Letters to Myself #4

Mental Health Awareness Week begins on May 11th.

I've done a lot of things to raise mental health profiles during this period over the last few years, but the one thing I've never been capable of achieving is an honest prose-based description of what my personal mental health issues entail. This week we are going to attempt to do just that.

I will refer at various points to childhood trauma, suicidal thoughts, depression and anxiety. Please consider your own needs and act accordingly.

The Last Eight Years // Two

I'm sitting in a coffee shop yesterday with a fellow poet: someone walks past the window table we're at. Recognising that person as someone important in my life right now, there is a wave. Sitting at my PC eight hours later I am not sure the life that's currently playing out makes me comfortable. I am refreshing my email almost obsessively for a message which is increasingly unlikely to arrive.

Mental health is not fun. Most days it is an annoyance, but in the last week it has begun to resonate with discomfort. So, we have taken matters into our own hands and moved forward with a plan that, it must be said, is far more comforting. It will provide closure, and peace, and ultimately will make me feel infinitely better than is currently the case. The discomfort will finally diminish.

I feel uncomfortable in my own skin right now. Nothing I can do is going to fix this. This is what between bodies feels like, has been since the start of the year. In good news, the result aimed for is slowly approaching. Now what is needed is patience and belief and crucially willpower. I am rubbish at all of these things. This is also not the idea time to be doing this, but that's how this shit has worked out.

Yesterday I was left cold by something unexpected. I have written two poems about the end of a relationship and suddenly I am on a different trajectory with my poetry than I was yesterday. I was sitting this morning by the Estuary, drinking the coffee above decorated in red and brown and watched as a large tractor dumped what looked like 100,000 cockle shells about twelve feet from me.

The poem I've just finished, inspired by that pile, is the first unignorable indicator that something new and interesting is playing out in real time in my Poetry Brain [TM]. Then someone I've not seen for MONTHS literally walked past me and I am beginning to wonder where the cameras are, because this is increasingly feeling like I am living somebody else's life.

At the end of my meeting, I was asked if someone could respond to my work using their art.

I have forgotten about Tuesday's email, it is smoke in my brain and no longer of value. Having someone respond to my work is a LITERAL dream come true. It is now supremely important to remember this time, to write it down and then bottle the remains and to hold them in an important place. If I can't have the dreams I really want, is there any point to anything, I thought yesterday.

Today the Universe, having heard me and decided that shells would be the first miracle, gave me a response as a result. When wishing you could have something just as a better thing is literally dumped right in front of your eyes, the decision of what to take should not be that hard... except I realise, at least on a few occasions in the last few years, I picked incorrectly.

That is NOT going to happen again.