Stephanie Haveman - AmL Poetry, Prose & Quotes

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Stephanie Haveman - AmL Poetry, Prose & Quotes

All my books are available through Amazon AND your local bookstore. if they aren't in stock, they can be ordered for you �� for personalized poems ($20).
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"Words That Resonate with the Soul"
Discover poetry that captures the raw beauty of life’s highs and lows.💜💖🌟

If you enjoy my writings, maybe consider supporting me: https://ko-fi.com/amlpoetry and or signed copies of one or all of the books, you can privately message me. Loving and appreciating you.

29/08/2026

You Were My Favourite Plot Twist

I wasn't searching. I'd given that up.
Love had already emptied my half-full cup.
I'd learned happy endings were mostly pretend,
and everyone promising forever could end
before forever began.

Then you wandered in without asking permission,
wrecking my carefully planned demolition.
I had walls. I had rules. I had reasons to run.
You smiled like breaking them might actually be fun,
and, bastard, you won.

I waited for cracks because cracks always came,
for silence to change how you spoke my name.
For warmth to grow colder, for hands to let go,
for the part where you'd leave and I'd say, "Told you so."
But you didn't. I know.

Instead we got boring in beautiful ways,
shared grocery lists and exhausted weekdays.
Love stopped being fireworks burning the sky
and became "Text when you're there" and "Want coffee?" and "Hi,"
and kissing goodnight.

You weren't the prince that the fairytales promised,
and thank fu***ng God, because neither am I.
We're stubborn and scarred and occasionally cruel,
two damaged grown-ups still making the rule
that leaving isn't always the tool.

Of all of the chapters I thought I would write,
all of the endings I'd rehearsed every night,
I never predicted the strangest thing yet:
I'd find someone worth all the risk and regret
—
my favourite plot twist.

© Stephanie Haveman - AmL Poetry, Prose & Quotes

24/08/2026

Sinking Into Anxiety

My mind can turn a ripple
into a fu***ng tsunami.

One unanswered message
becomes abandonment,
one strange look becomes proof,
one pain becomes a funeral.

I have drowned
in oceans that never existed.

These days I try to stand still
when the water rises,
reminding myself
that fear is a terrible fortune teller.

Not everything I feel
is something that is happening.

© Stephanie Haveman - AmL Poetry, Prose & Quotes

24/08/2026

Do you suffer from any of the following symptoms?

1. Emotional pain
2. A heart that has been broken one too many times
3. Trauma that refuses to stay in the past
4. Grief that shows up without an invitation
5. An unhealthy tendency to love people who come with warning labels
6. Feeling everything far too deeply
7. Overthinking conversations from three years ago
8. Abandonment wounds with excellent long-term memory
9. A complicated relationship with your own reflection
10. Trying to heal while occasionally wanting to burn the entire healing journey to the ground
11. Missing people you know damn well you shouldn't go back to
12. Being exhausted from always having to be strong
13. Recovery that looks nothing like the inspirational quotes promised
14. A desperate need to feel understood without having to explain the whole fu***ng story
15. The strange suspicion that maybe you're not broken at all, just carrying a lot of things that hurt

Possible treatment: poetry.

Side effects may include crying in public, highlighting half the book, staring at the ceiling for an unreasonable amount of time, sending pages to someone with "THIS. FU***NG THIS.", feeling personally attacked by a poem, and discovering words for things you've never been able to explain.

I write about the things we don't always know how to say out loud.

Trauma. Grief. Love. Loss. Addiction. Recovery. Abandonment. Survival. Mental health. Healing. Relapse. Becoming. And all the beautifully f**ked-up places in between.

My poetry and prose collections aren't written to tell you how to heal.

They're written to sit beside you while you do.

Stephanie Haveman | Poetry & Prose

📚 Whispered by the Neighbor's Ghosts
📚 Stripped Naked
📚 Alone in the Dark
📚 Butterflies & Guitars
📚 The Black Book of Chaos
📚 Echoes From the Past – Part I
📚 Secondhand High

Available on Amazon. https://a.co/d/01gtr5Ms

No prescription required.

Although tissues are strongly recommended 🖤

24/08/2026

Beneath My Smile

There are entire graveyards
beneath my smile,
names I no longer say
and versions of myself
I buried without flowers.

Still, I laugh loudly.
Still, I love recklessly.
Still, I make plans for June
as if tomorrow signed a contract.

Maybe happiness isn't proof
that nothing hurts anymore.

Maybe it is what grows
when pain finally learns
it doesn't own all the land.

© Stephanie Haveman - AmL Poetry, Prose & Quotes

23/08/2026

If you've been wondering why this page went so quiet, here's the honest answer.

I didn't stop writing because I ran out of words. I stopped because I was busy surviving the very things I usually write about.

The past year has maybe been one of the hardest years of my life, sober. Not in the dramatic, movie-worthy kind of way. More in the exhausting, relentless way where every time you think you've caught your breath, life quietly says, "Actually... one more thing."

Most of you know me through poetry. Through the pretty sentences that somehow make ugly feelings sound beautiful. But poetry has always been my way of processing life, not escaping it. And this year life was moving so fast that I didn't have time to process anything before the next wave arrived.

My health completely took over my world. Living with FND already means your own body feels like an unreliable narrator, but this year it seemed determined to become a full-time chaos coordinator. Ambulance rides, hospital admissions, scans, specialists, new symptoms, old symptoms pretending to be new ones... at some point I genuinely started recognizing the ceiling tiles in the emergency department. They should probably name one after me.

Then there was my son.

Protecting your child is a strange kind of battle because nobody hands you a manual. There were shocking revelations, agencies, difficult conversations, sleepless nights and a constant balancing act between being his safe place and secretly wondering who was going to be mine. Watching him slowly become himself again has been worth every fight, but I'd be lying if I said it didn't cost pieces of me along the way. And we still have a looooong road to go.

Somewhere in the middle of all that, I published my book about FND. A book I wrote because invisible illnesses deserve visible voices. It reached people I never expected it to reach, and hearing strangers say, "You finally described what I couldn't explain," healed something in me that medicine never could.
Yes, I wrote my first bestseller. I'm stil in awe with the numbers each month. But it is and stays a niche subject. So, no. I can't retreat to a remote island and dissappear completely or buy a new identity and start over somewhere else and pretend this life never existed.

Recovery kept moving too. Four and a half years sober now. That's the weird thing about recovery: people think the miracle is stop using. It isn't. The miracle is learning to stay present when life gives you every reason to disappear. For years now, I am a sponsor, watched women find their own strength, and realized that sometimes the best way to save yourself is to keep reminding someone else they're worth saving too.

And then... kittens happened.
Because apparently the universe looked at my carefully curated emotional breakdown and thought, "You know what this needs? Fifteen cats." Those tiny terrorists filled my house with shredded toilet paper, midnight zoomies and more love than I knew what to do with. They also reminded me that healing rarely arrives looking profound. Sometimes it arrives as a three-hundred-gram fluffball falling asleep on your chest while you've been crying into cold coffee. We're in the final stages of the last three going to their forever homes and we'll close that chapter of being employees to 6 cats total, whom one suffers with Munchkin syndrome/mutation.

And in between all of that, I've been more scared of losing my mother who was diagnosed with rare lung cancer. And lived from scan to scan. Cause how do you cope with the risk of losing when you finally got back what you've been missing your entire life?

I disappeared from this page because I couldn't keep pretending I was only a poet. I'm a mother. A patient. A survivor. A woman in recovery. A cat foster who somehow keeps failing at the "foster" part. A person whose life became much messier than the carefully edited squares of social media ever showed.

But here's what I've learned. The words never left me. They were sitting beside hospital beds. They were driving home after impossible days. They were hidden in notebooks, voice memos and the backs of receipts. They were waiting until I had enough distance to look at the chaos without drowning in it.

So I'm back. I hope.

Definitely not because life is finally calm. It isn't. I still have appointments. I still have difficult days. I still cry over things that make no sense and laugh at things that probably shouldn't be funny. That's exactly where the best poetry has always lived: somewhere between breaking and rebuilding.

Thank you for waiting.

Let's write again. ❤️

© Stephanie Haveman - AmL Poetry, Prose & Quotes

23/08/2026

Please stay when I feel lost.
When the night is being rough.
Don't go when I can't trust
on believing that I am enough.

Hold me when I'm in pain.
I know it's more often than not.
But alone the world keeps crumbling
And I can't handle that plot.

Don't go when I'm still trembling
from ghost that follow me.
And when the morning comes,
I might still need help to see.

Don't leave when I can't follow.
At times direction is what I need.
And I've never felt the safety,
out of a hell that only sows and fears are left to reap.

Please call a little more often.
Guide me when I can't stand tall.
I've been raised in coal and ashes.
Blood and tears always kept me small.

Even when I say I am fine.
Look past that straight smile.
I might be lying about my feelings.
and not be fine at all.

It's the darkness in my own mind
that pulls me under when I'm weak.
And it's in those lonely moments.
I need to know your mine to keep.

© Stephanie Haveman - AmL Poetry, Prose & Quotes 8/23/26

17/05/2026

How do you keep life exciting?

Tonight at a quarter to ten, I received a phone call. Asking if it was possible… if Maya might accept two newborn kittens. Their mother had disappeared during or shortly after giving birth and hadn't returned. No idea where to. No idea why. Just two newborn kittens without warmth, without milk, and without a mother. The rest were already dead. The birthing site turned out to look like a battlefield.

And somewhere between reason and impulse, I actually said immediately: “Bring them right away. Don't wait any longer. Wrap them in a towel and come here.”

Not even fifteen minutes later, we were standing here with two miniature creatures in our bedroom. A red male kitten and a black-brown spotted female kitten. So small that you are almost afraid to breathe the wrong way around them.

The spotted girl actually looked quite neat. Washed clean. Dry. A bit chilled, but not worryingly so. I suspect she was born first and at least received some care from her mother before she disappeared. That one could actually be placed among Maya’s kittens quite quickly.

And then came the red one.

Jesus. That kitten looked like it had been evacuated straight from a disaster zone. Cold. Stuck together with dried blood, mucus, placenta, and sand. Truly one of those little bundles of misery that makes your heart sink immediately because you can already see how long it had probably been lying there.

So there we sat. With a hot water bottle. Blankets. And me, in the middle of the evening, stroking a kitten with a toothbrush as if I were auditioning for Emergency Care: Neonatal Cat Edition. Trying very carefully to get that little body going again. Because a cold kitten can't drink. And a kitten that doesn't drink… well.

And then, of course, came the most nerve-wracking part. Maya. I don't think I have ever placed a kitten with a mother cat *that* carefully. Completely prepared for hissing, growling, or a complete “absolutely not, you can go to hell with your street finds.”

But Maya looked. Sniffed. And immediately started washing. As if she decided without any doubt: fine, these are mine now too. And that little red kitten, in particular, received a full emergency treatment from her right away. Washing for minutes on end. Really thoroughly. As if she knew exactly how bad off he was. Slowly, a normal kitten emerged from under all the dried-up misery.

And by now, they are just lying among the rest as if they have always belonged there. Although the difference in size is significant in just 5 days.

Although last night, madam did decide that my wardrobe is apparently a better maternity ward than all the carefully arranged spots we had made for her. So I woke up realizing that my clothes are now officially part of the neonatal intensive care unit. Fine. I’ll adapt to her real estate choices.

Meanwhile, Maya is now working double shifts in the milk factory and eating as if she is preparing for a strongman competition. That poor animal is now feeding half a preschool. So ever since acceptance, I’ve been comparing cat food as if I were putting together a top-level sports diet for an Olympic athlete. The full package. Because if anyone is allowed to gorge without comment right now, it’s her.

Momo still thinks the whole thing is heavily over the top. She looks into the room every now and then as if she wants to ask if we’ve opened a registration form for new kittens yet.

Muis, on the other hand, is already fully back in her role as the family’s live reporter. With her nose right in the air. Checking everything. Observing everything. She’ll probably write a final report herself later.

And me? I’m mostly sitting here looking at a wardrobe full of tiny, breathing little potatoes, with the realization that two kittens who probably wouldn’t have made it through the night are now lying warm against a mother who decided without any doubt that love apparently doesn’t need to ask where things come from.

12/05/2026

Lately I was watching the series Men on Fire. There’s a scene where the main character deliberately drives his car into a pillar at around 70 miles per hour. Full speed. Done. Silence.

And the strange thing is?
It looked wonderful to me.

Not death itself. Not the grief it would leave behind for others. Not the drama. But the silence. The darkness. The nothingness. No phone calls. No worries. No responsibilities. No next crisis already waiting around the corner. Just... peace.

They are only thoughts. I know that by now. Over the years I’ve learned that thoughts are not automatically something you have to act on. They can exist without becoming a plan. Without becoming dangerous. But sometimes I can romanticize it endlessly in my mind. Even more than alcohol back then. That complete disappearance. That feeling of no longer having to carry anything.

And maybe that says more than anything else about how tired I am.

Ever since my mother was diagnosed with lung cancer last year, life has felt like one long chain of events. Honestly, it already started before that. The problems with the house. Being sick. Trauma therapy. Getting sick again. Constant tension. Constantly having to adapt and survive. Thijmen being home full time. Managing everything. Enduring everything. It feels like we’ve been stuck in the middle of something for years without ever really getting out of it.

And I notice what it’s doing to me.
It’s flattening me.

I wake up without any real excitement for the day. Not necessarily sad. Not deeply depressed. Not suicidal. Just empty. As if my system simply has no reserves left. As if somewhere along the way the vivid, alive part of me temporarily checked out.

When it comes to writing, I feel empty.
I crave good weather. Silence. Rest inside my head. A period where not everything constantly needs to be solved, processed, felt, or carried.

Of course there are beautiful things too. Truly. I just had an amazing weekend in Ostend with Thijmen. At the end of this month my mother and I are going to Wales together, to the international book festival in Hay-on-Wye. There are definitely things to look forward to.

But even beautiful things do not always fix exhaustion.

Sometimes there’s a spark. A beautiful moment. A laugh. A conversation. The sun on my face. And for a second I feel a small part of myself returning. Only to sink back into fatigue and emptiness afterwards.

And maybe that is the scariest part of all.

Not the thought of that tree or that pillar.
But the longing for silence. For absence. For nothingness.

Because when rest only starts to feel possible through disappearing, that’s when you truly realize how exhausted someone really is.

25/04/2026

"the weight of almost breaking"

the last few weeks
have been a quiet war
fought in kitchens and car rides
in half-finished thoughts
and eyes that refuse to stay open
when the world finally softens

I have carried more than I said out loud
smiled through sentences that scraped my throat raw
held everything together
with trembling hands
and a heart that kept asking
how much more is enough

there were moments I folded
not completely, but close
like paper bent too many times
still pretending to be whole
while the creases remembered
every single pressure point

and yet
somewhere between the chaos and the quiet
I kept showing up
even when my body whispered no
even when my mind blurred the edges of time
I stayed

because survival is not always loud
sometimes it looks like this
breathing through the overwhelm
choosing to remain
when disappearing feels easier
and calling that strength

the last few weeks did not break me
they carved me
left fingerprints on my bones
reminded me that I am still here
not untouched
but ungone

© Stephanie Haveman - AmL Poetry, Prose & Quotes

25/04/2026

Update 26th of April:
Turns out it’s not just a “simple” stomach bug. The tests came back positive for norovirus and a bacterial infection called Yersinia enterocolitica. So definitely not the one we were expecting.

Ironically, the antibiotics I was on likely triggered all of this, so treating it with more antibiotics isn’t really an option right now. It’s more a case of riding it out and supporting my body through it.

After being checked, we’ve decided to go home for tonight and head back to the campsite tomorrow if everything stays stable. Ronald has to start work again on Tuesday, and during the week I won’t be alone, which feels a bit safer.

For now it’s rest, tiny sips, and hoping my body slowly starts cooperating again. Thanks again for all the messages. 💜🫂

-----
24th of april

Sometimes life just piles it on all at once.

What started as a simple bladder infection somehow turned into an overload of antibiotics, and now I’m dealing with a bowel infection on top of it. Tonight things got bad enough that I had to be taken by ambulance and was admitted to the hospital. I got out again after midnight, so I’m back home for now, but it’s not done yet. Still, Ronald Bainczyk has been amazing through all of it. He's my hero for always being there.

I was really dehydrated too, so they hooked me up to two IV bags and gave me a lot of painkillers. I’m honestly really grateful for how caring the hospital staff were. In the middle of everything feeling like crap, that actually made a difference. They also told me we handled it exactly right. If we had waited even one more day, I probably would have crashed. Because I could clearly explain the timeline of everything over the past weeks, they were able to act fast and properly.

They’ve done tests, and depending on the results I may need to go back in for treatment, either regular admission or in quarantine. They’re about 90% sure it’s a Clostridioides difficile infection.

For now I just have to manage the symptoms at home with liquid IV and paracetamol on top of my regular prescribed pain meds, which isn’t ideal, but it’s what we’ve got for now.

Right now it’s a lot of waiting. Waiting for results, waiting to hear what the next step is going to be.

I feel drained, physically and mentally. My body is clearly not having it anymore, and for once I’m actually listening to that instead of pushing through like I normally would.

I also want to be honest about something else. Calling 112 wasn’t easy for me. I really had to push myself to let Ronald make that call. I’m still dealing with trauma from the past, especially around family, and asking for help or keeping people updated about my medical situation is something I struggle with a lot. Even adding my mom back as a second contact person was a really big step for me. It’s complicated, because there has been real emotional and mental hurt there, to the point where trust hasn’t felt safe for a long time, and I’m still working through what that means and how to navigate it.

But in between all of this, there’s also something really good. I’m working on something amazing together with my son, and that’s giving me something to hold on to right now. I’ll share more about that as soon as it starts taking shape.

And tomorrow, we’re actually leaving for a week. Camping. Which sounds a bit crazy given everything, but maybe the outdoors will do me good. Fresh air, a bit of sun, a change of scenery. And if it doesn’t, we’re close enough to home to just call it and go back. I can be sick on the couch at home, or in a comfy chair in the sun with a good book or the project I’m working on. Either way, I want to at least try.

For now I’m taking it slow. Trying to rest, trying to recover, and just getting through the days as they come.

I’ll update when I know more.

🫂💜

Adres

Koningin Emmastraat 41
Willemstad
4793CC

Telefoon

+31650877958

Website

https://www.amazon.com/author/stephaniehaveman, http://www.stephaniehaveman.com/, https://linktr.ee/amlpoetry, https://w

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