I Was … But You Were …

On the 10th anniversary of its release, Vrinda Jagota revisits Rupi Kaur’s “milk and honey.”

By Vrinda JagotaFebruary 12, 2025

• Poetry

IT’S COMPULSIVE AT THIS point: when a bumper sticker has too many line breaks (“my son / served in / the military”), or when a friend sends two or more mildly controversial texts about their night (“it is good to take a nude / at a glam event”) my brain goes “—Rupi Kaur.” The poet rose to fame 11 years ago when, at 22, she self-published her debut poetry collection, milk and honey. Around the same time, a separate school project, a set of photos proudly demonstrating her period stains, went viral because Instagram tried to censor the images. Her work caught the attention of indie publisher Andrews McMeel, who republished milk and honey in 2015. Within a year, it had sold over half a million copies—nearly 17 times the number publishers consider successful for a book of poetry—and had been shared on countless Instagram grids around the world. Today, sales of the book have soared past six million, and Kaur has been dubbed both the savior and saboteur of contemporary poetry.

Her work is easy to meme because it is ubiquitous, mechanical, and self-serious: flip to any page and you might find a poem that follows the template “I was X but you [were Y thing that couldn’t appreciate it]” (“i was music / but you had your ears cut off”) or an ode to armpit hair that is delivered with the gravity of a dying wish. A joking reference to her work has become shorthand among terminally online millennials for a certain kind of political awareness: of the hollowness of neoliberal identity politics, of the way the internet is overinflating our egos while rotting our brains.

Kaur’s foresight is undeniable. She tailored her work to Instagram, a platform that would come to monopolize our attention, influence our beauty standards and our elections, and function as a primary means of self-representation for young people around the world. She also spoke candidly about sexual assault and bodily autonomy a few years before the #MeToo movement and Jian Ghomeshi’s sexual assault case in Canada showcased how ubiquitous gendered violence was and how badly women wanted to share—and hear—stories about it. She wasn’t the first Instagram poet, but she is perhaps the most successful at packaging identity politics to fit the way we were beginning to communicate in 2014, and at offering young women a sense of online community tied to their marginalization.

But Kaur’s foresight isn’t indicative of high caliber work. In the last decade, it has become increasingly more evident that the internet is destroying our attention spans, lessening our ability to grapple with nuanced opinions, and encouraging us to view the world through the lens of the personal at the expense of the communal. Reading the 10-year anniversary reissue of milk and honey today, it’s clear that Kaur’s work is inextricable from the apparatus that made her famous, one that does little to bolster real community organizing or meaningful political change. The political ideologies that Kaur touts are at inherent odds with the platform on which she chooses to share them.

In 2019, The New Republic’s Rumaan Alam named Kaur the poet of the decade because of her ability to cater her work to the internet. Kaur writes sparse, compact prose, Alam observes, “in part because she’s thinking within the parameters of a smartphone screen.” It is a hypothesis Kaur corroborates in the new edition of the book, where she shares the various artistic formats she tried posting on Tumblr and then Instagram—music videos, audio files, straightforward text—before setting on her characteristic five- to six-line poem accompanied by an illustration drawn by Kaur herself.

For Kaur, the internet also symbolizes a sense of authenticity. She was intent on having control over her vision (which, in one interview, she defines as the cover design and the size and color of the paper). Self-publishing, and then gaining attention from a project that separately, spontaneously went viral, was a way for Kaur to reach her readers directly and to build recognition outside of the red tape and hierarchy of traditional publishing. This farm-to-table approach paired with the direct language she employs led to praise that she was making poetry accessible to a new generation of readers.

But it’s hard to ignore how her simplified prose, meant to be read and consumed quickly before an on-screen notification lures away the reader’s attention, results in simplified political ideologies and artistic ambitions too. In one of her more famous poems, she asserts that “my women” are just as beautiful as “as the ones in / your country.” Kaur takes issue with beauty standards that have made women with “skin the color of earth” and “eyes like almonds” feel any less beautiful than their white counterparts. Yet just a few pages later, in another viral poem, she writes, “i want to apologize to all the women / i have called pretty / before i’ve called them intelligent or brave.” It’s unclear if she feels that all women are beautiful, or if she thinks we should challenge beauty as a marker of worth altogether. To make matters worse, the language she uses to describe Brown women, specifically the descriptor of almond shaped eyes, has been widely critiqued for exoticizing Asian features.

Elsewhere, in a poem about body hair, Kaur engages in flimsy choice feminism that validates the myriad individual feelings of her readers at the expense of a rigorous, consistent political ideology. In a poem titled “you belong only to yourself,” she writes, “removing all the hair / off your body is okay / if that’s what you want to do / just as much as keeping all the hair / on your body is okay / if that’s what you want to do.” Stylistically and politically, the circular logic renders the words meaningless. It’s a poem that ends exactly where it begins, nothing challenged, nothing learned: any possible decision a reader makes has been legitimized, whether it subverts patriarchal expectations about body hair or neatly adheres to them. Kaur imagines a false utopia where our choices exist in vacuums, unaffected by societal pressures and unable to reify problematic expectations.

In one of the reissue’s later sections, Kaur focuses on healing, which she positions as an inevitability rather than a process that, on a personal level, often requires a good deal of effort, and on a social level necessitates that structural oppression lessen or end. In this section, she reminds the reader that they can’t love someone else unless they learn to love themselves first. It’s a sentiment meant to encourage people, especially women who are conditioned to exist in the service of others, to prioritize themselves. But I’m wary of the neat categorizations this rhetoric creates between “people who love themselves” and “people who don’t.” It's a rigid, punitive, and hierarchical distinction that ignores the fact that healing is not linear or definitive. It also puts all the onus on the individual without acknowledging that trauma can be ongoing in a world that continues to inflict harm.

Kaur’s emphasis on neatness—sorting people into these prescriptive categories, finding a clean, quippy ending to every thought or narrative—does a real disservice to the captivating messiness of life while also overlooking the tireless work that both personal growth and resistance require. She sees hurting and healing as distinct life stages that you can jump between and generally glosses over the process of working through trauma or of changing oppressive systems.

I found myself intrigued by the whispers of vulnerability and confusion introduced in the poem “belonging”—“i have no idea where i’m going / most days i’m a stranger to myself”—only to have the uncertainty squashed before it could be properly explored. By the end of the poem, just a few lines later, she writes, “i’m exactly where i’m supposed to be,” mirroring word choice that can be found, almost verbatim, in a song from the 2008 Disney Channel Original Movie Camp Rock.

There is some unresolved sadness and pain in the book, especially in the section titled “the hurting,” which is about sexual assault and intergenerational trauma in Kaur’s family. The poems can be perpexingly vague: “the idea that we are / so capable of love / but still choose / to be toxic.” And sometimes, they tell a story that spans decades without offering much interiority: “when my mother opens her mouth / to have a conversation at dinner / my father shoves the word hush / between her lips and tells her to / never speak with her mouth full / this is how the women in my family / learned to live with their mouths closed.”

But “the hurting” is also the section where the perpetrators of violence are most specifically named. It’s here that Kaur’s strong sense of moral conviction, and unwavering, direct language is the most impactful. Kaur and I are the same age. When I think back on my early twenties, when milk and honey came out, I’m disturbed to recall how little my peers and I had been taught about sexual autonomy. Many of us had no idea that sexual assault could happen in relationships, or that we were allowed to change our minds about what we wanted at any point. A poem plainly stating “sex takes the consent of two” would have genuinely been a revelation. I don’t think the millions of readers who found solace in Kaur’s work in the 2010s were being entirely deceived by Instagram marketing—some of them likely felt a sense of relief that a writer was firmly and plainly countering the insidious, omnipresent messaging that a woman’s safety holds far less weight than a man’s desire. Kaur’s unflinching moral clarity also stood out recently: in 2023, when she rejected an invitation to a Diwali event at the White House in protest of the Biden administration’s complicity in the genocide in Gaza. It was a relatively minor action, but one contrasted starkly to many of her peers’ inaction.

The fact that milk and honey was written with social media in mind means the poems can stand alone. The book is organized into thematic sections, but the individual poems are mostly self-contained. They read like tweets that meander across your feed—perhaps organized by the invisible hand of an algorithm but not closely linked to one longer narrative. Chiara Giovanni wrote in 2017 that this lack of cohesion allows for the work to be decontextualized and consumed by a wide variety of readers, none of whose worldviews are significantly challenged: white women, who didn’t have to engage with the (few) times Kaur explicitly writes about race, saw her as the “patron saint of millennial heartbreak,” Giovanni writes, while women of color could see her as their answer to the alienating whiteness of the publishing industry.

And yet, though her work mostly centers the self and only evokes community in the broadest senses, Kaur writes about the importance of building community in the book: “sometimes it takes a crisis to remember / our lives depend on each other / we will end up nowhere / if we try to go it alone.” She thinks of all the people involved in producing milk and honey as pivotal to the book’s success. In a new retrospective section of milk and honey titled “the journey,” Kaur thanks everyone from the printing presses to the booksellers to the “folks who carry heavy boxes into factories” to “truck drivers who deliver the paper.” She writes, “I love you. In this life, our successes are not our own; they are the accumulation of what a group of people are capable of when they believe in something.” And in a 2017 profile, she told The Cut, “It really just takes a giant community […] Some random dude or woman driving this truck is helping millions of people have the book in their hands.”

There is certainly no harm in acknowledging all the people who are involved in producing and distributing her book. And that feeling of immediate kinship she has with truck drivers specifically makes sense on a personal level, given that her father was a truck driver. But in an operation as large as the one required to distribute millions of copies of milk and honey, I wonder how the sense of community she evokes functions. Do all the workers involved in making her book share equally in her profits and fame? She also initially self-published the book on Amazon’s CreateSpace platform. That same year, Salon reported that the company used surveillance technology to monitor its workers, firing one because she “wasted” several minutes of time during what was likely an 11-hour shift. Is Kaur in community with those workers too? Would they say that they were in community with her? This is, of course, a difficult standard for anyone to meet, but one that she chose to invoke in the way she marketed her work. These questions also speak to the pitfalls of invoking a community that is not specifically defined.

Over the last decade, it has become increasingly clear that the internet uplifts expression of self at the expense of true interconnectedness. Jia Tolentino wrote in her 2020 essay about the internet that social media users feel imperative to post, as it’s the only way to be seen online. We are specifically encouraged to share content that makes us seem objectively Good: our best angles, the most flattering narratives about ourselves, hastily posted infographics that are framed as meaningful political action. At the same time, the self-help therapy-speak shared with us is designed to flatter the widest audience possible. We’re constantly bombarded with advice from virtual life coaches that assumes we have all been equally wronged, regardless of who we are or what we’ve actually done. These talking heads encourage us to draw firm boundaries with our loved ones, to think more about what we are owed than what we owe others, and to cut people off any time a disagreement arises. When I was going through a particularly bad breakup, I would encounter Reels from supposed therapists that assured me that I was the prize and my ex was the problem. It kind of helped—until I realized my ex was probably being fed the same exact videos about me.

Scales of violence are also being flattened and power dynamics obscured. Terms like emotional labor were once meant to describe the pressure a worker feels to perform kindness in an industry like food service, where the amount of money they make is unfairly linked to how much customers like them. Today, it is decontextualized online, and misused to describe a situation as trite as responding to a friend’s text message when you don’t feel like it. This changing definition fundamentally misunderstands why the term is important: while a boss who demands emotional labor is abusing their position of power over a worker, a friend who asks you to text them back likely doesn’t have the power to disrupt your ability to pay rent or to take away your healthcare if you don’t respond. And while there should be no expectation of emotional reciprocity in your workplace, sometimes you do owe care to your loved ones.

Over the last decade, the gap between how we see and present ourselves (flawless) and how we see the rest of the world (capable of malevolence toward us at any moment) has grown to the point where sustained community-building feels difficult. There is no framework for real accountability when perpetrators of violence can co-opt language (of boundaries and self-love) that might be genuinely useful for survivors of violence to hear. And there is no incentive to care for each other when the most privileged among us are reassured that the only sustained duty they have is to themselves.

In one poem, Kaur writes, “you / loving yourself / is the revolution,” which, if posted on her Instagram, could be read by a CEO who is exploiting her workers’ labor, by a young woman who was sexually assaulted at a frat party, and by a girl living in a country being bombed by weapons the CEO’s company made. By accident of their birth location or gender, some of these women have been denied access to basic rights: healthcare, clean food and water, and the ability to live peacefully until they die of natural causes. Securing access to these rights would require large-scale systemic overhauls: an end to Greek life and rape culture as well as US-backed settler colonialism, to name a few.

These changes are so large and ideological that you could rightfully call them revolutions. But the tremendous work of getting there—mass mobilization, teaching people that our liberation is intertwined, demanding that the CEO stop her exploitative behaviors—could never be done alone. Kaur is not responsible for handing us the guidebook for changing the world, but when she claims that self-love is the beginning and end of a revolution, she plays a part in stifling our collective imagination. She tells us that pursuing individual, fleeting feelings of happiness while maintaining the status quo is enough. Kaur says it best herself: “changing other people / isn’t my responsibility / i am the only project / i need to be working on.”