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Stuck like a fly, I'm paralyzed by choices
Everything needs to get done
But like Ouroboros, eating his own tail
The tasks are a circle with every place to start requiring a different task to be done
It's a sisyphean struggle to get started on most things
Yet words are my escape
I share my dreams with others
As their stories flow into me
My consciousness recedes
Rarely enough to have  complete silence
But even whispers are a relief
From the thunderous yells
"You're just lazy!" and "You'll never amount to anything."
Those words and more echo through my mind
Every second of every minute of every day.
Wistful "if only"'s of impossible scenarios
Are my constant refrain
All efforts I make turn to ash and dust
Just taking the next step, the next breath is a fight
It's feels like it's me against the world
And that weight is heavier than I can hold
Sometimes, the darkest days give the most inspiration, while others choke the will to survive. And little by little its grip tightens, it won't get me today.
My tenuous grip on the edge of oblivion is slipping.
As I suffocate under the anxiety
Induced by a world driving full speed into it's own destruction.
Any effort I put forth to change my lot is crushed by a system designed to exploit.
After being promised a future of opportunity and success.
Society is crumbling, and a part of me wants to emulate Nero and dance to the flames.
If only I could find the energy, but by design
The downtrodden and desperate can only see the next step.
Obscured by the shadows of oligarchs stealing money from the poor.
When is it time to rise up and throw these shackles off
My throat is closed, the hangman's noose around my neck
As my hands are bound and my ankles weighted down with a ball and chain
How do I escape this hellscape that has me bound
Is that only just a dream, ephemeral and ethereal
Unable to be grasped by my reaching hands
As I fade away, will there be anything left of me to remember
With fascism on the rise, a genocide my country is complicit in, the world dying faster and faster each year how am I supposed to cope?
Trevor Dowe Aug 2021
Adrift I float
in an uncaring ocean
left, abandoned

all ties severed
solitude and emptiness
unwanted, unneeded

all traces of me
washed away with the tide
forgotten, alone
These haiku can be placed in any order, but are all connected and are a triptych of what it's like to have Rejection Sensitive Dysphoria. I wrote these as a reflection of my emotions and the pain I feel when I don't understand why people aren't talking to me. I obviously know that they have their own lives, but when going from feeling like a priority to feeling like an option can make anyone feel low
Trevor Dowe Aug 2021
Her smile shines and illuminates my soul like the sun is warm on my face, with her by my side I'm happy in ways I've forgotten, if I ever knew I could be.
My alarm goes off, another day of grey.
I'm too broken and jagged edged to put anyone else in my company. I'm not whole and I'm not her responsibility to fix and I don't want to cut her on my sharp shattered soul.
For now I subsist on her genuine kindness and warmth, I may never feel her arms around me and her lips upon my skin, but I take comfort in her casual friendship and solace that I'm working on healing myself so that I can be ready for love.
Always, I will be grateful to her for her  gentleness, her ferocity, and her ambition for they are the path I follow to become whole again, upon her I would shower the blessings and bounties of the cosmos.
My love is boundless, and I do my best to give a safe amount because I'm still learning what it means and I refuse to be careless with the hearts of others, for I know the pain of one rent asunder, torn for no less than the amusement of one I trusted.
Lessons of malfeasant and twisted affection must be unlearned and I know I'm better than the trauma I've suffered but the effort and struggle to become who I know I can be is the hardest thing I've ever done, and I've done terrible things in my darkest days, days when the end was neatly noted on calendars.
I'm not ready to put someone else through the pain of existence, because I know that there is peace and I will find it, she showed me how to be strong, now I will show her that I too can be.
Depression is a fickle and evil thing and it never truly goes away, like it's twin anxiety, it lurks waiting to latch onto your soul and drag you back down into it. But it's worth the fight every day is a little brighter if you remember that stormy days are natural and they will eventually blow by. There will be an end and the rainbow as the clouds break and the sun shines again is worth working for
Trevor Dowe Aug 2021
Not
I'm not who I was
never have I been who I am
My love and admiration twist
I have no confidence
because I am cognitively dissonant
raised with values too extreme for humanity
not able to shake free of them
I've done terrible things, too few I regret
and even those still echo desire in the depths of me
but I'm not going to allow myself to wake in this darkness
not going to be complacent
pain follows change, but so too does joy
I'm not yet free, not yet me
I don't know if I can break free
but I do know
I'm not done yet
growing up in a strict religious household with puritanical extremes of what is acceptable behavior and zero tolerance for worldly desires has hurt me and my ability to be a person capable of love. I'm flawed and i am trying to find beauty in myself, but I don't know if I'm strong enough.
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