there is no way to describe it.
i am flying, high above my problems
but also drowning helplessly in them.
my nerve endings are alight,
tingling with electricity
like a live wire right before it shocks.
i am engulfed by flames of a fire i lit,
red, hot, uncomfortable
yet everything is a hazy, euphoric lilac.
i can't breathe. but i don't need to.
my chest feels like it carries ten kilos,
but i am weightless
light-footed,
as though you need to hold onto me
or else i will float off.
i can't focus. not on me. not on you.
the world is spinning out of control
so hold me.
hold me until i come down,
slowly,
but please,
don't let me fall.

⚠️Trigger Warning: The following poem contains subject matter pertaining to self-harm, suicide, and involuntary psychiatric hospitalization⚠️
______________­____

Tenth grade:

I am standing in the foyer
with my friends
before the bell rings.

From my sailor's mouth:
a bluster of salt and curse words.

My friends are so used
to hearing me swear,
that I believe they have become
desensitized to the variations of "****"
that whistle through my teeth.

Today, I use a
word
I have never said in front of them before.

Their eyes flash
with holier-than-thou
disapproval.

I understand how my language
may be construed as being offensive.

And, truly, I mean no harm.

But truly,
does that make me less than?

(Maybe it does.)

I've never been like them.

I am not pristine.

I am all edge.

Cut from sea glass,
composed of atoms having split
and drowned in their
self-perpetuated monsoons.  

My voice is not a siren song.

It is the stuff
of brine and hurricane.

I ask:
are you mad at me?

"I mean--I don't like hearing it..."

(Yes.)

"It's just sort of disrespectful."

(So you are mad at me.)

This type of shame
can only be alleviated
through means of punishment.

During English class,
I go to the bathroom.

Into my left forearm,
I carve the word
*****,
its lines written
in barbed-wire cursive.
Like a trigger-happy Etch A Sketch,
I create haphazardly.

When I get home that evening,
my parents, having received a phone call
from the school that afternoon,
tell me we are going to the hospital.

(Clarification:
I am going to the hospital,
they are only taking me there.)

Post phone call,
my father had contacted
Alberta Health Services.
The representative he had spoken to
told him that it was necessary
that I go to the hospital
and that if I didn't comply,
he should call 911,
wherein the paramedics
would take me by force.

I am in awe that
this stranger has the power
to tell me where I must go
before I am even aware
of their existence.

After screaming
and sobbing
and swearing--
one of the words being
the cuss that initiated
this series of events
in the first place--
I finally surrender.

On the ride to the hospital,
I listen to "A Car, a Torch, a Death"
by Twenty One Pilots.

"The air begins to feel a little thin
As I start the car, and then I begin
To add the miles piled up behind me
I barely feel a smile deep inside me
And I begin to envy the headlights driving south
I want to crack the door so I can just fall out"


I cinch the vinyl of the seatbelt
between my fingers the entire way there.
Because, in this instance,
the seatbelt is my enemy
so I keep her closer
to me than my own skin.

(But I am not sure
if I really did this
or if my emotion
exploits my memory.)

We arrive.

Still hysterical,
I grab a fistful of snow
before we pass through the doors.

A guffaw verging on maniacal
escapes from my chapped lips:

What if this is my
last chance
to touch snow,
to inhale the crispness of November
before I am locked up?

(What if they lock me up?)

I step out of the queue
and into the nurse's station.
My parents explain
what I've done to myself
and the nurse asks me how I feel.

"Angry,"
I say.

"Why are you angry?"

"Because I've been brought here against my will."

When the ER doctor
has finished her interrogation,
she says that a psychologist
will be with me shortly.

"I'm going to do homework while I wait,"
I tell her, defiance tugging at my vocal cords,
"Because I AM going to school tomorrow."

I ******* my way through
the rest of my assessment
with the psychologist,
try to sound the least suicidal as possible
while also making it exponentially clear
that admitting me involuntarily--
isolating me from the rest of society--
would only intensify my depression.

They let me go.

One of the doctors--
or maybe it was a nurse--
makes a comment
that I can't fully remember.

All I know is that I reply:
"No, I'm still pretty ******,"
to which the doctor (nurse?)
tells me that my parents did the right thing
and that my anger is unwarranted.

And I am just so ******* exhausted
with these people who treat me
like I'm some backward,
music box ballerina.

I figure eight in the direction
opposite of the world
spinning on its axis.

They do not like
this backward girl--
this warped record
whose lyrics seem unfathomable.

So they close
the top of the music box
and I no longer play
the leading role of my own life--
I am just some small, porcelain thing
collecting dust in the fissures of her
silence.

⚠️Trigger Warning: The following poem contains subject matter pertaining to self-harm, suicide, and involuntary psychiatric hospitalization⚠️

I don't recall a whole lot
about my first hospital visit.

I know only the
fleeting
keynotes of the experience.

And I'm not just referring to my first...
psychiatric (?) visit.

(I'm not sure if psychiatric is
the right word,
but I find that I often struggle
to find the right words
when I attempt to describe hospitals
and the time I've spent in them.


I'll do my best.)


See,
I had never been to the
Emergency Room for anything before.

(Well,
except for that one time
I tumbled off the changing table as a baby.
But I'm not sure that really counts,
my only knowledge of the event
having come from second-hand stories.)

Surprisingly enough,
being the clumsy child I was,
I had never sustained
any significant injuries
while growing up,
especially in comparison to my sister
who had a daunting repertoire.

When she was a toddler,
she executed a daredevil jump
from the top of the staircase,
breaking her arm as she crash-landed
onto the basement carpet.

While we were waiting
for her to be fitted with a cast,
I remember her doctor told me
to stop misbehaving.

While I can't remember
exactly how I was misbehaving,
I'm sure it had something to do
with the chaos of my temperament,
a chaos that has churned inside me
for as long as I have known.

Over the course
of my high school years,
when I would make several
appearances at the hospital
due to my own brokenness--
the very brokenness that persuaded
the lacerations on my wrists
and my lust for death--
the doctors would,
in their clinical, roundabout ways,
tell me the same thing:

to stop misbehaving.

In the ninth grade--
this here. this is the first visit--
my guidance counsellor and English teacher
had driven me to the Children's Hospital,
which was only up the road from my high school.

Oddly enough,
I had been relatively compliant.

I had gone quietly,
devoid of the defiant uproar
that seethed under my skin.

Perhaps I acted as I did to prove that,
despite, my darkness,
isolating me from the world I knew
would be a grand disservice to me.

Or perhaps I feared
what would happen
if I was to purposely disobey,
that, upon arriving at the hospital,
I would be treated like the rebel I was,
promptly disrobed of my independence.

The remaining details of the visit
have been resolved to vagueness
as time has passed.

I only know my father  
came straight from work to pick me up.
Before we left,
the doctor gave us pamphlets--
crisis hotlines,
accessing resources
within my quadrant of the city,
alternatives to self-harm.

The doctor dwelled on this last subject;

if I felt like cutting myself,
I could still satisfy the urge
without actually drawing blood.

I could press ice to my skin
or write on myself with markers--
markers not pens--
or snap a rubber band against my wrist,
which was the method
he had particularly fixated on.

He explained he wasn't too keen
on me snapping myself
all the time, either,
but that it was a preferable
alternative until I improved.

"Doc,"
I wish I'd said,
"If only you knew
how lovely it is to bleed."

⚠️Trigger Warning: The following poem contains subject matter pertaining to self-harm, suicide, and involuntary psychiatric hospitalization⚠️

Over the duration of high school,
there is one fear that eclipses
the daily rumination of my thoughts.

Behind sepulchred eyelids,
burn the imaginings

of wasp-needled syringes

straitjackets curling around bodies
with noose-like exactness

a padded room
absorbing brain-curdling screams
into its pink insulation.

At the time,
I was petrified that my newly-discovered
flirtation with self-harm
would land me a permanent stay in an asylum.

The rational part of me knew
that they don't call them
asylums anymore.

The rational part of me knew
there would be no syringes
or straitjackets
or pink, padded rooms.

It was the principle

If it was decided that I was
"an immediate risk to myself"--
a decision that would
incorporate the voices
of the people who barely knew me
but deny me my own voice--
I would be admitted
to a psychiatric ward,
and it would be against my will.

It wouldn't matter
if it was at the Children's Hospital or not--
It wouldn't matter if the walls
were coated with those
sickeningly bright colours
or if there was an Xbox
in the common area.

You can dress up a prison cell
as vibrant as you'd like.
But, by principle,
it's still a prison cell.

When they strip you
of your clothes,
and force you into
their bleak hospital gowns,
they also strip you
of your independence.

(You aren't even allowed
to wear your school cardigan,
the one whose soft, green fabric
you nestle against your fingertips
when you need comforting.

What makes you think
you can leave when you want to?)

See,
doc keeps ya locked up
until he's snuffed the
crazy outta you.

They don't like using
the word
crazy
anymore, either.

So,
like the prison cell,
they play dress up
with your "crazy",
draping it in euphemisms like

unstable.

erratic.

incapacitated.

suicidal--

Once this word is used to label you,
you are never quite able to
abandon its connotation of
madness--
a reputation of inferiority.

And everyone believes
that they are only doing what's best for you,
that hospitalization is the only thing
that will save you from yourself,
when, in fact, it's the ultimatums
and the countless visits to the ER
and the way you are treated--
like a poor ***** lying in wait
to be put down--
that destroys you.

The memories still
bleed fresh most nights.

I seethe at
the mistreatment and
the betrayal and
the destruction
like an army of bees
whose hive has been kicked in,
a snow-globe convulsing
between careless hands.

I was kinder
before they stole away
the last moon-slivers of hope
I held between heart and ribs,
between lips and flower petals.

The nectar has been
exorcised from my soul,
leaving only infestation behind.


(and there is no escaping this swarm)

volume i
A Portrait of My Sixth-Grade Self
___________________­

Eleven-year-old fingers
swollen with baby fat
dig into the gaudy shimmer
of turquoise eyeshadow
encased in its shattered compact.

I apply the pigment,
erratic smudges extending
from my lash line
to just below my untamed brows.

The blue powder accentuates the swirls
of my fingerprints in dizzy figure eights.

But you can't quit your own skin
like you can quit ice skating lessons.

I am in the sixth grade
when the Popular Girls
in my class tell me that,
if I want to get a boy to like me,
I have to change the way I look.

I abide by the rules of the
Unofficial Mean Girl Doctrine:

{no. 1}

I mustn't wear sweat pants,
these sloppy Old Navy rags
that I have owned for three years.

See,
denim is superior to cotton
even though it leaves
cavernous indentations
on my stomach.

Sweat pants forgive
the extra swell of your waist line.

Denim punishes you
for what you don't have,
more specifically
for what you have too much of.

I ask my mom for skinny jeans
because perhaps if I can
shrink all that I am
into this blue, unyielding fabric
I will feel thinner than I actually am.

We buy the skinny jeans from Old Navy.

{no. 2}

My signature high pony tail is
unacceptable.

I should wear my hair down,
they profess.

I am not sure if this is
because of the tufts of frizz
that loom over my scalp
like wasted dandelion seeds

(I wish... I wish... I wish...)

or if this is just a necessary ritual
in the abandonment of my girlhood.  

After I unsheathe my curls
from their rubber-band Bastille,
their trial commences.

My ringlets slither
in hostile circulations,
executing frequent detours away
from anyone who might scoff
at their animalistic bedlam.

If only I could will
my spectators to stone.

Cuz no one ever dared
**** with Medusa
and her curls.

Instead,
I settle for a flat iron.

{no. 3}

Do everything in your power to be
Beautiful
including, but not limited to,
the laws indicated above.

Yet,
despite my grandest efforts,
it is never enough.

I am never enough.

I am the Walmart Edition
of what the Popular Girls
want me to be.

With my gaudy eyeshadow and the
cheap Dollar Store bracelets
that I wear around my wrists,
plastic flowers blooming
upon threaded stems
that nip at the hair on my arms.

One day on the bus ride home,
a boy from my class tells me
I am too hairy.

"Huh?" I ask,
pretending I haven't heard him.

"Nothing," he mumbles back to me.

See,
little girls are supposed to play with
jump ropes and Barbie Dolls.

They are not supposed to
play with razors as they strip away
every misplaced hair on their body
or consult Teen Vogue
for the latest beauty hacks
like they are Gospel.

This year of 2011/2012
has been engraved  into
the historical road map
of my every insecurity.
The legend of this map,
depicted in smeared globules
of sugar cookie lipgloss,
deliver me to my destination:

self hatred.

Mascara stains the
topography of my flesh
in inky, dotted lines

I follow.

I plummet
like the eternal run
in my stockings.

One way plane ride
non-stop
never to return
from this perception of ugliness
and then--

flight


down.

⚠Trigger Warning; the following poem contains subject matter pertaining to self-harm ⚠

~

I am sitting in
ninth grade English class
(or maybe it was Social Studies?)

My fingers creep
beneath the desk,
past a mausoleum
of stale chewing gum
until they grasp at
something frigid and metal.

Kilt pin unhooked,
plaid parted,
I reach for mid-thigh.

Pulse hammering in my veins,
and my countenance an
exhibition of nonchalance,
I probe-gouge-drag
it across my skin.

From my mouth,
a quiet yelp.

The girl next to me asks,
"are you okay?"

⚠️Trigger Warning: The following poem contains subject matter pertaining to self-harm⚠️

~


In the beginning,

I used Bic pen caps
safety pins
jagged remnants of plastic
salvaged from a broken mechanical pencil
the serrated edge
of a paper towel dispenser--

gateways to razors
and Exacto knives.

Objects that were too dull
to split skin
but were still sharp enough
to leave their mark--
puffy, red scratches
accompanied by the
occasional pearl of blood,
dark rarities
that blossomed in rosy drops
upon the dominion of my flesh.

At the time,
I deemed my attempts
at self-harming
pathetic substitutions,
euphemisms in lieu of
the real thing:

deep lacerations from which
reservoirs of Crismon
were birthed.

Sometimes,
I still believe this,
even though it is
terribly unkind
to abbreviate my experience.

If my ninth grade
guidance counsellor
were to read this,
she would tell me that
it's not about the
depth of the wound,
or the means by which
the wound was acquired, but
rather
the existence of the wound

(the existence of the
hurting).

You howl across the smartphone speakers
“unstable”
I roar back,
“healing.”
Ah, semantics.

You cling to definitions tighter than static
Your arguments are magnets to my geyser:
stuck, yet I flow on

You build a face for the day,
reinforce it, ready for the wrecking ***** in our vernacular
nothing will shake your perspective
your eyes are glasses to our periscope

The things you’ve been told are just that
and my illness doesn’t make me any less blood and bone
any less ups and downs
any less success and collapse
than you
despite what you’ve heard about depression from some friends or a Facebook post
it’s more than a daily beast
it’s a mountain to climb with only one arm
and I’m on my way to stable footing

You want to attach words like “lazy” and “uncaring” to my identity
go ahead, I pick them off like fleas
they can only drain me for as long as I let them.

I will say “suffering”
you might say “a lil’ sad”
we both sit there, hoping truth blessed us with its language

Only one thing is for certain.
Whatever “it” may be
It.
Won’t.
Stop.
Me.

The called her a monster
For what she had become
They called the devil
But oh she was
She became this way from the pain
The torture they had given her
She learned to be hard and cold as ice
For when she was soft
She got walked all over
They are the ones who changed her