Stop me if you’ve heard this one - depressed twenty-something writes slam poetry to keep herself together, and she can’t tell if her writing is a symptom of her illness or a sign her recovery.

She bleeds into the keyboard her very most intimate thoughts, assiduously translated into saccharine metaphors with at least some semblance of poetic rhythm, because it’s okay to talk about her depression like it’s a disgruntled crew member staging a mutiny for control of the ship that is her body, but not to say “you know, I’m just. So. Numb sometimes.”

When you ask her how she’s doing today, she responds with “I’m okay” because neither ‘I’m dead inside, how about you?’ nor, ‘Actually, I didn’t wake up ready to depression go-back-to-sleep, so pretty **** great!’ nor, ‘Hoping work today will be eventful enough to distract me from my existential dread,’ are acceptable answers.

See, when she says ‘I’m okay,’ what she means is, “I got out of bed today. Hi-five for effort?”

Depressed twenty-something jokes about how she’s tired because ‘Oh, I didn’t get my full 18 hours’ when she actually slept for a more than adequate ten hours. It’s not acceptable to say ‘I’m tired because of depression’ because that just brings down the mood, doesn’t it?

So she laughs along with every ‘you’re young, you can’t be tired all the time!’, and downs sweet tea, Diet Coke, and coffee that makes her stomach turn and her bladder empty every f i v e minutes, seriously, five minutes because maybe if there’s enough caffeine in her system, she won’t look that bad

When she says ‘I’m tired’, she means “I can’t stop it.”

Depressed twenty-something talks about her future, as if she has one. I’m going to speak six languages, I’m going to work for the U.N., I’m going to live abroad, as if she’s actually certain she will ever leave her small town again. She’s preparing for a future she is at least sixty percent sure she’ll never have. In this economy? With her station in life? Whaaaaat? She’s chasing her dreams knowing they’re dreams, just hoping she ends up...somewhere.

She’s not sure if it’s just the depression and the tell-tale symptom of hopelessness, or if she’s finally a grown-up and is just being realistic. And if she’s telling you the truth? She isn’t sure which one she’s more afraid of it being.

When she says ‘I’m saving for college’ what she means is, “Higher education is marketed to the poor as a way to rise above their station, but actually it’s just going to make things worse, but if I don’t go to college I won’t even have a shot at upward mobility, so...yay student debt?”

Depressed twenty-something keeps an extra bottle of her antidepressants in her work backpack, because her sleep schedule and therefore eating schedule is so irregular, she can’t take her medicine at reliable, set times. But she takes it twice day with her meals.

She doesn’t mind it. In fact, she can’t even think about her life before medication without getting sad. Because yes, sometimes it takes a while to get the motivation to get out of bed. And yes, some days there’s just emptiness where her feelings should be. Most days though, there’s this annoying part of her brain that she just has to keep telling to shut up, and sometimes it listens.

When she says ‘I have to go take my happy pill,’ she means, “I have severe clinical depression. And I have to take medication to live a functional human life. And I want everyone to know because I’m not ashamed.”

When I say ‘I have depression,’ I mean, “I’m mentally ill and I always will be, but most days, I’m happy some of the time. Some days, I am happy all of the time. And some days will just be hard.”

Outside of a bar in a North Carolina strip mall, stone cold sober because I am scared to use my fake, I feel drunk as you sit next to me. Perhaps I am. I'd have to be to think maybe, maybe, maybe, when I know, I know, I know.

Your hand brushes against mine, and you're saying the most beautiful words I've ever heard, and the fire in my heart spreads up, down, left, right. But it cannot spread just four inches outside of my body. It cannot set you on fire, too.

We listen to each other and hear two very different things. You are birdsong outside of my window that I am eager to hear; I am traffic outside of your window you've learned to tune out at bedtime.  

If there are nine million bicycles in Beijing, then Beijing is my insides and bicycles are your name, because it is written on my insides nine million times. But there are no bicycles on Antarctica. There is no use for them there, just as there's no use for my name to be perched on a straight girl's ribs.

You tell me my weird hobby of listening to French rap music is awesome, that it's so cool that I'm teaching myself three languages, and that you want to be me when you grow up - I laugh, because you're several years older than me. Selfishly I catch every droplet of your praise.  I ruminate on it for hours, for days. It means more to me than it should.

My name sounds like a compliment from your mouth. I try not to say yours too often, so you don't grow tired of me being around. If I can't set your insides on fire, I want you to want to be my friend. Even that feels like I ask for too much.

In every scene, I see you in the foreground of the narrative. For me, it would be on honor to be one of your background characters. Narratives are richer with them anyway.

I look at you and you are the Harry Potter movie marathon I wait months for. For you, I am the 2 am infomercial you fell asleep to. But I don't mind half as much as I should. Even white noise has its place in someone's life.

So, you ask,
How would I explain it?
Well certainly, as something
Not fun.
It's like...
It's like carrying a leach around with you.
When I walk, I can feel it,
It is a dead weight on my chest,
******* the life from my arms,
Making my hands and face slender,
What should be full and strong
It's like...
It's like when you're sick to your stomach.
That feeling of tar in your gut,
But instead of being isolated, it's everywhere
Throughout your body,
It makes you feel sick everywhere.

This is how I explain dysphoria:
Have you ever looked in the mirror,
And wanted to just rip all your hair out?
When a bad hair day gets out of hand,
Have you ever felt the need to just start over?
Even when you tear out a clump of hair
And your scalp looks raw and a little ******,
But you keep going anyway,
Just to get rid of that stupid haircut?
...no?
Alright, how about,
When you're watching the outtakes of a 3-D animated movie,
the scenes that have "gone wrong",
When the girl's eyes are far too big and pop out of her face,
Her arms are disconnected from her chest,
Her head moves but her teeth do not,
And you just want to scream "DELETE IT!"
Because it's obvious that someone has ******* up here,
And this nightmare, this fever dream
Is not what they intended their creation to look like.

Alright, well have you ever
Done a pencil drawing?
And you've put a lot of time and effort into it,
You're so proud,
This is one of your best works,
But something about it is just off?
You might not be able to tell what it is,
This will bother you for a long time,
You will spend hours on end thinking
About what exactly separates this piece of art from everything else,
What it is that keeps it from perfection...
Until suddenly one day, you realise,
You notice exactly what's wrong,
You grab an eraser to fix your mistake
But then, oh no
Your eraser was *****,
And when you tried to rub out that single wonky line,
You leave a huge black smudge across your paper
And now there's no way to get rid of it
All your work on this piece, ruined,
And you're really upset,
You were so proud of this drawing,
It was so close to being perfect,
It could have been so beautiful,
It was almost perfect, but now...

But now, it's wrong.
It just looks wrong
It just IS wrong,
It wasn't meant to look like this
I am trying to explain as simply as I can
That this body is wrong,
That it wasn't meant to look like this,
That it wasn't meant to BE like this!
Don't you understand?
This is how I explain dysphoria:
Have you ever looked in the mirror
And wanted to just rip your chest out?
Do you ever see your body, your parts seeming broken,
Your chest, legs, hear the sound of your voice
And just scream "DELETE IT!"
Because it's obvious that someone
Has ******* up
Someone was using a ***** eraser
When they created me, erased me,
And they've left smudges, mistakes, that I
Cannot get rid of,
And however hard I try to pretend
That I don't care,
I do,
And I still feel the need to erase them.
These leaches that I carry around,
They drain me,
And I was so proud of myself
I,
This body...

It could have been so beautiful

Are you okay?
Are you alright, are you fine, are you good?
Are you adequate, are you decent?
Are you emotionally stable, sleeping without crying, smiling because you want to?
Are you breathing without questioning, are you waking up without trying, are you eating without throwing up?
Are you reading this poem right now and thinking no?
Are you thinking for the first time, will I ever be okay?

You will be okay.
You will be alright, you will be fine, you will be good.
You will be adequate, you will be decent.
You will be emotionally stable, you will sleep without crying, and smile for the happiness blooming inside of you.
You will breathe without questioning, you will wake up to a new day, you will eat easily
You
are going to be okay.
So please smile sunshine
It’s a fine new day
To be okay :)

- a.g.

whenever I feel the tremble start to ooze its way
from my compact mind to the tips of my fingers,
I immediately anticipate the fate
that I have always been able to foresee
whenever that familiar first jolt of an anxiety attack sails its way,
like a vessel in a storm
throughout my entire body

heart pounds an intolerable caution
lungs wheeze frigid determination with a rough friction
that lightly scrapes my core with a ticklish flutter
shoulders lift up into a hunch; absolutely automatic
the top tray of teeth lock clenched into the bottom tray’s hold
a fleet of air hisses in and out of two nostrils like a monk’s meditation
capacious eyes flicker from
the lid to the lash to the iris to the pupil to see everything

everyone is staring
everything is too intimidating to look at for longer than two seconds
then, the tunnel
the clearest, acute vision waters into a soft edged frame,
into a pixel mud of a picture, into a black peripheral,
black corners rounding in – a narrow and petty circle
I use it and follow it to wherever my
deepened impulse decides to take me

silently contemplating,
silently speculating,
silently examining
the fears I let my feeble self
get swallowed up in.

Sometimes I don't belong.
"10 things all women do",
screams the headline
Not me, I think, scrolling along.
"every man should try this", demands the caption.
And I just sit here thinking, not for me.
Do they even understand a fraction
Of what it's like to be
Here, in the middle, in between?
"just another queer millenial"
Is that what they see?
Can it really be that they reduce me
To that? Because I know
That I am so much more
But still, this is a blow
That strikes hard
And it hurts.
Am I allowed to cry?
Under which of society's odd rules should I
Handle my feelings about this?
Because men, as it is,
Are unmanly when they let tears flow.
Women, however, are expected to do so.
Now what do I do?
I could lose myself in thinking this through
Over and over again.
My circling thoughts never come to a halt.
There's just this one thing I know:
It is not my fault
That I can't seem to fit in.
That's the way it has always been.
One gets used to it, you know?
Just keep fighting and grow
up to be who you want to be.