This collection is not just about anxiety. Though anxiety has been a constant in my life, coloring everything I do, it also melts into the fabric of the psyche, seemingly no start and no ending. Depression is part of this fabric too, along with other mental health struggles, along with that mysterious terrain of social influences and moral quandaries. So I speak not only as someone with anxiety or depression, but as someone who has experienced and empathized with a variety of mental health issues, and the way these issues interact with the world.
This is naturally one of the topics that I find myself returning to because I am constantly trying to figure it out, in myself and others, the ways in which we are different, or not-so-different.
—
The way I should manage myself
Sometimes
Talking about my mental illness leads to support
Sometimes
you’re-so-brave and I-didn’t-know-you-had-to-deal-with-that’s
Which is fine.
But more often
Advice
How I should fix it
Not have so much of it
Not let it bother me
Not let it define me
Like I’m not enough the way I am because of something that has made me who I am.
They tell me I shouldn’t let it rule my life,
Like I’m just not trying hard enough not to have it.
Like an asthmatic could wish away an attack,
Like an epileptic could try harder not to have seizures
They tell me that I shouldn’t tell people about it,
I shouldn’t tell my employer,
Like I can pretend it doesn’t affect my work sometimes
Like I’d even want to work at a place that would discriminate
I could disown it,
Say I just need to work harder
Try yoga eat better meditate journal get outside adjust your mindset maybe just shake it off
But it’s there no matter what
It’s shaped me and marked my struggles
To say it doesn’t exist,
Means parts of me do not exist.
To say I can try harder
Shrinks the oceans I’ve swam to get here.
—
Sleep
I am not sleepy, yet my mind reaches for sleep,
Steady dreams that wash away the mundanity of the real,
Behind the curtain, it pulls back to peek,
What fascinations await,
Wondering if it is powerful enough to pull the rest of me after it.
The hold so strong,
The dreams that let my creative mind flourish,
Where consciousness suffocates it.
—
Under the skin
People think they know how you should feel
When something bad happens to you
When the bad layers itself in new and inventive ways on your life
Twisting and moulding to look like it’s only one grief
A singular item,
Innocent. Unassuming.
Not something that stops you in your tracks
And pulls you to the ground.
All that weight no one can really see.
It doesn’t look incredibly heavy
Just manageable enough to say, This is nothing. You can handle this.
No one looks in your eyes and sees the blurry shapes and tangles of your life
Lets you breathe and gives you strength
In the way only a friend knows how
No one wants to look
And if they did
They’d think they could do it better.
—
Looking for real
The things that aren’t real whisper themselves into myth
The ones that I’m already listening for
Those are the whispers I hear the loudest
The ones where I’m wrong and weak
Small and sensitive
Weird and disgusting
Or maybe I don’t hear them.
Maybe they’re in my head too.
—
Dreaming
Dreams are painful because I cannot stay
In the lovely worlds I have built beneath the surface of my mind
A place where my grandmother is alive
And I swim along clear, crisp rivers with ease
A past lover asks for a second chance
I am strong and a fighter to be reckoned with
I am important yet never feel inferior to challenges ahead of me.
Sometimes the dreams are not so easy and pleasant
But even so
They are easier than life itself.
—
What I need
Why was I so selfish, I think,
Remembering the days before I got help.
It’s simple, I tell myself. I needed help to fulfill my needs. And I didn’t know what those were.
Only that it was something I needed and didn’t have. So I took took took what no one would give.
Maybe that’s how. I finally took something that worked.
—
Remember
Wildflowers come back every year.
Even after a snow,
Drought,
Heat,
Freeze,
They will come back.
And so will you.
—
Change and Growth
Things will get better
They won’t stay the same
It’ll look up
Keep holding on
Staying the same is the nightmare
What if things never get better
—
Now
It wasn’t always like this you know
I had to work to get here.
—
Silence
I used to hate it all the time
The way my mouth wouldn’t open unless I forced it
My steps light, my movements meek,
My stature wispy like I could silently flit away into a shadow
And no one would look for me, left only with a strange feeling that there had been something there.
It’s different now. I talk. Oh, fuck, I can talk.
Like my withheld words broke from me like a dam one day and they flowed freely,
Spilling my truths unstoppably.
And then, once they saw me, they wanted to talk too. Oh, fuck, now they talk to me.
I shrink away, trying to mute the voices that want me to listen now,
Maybe their dam broke too because I feel drowned, exhausted,
And silent once again.
