Balance


My coworker points out my perfectionism when
I’m facing the shelves.
spent the last forty-five minutes
undoing the asymmetry of everyone else's
actions.

I do not say anything.

I think about how I haven’t take my Prozac
in five days
enough time for the OCD
To reinsert itself.

I didn’t sleep for six straight days in September.
rewriting my notes compulsively because I messed up,
looks a lot like rewriting myself into perfectionism.

My serial symmetry—
controlled letters looping into the perfect picture
a picture those around me cannot get enough of.
When I don’t sleep for six days,
I see a psychiatrist.
I didn’t know anything was wrong,
with my harmonic convergence on letters
and work and neatness and writing,
was abnormal.

It's hard to know something is wrong with you when the world labels you:
“PERFECTIONIST”

I took no issue with the obsessions
Because I didn’t know there was an issue at hand.

I got the script for Prozac
and it rewrote the notes for me.
It did not fix everything,
but I could breathe for the first time.
My symmetry still slips out and I have to fix the mess—
Every mess but myself.

My life hangs in the balance:
I am terrified of not being good enough
yet I have to try.

I continue to push,
I have something to say.
My atypical thought pattern will not cease
no matter how hard the symmetry tries to knock it down—
I must write,
paint,
draw.

It is the only thing that differentiates self care
from self medication.

I will not drown my sorrows,
like those who came before me.
The cure for my woes is not at the bottom of a bottle—
but maybe it's there when the ink runs out in my pens.

Again and again
I find myself here:
on the precipice of my own creation,
on the precipice of my own destruction.
I live a black and white balance,
There is no grey when it comes to my mental health.
It is not like OCD to wait,
my proactiveness comes with creation
perfectionism waits in the shadows to **** me.

I must be better than the parts
of me
that seek,
my own
end.