Toni Hardy was about six months into a relationship she now describes as emotionally abusive and manipulative when she noticed what it was costing her. “I realized that I was really losing myself,” the Baltimore poet says. “I had no desire to do anything, no desire to be around anyone.”
What kept her in it, she says, was not the relationship. It was what she believed about herself. “I didn’t think I deserved better at that stage in my life,” Hardy says. “I didn’t have a good sense of self. I didn’t believe that I was created for more.” By her third year she had reached the end of it.
She was wrong about that, and the record is public. Hardy, 35, has published eight books, all on Amazon, and traveled to 36 countries, including nearly a year in China. She grew up in West Baltimore taking inspiration from her grandmother, Elvira Johnson, a poet whose work remains unpublished, and she says a substantial collection of those poems is still waiting for the family to bring it into print. She reads at Busboys and Poets and at Pure Poetry Live, and works in an animal diagnostic research laboratory.
She says she did not want to be transparent about any of it. What she tells anyone reading is the practical half. “Don’t be afraid to reach out for help,” Hardy says. And then, because she knows what the asking costs: “You don’t have to tell them everything.”
