

And, like, it wasn't even a thought, you know, in my head, you know, until my parents were like, you know, "You can be a published author one day," you know?

Mm-hmm.

"You could be an author of poetry one day," you know? Like, they encouraged me up until they both passed away, you know, to do it.

And then what really encouraged me was after my dad passed away, um, I found a folder of my own poetry from, like, way back when I was, like, in my early teen years that my dad had kept that I thought I had thrown away, but he kept, went out there, got it out of the trash, and kept all those years.

And that was part of my second book, The Healing Pieces of Me.

That's where a bunch of those pieces came from-

Oh

... was all the old poems that my dad had kept.

Kept together.

I know you've got, like, the three book, uh, the three books.

So you got the Healing Pieces of Me, Pieces of Me, and the Echo versions.

Are they, they kind of like different themes for each book? I'd like to hear a little bit about the three books.

Okay.

So Pieces of Me is the first one, and it's actually the one of pretty much the broken version of me, the parts of me before I started, you know, really doing the whole getting the mental health.

Because in my teen years, I pretty much was like, "I don't wanna do therapy no more.

I wanna do whatever," you know? I, I, I rebelled because, um, couple years after, you know, having therapy and freedom from not being, you know, trapped I felt like, it happened again by another male family friend that my parents thought they could trust.

Except that time I got a little smarter, and I wrote out a paper with a bunch of questions, made the guy answer all of them, and then signed it, made him sign it and date it.

And my dad found it when my mom and dad had separated at that point, and I was ...