Mental Health
Are They Worth Your Energy?
If you want to improve your life, stay away from people who make you uncomfortable. A while ago, a friend came to have coffee with me. As soon as she sat down, she sighed: "I've been feeling so tired recently..."
By Emily Chan - Life and love sharingabout a year ago in Poets
The Girl in the Margins
I open the spine and find you again— ink-blotted girl with sky-wide dreams, your laughter pressed between lines, your grief hidden in margins. You speak in loops and loops of hope, believing love could rewrite the world, believing you could become someone by simply wanting it badly enough. I know your handwriting like a ghost knows the house it once lived in— familiar, sacred, aching to be touched, but untouchable now. You don’t see me watching you. Older. Wiser. Wounded, too. You walk through those words with stars in your pockets, and I want to warn you— but the past is deaf and I am only a visitor. Still, I read you like scripture, not to relive you, but to remember how it felt to believe in becoming— because that young girl who wrote in this old journal; I know her, but she doesn’t know me.
By Carolina Borgesabout a year ago in Poets
Alphabet Soup
At the intersection of PTSD and ADHD is crawling in my thin unrecognizable skin. Running from pointless unfinished chore to pointless unfinished chore. Filling every waking moment with sedating noise to overwhelm the screaming sound of my overheating brain. Panicked twirling in confusing circles, loading task after task, unable to begin until all have filled in. Tools disappear as I put them to use. Nervously checking windows, doors, and corners even while I'm unaccompanied. It's locking the bathroom and bedroom doors when only my husband is home with me. Feeling a spider descend on the room, while I walk over a piece of trash until it drags me to the floor. Windows all blinded and draped, lamps turned down, barely illuminating my face. With nothing to eat because it has all gone bad. Dishes pile up in the sink, all washed in one day, just to click on rinse and repeat. A clattering clash of magnificent thought, ready to be enacted, but motivation dies the second there's a bump. One fleeting look of disapproval ends in relationship upheaval. Fleeing to the only perceived home base. It seems to be a cyclic race. Starting out with tears of pain, easily racing the ladder to joy again. Don't dare ask me to come down. You know I'll leap, no second look. Delve into a project I have never tried before. Get three-quarters of the way before running out of the steam to go on. Just toss it on the pile, they make great kindling for the fire.
By K.B. Silver about a year ago in Poets
