From a young age I have struggled with my mental health and much of my adolescence and life as a young adult has been spent coping with anxiety and depression while coming into my own. The best lesson this life journey has taught me is that honesty, openness, and vulnerability regarding one's own mental health and heart is powerful and exceptionally brave. I have tried every remedy, coping mechanism, and medication (with supervision of my physician) available to me. I can tell you with full confidence the most anxiety inducing thing I have done is try and fail to be happy or perfectly healthy. Sometimes the best thing I can do is sit in it. Regardless of whether or not you have a diagnosis, being human is painful, hard, and can feel impossible. These feelings are not misplaced, they are intrinsic to life and youth. At the end of the day I now try to ask if what I did and the things I felt contributed to my Wholeness instead of asking if they contributed to my Happiness. This meditation in turn provides me validation for all that I do, and more importantly, peace.

The proceeding two poems are a contemplation of my Wholeness. They may seem pessimistic or destructive or just generally sad but to me they are full of hope in the sense that feeling something, anything, is beautiful and important. They are written meditations, the first realizing there is nothing wrong with accepting uncomfortable emotions and secondly the terrifying yet exhilarating excitement of a particularly anxious moment.

Creativity, especially poetry allows me to put into words gut feelings that are by nature mute and erratic. I have realized through poetry that the absence of words can be expressed with language. I am publishing these poems in the hope that they are not only relatable but encouraging. I invite all to feel, ruminate, and express in the most authentic of ways possible.

Self Help

Pursuit of happiness.

I am reaching and slipping, each soft thud of my feet pulls me farther into the ground

I cannot live half planted, trudging through the pebbled clay of the earth

I look happiness in the face and she has none

She is a blank empty stare, challenging me to love her

Happiness tells me that Love is real.

All I have is the heart that beats in my chest

and he is a lovely companion

Xanax Breath

Where are my hands?

Fingers are puppets on a string, blood clots at the wrist

Begins at the knuckles

How lucky are we to be able to breathe

Christmas lights wrapped around my neck

What am I supposed to do with these?

To throw over the rafters, lacing my form through

To run down the street, cosmic vision

I am a bull who is also a worm

Spine too rigid spine non-existent

I reach inside and pull out bones

More room for my lungs

"You need to get out and then you'll be okay"

Is okay enough

Sometimes enough

Where are my hands?

One at a time

Each beginning has an end

"It is uncomfortable, but it is not dangerous"

My organs are purged into a white ceramic toilet