Tag: self-reflection
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Road Verse
When the second chance is really the fourth or fifth And you aren’t ashamed, but you won’t admit Lessons are learned as you go, They don’t wait at the end of the road. When you’ve lost the faith you thought was heaven-sent Don’t make it all about trying to reinvent The soul you traded in…
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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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Running Home
Emma was in Boston the last time she’d ventured out for a jog. It had rained that morning and the puddles lay like landmines along her sidewalk-to-pond-and-back circuit. The mud splashed up to her ankles and had caked thickly on the laces of her running shoes. Now, in the living room of her parents’ Pennsylvanian…
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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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You Better Run
When you go for long runs, moments become monumental. After a while, you finally hit that temperature when the pores on the crown of your head open like infants’ eyes, oozing the byproduct of your stamping feet’s toil. Their opening is the moment you desire from the time you take your first stride. Hammering the…
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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…
Sophisticating the Rudimentary 