Letters To Myself #2

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 // One

Most sane people would start at the beginning, but that’s never been me. We begin with the now, the moment I started writing this, because that’s the most vibrant part of what I am, the now. This bit here. The rest of it arranges itself behind the present in a manner that sometimes I find hard to reconcile, because so much now of existence requires you to share a story to create legitimacy.

As a poet, it has become a rite of passage. Earlier this month I submitted poetry that recounts my own mental health experiences to a publisher for an anthology, and was told in no uncertain terms my work was not suitable. I found myself wondering what kind of emotional response this person was looking for, and then I think about the times I’ve submitted LGBTQI work and had the same reaction.

Am I simply not bisexual and anxious/depressed enough to be saleable?

In the last year I’ve made a conscious effort not to mine my own trauma as much as has previously been the case. There are courses encouraging this currently online, but no real sense of what could be the consequences of doing so. Therefore it was satisfying to see that Criptic Arts have created a guide for autobiographical works: it is for theatre, but the principles are pretty solid for poets too.

This year it has become more helpful to turn the lens away from myself and return to a form of storytelling, which is proving to be surprisingly commercial. Mostly, I will admit, that I am tired of the requirement to ‘perform’ on several levels. The majority of my joy in the last five months has come behind the scenes, helping and supporting other people, and guiding new poets into their niches.

I’ve also been able to finally form meaningful relationships with other creatives.

I began to write poetry as a means by which to express the tyranny of experiences I could not verbalise, in the main because I was non-verbal at the time they took place. The more these moments are poked and reconsidered, the easier it now becomes to leave them alone, which is probably the best thing for everybody. My concerns now are wider, deeper and ultimately more problematic. They also seem to alter on a moment by moment basis.

When it was apparent that this week was MHAW, I felt an actual compulsion to go long-form and NOT into poetry. If you want to watch how that was resolved a few years ago, the links to all of the videos starts below. Now we are more concerned with the state of the planet, the environment, politics and the idiocy of reality in general, talking about myself again becomes slightly unnecessary.

However, all that will change in the second half of the year.

We’re not here to predict the future either, instead for the next seven days I will do my best to present my own view of reality and where I sit within it. Today that means feeling slightly discombobulated from everything, but being hyper aware of how significant the landscape around me has become. This year someone has called me a nature poet in a completely unironic manner, and this is making me stupendously happy.

For now though, I’m off to edit some old fanfic which will make me very happy.