Category: Mental Health
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June First
Let fall the words they spoke to you on nights rage struck your temples like lightning to an oak tree that went its whole life all those layers of rings not getting hit just to get hit. Let the wilderness consume your mind not because you need to simulate recklessness you, so calculated now what…
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Surviving Suicide: What I’ve Learned After 10 Years
10 years ago, I attempted suicide. On a summer night in 2008, my parents drove me from the house where I was raised to the emergency room in an effort to save the life of their 21-year-old son. My action was built on several years of mental turmoil and anguish, of unchecked thoughts and words…
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Inkwell Reflections for Miss Dickinson
White dress white dress how softly compressed prismatic coordinates printed over a spectrum of threads matching sheets covering the little table and chairs in the upper room of consciousness. White—no color or all the colors at once? All the bright or all the dark the stark dark hair and the pale face pale arms pale…
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Invoking the Blank Page
I am looking to you, Blank Page, for help. I awoke today with Worry. While I was able to slough off the morning blanket, Worry persisted its shroud about me. An invisible source secures a tight hold around the top of my head. It clamps the innards of my chest. The cinches have been there…
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Depressive Tempests
“The madness of depression is, generally speaking, the antithesis of violence. It is a storm indeed, but a storm of murk.” – William Styron, Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness It is never so simple to say, “listen here, this is an exact depiction of mental illness,” as is it not simply the case in…
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Stigmas, Silence, and Schooling
After almost nine years, I still cannot get a clear sense of what happened during the months that followed my high school graduation. The diagnosis that has become a descriptor of my identity fogs up the lenses of self-retrospection. Concepts like failure, accomplishment, becoming well-adjusted, figuring out the next steps in life, getting knocked down…
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The Pebble Drop
I am bipolar. Not like in the slang sense of the word. Not like just on bad days. Not like how people describe random eruptions of anger. Not like what you hear in that Katy Perry song. I have credentials. After I got my diagnosis, my father used to explain having a mental illness as…
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Man Oh Man(ia)
You’re updating your resume again. You have the urge to write down under accomplishments starting from A to Z: Alcoholic (recovering), bulimic (recovering), cutter (recovering), drug addict (recovering), etc. Or, you want to throw in there, “Has managed, with the help of doctors, chemicals, and family, to keep bipolar disorder from ruining life and the…
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Story-telling Self-talk, or Overcoming the Nothings
There is this story in my mind and there it seems fated to remain. I cannot determine whether that’s because I read too much or if I do not write enough. Or do not talk enough. Or do not feel enough. There are these stories in my mind. Some might call them memories. Unreliable, jumbled,…
Sophisticating the Rudimentary 