Part 2: Mental Health and Art

The journey to recover from my depression is still ongoing. I will say that it has gotten easier after I learned how to release my emotions into my work. Discovering poetry in primary school was an essential step into being who I am now, since at the time when I found myself in a very dark place, listening to and reading poetry was the most emotionally freely thing I could do. I’ve always been a reader and used reading to escape my reality often. But poetry: it wasn’t something I could get into but it helped me understand and eventually learn how to explain to myself and others what was happening when I couldn’t explain it simply.

I’ve always done well with metaphors. And when I began writing poetry I wrote about simple things like the clouds and the bathroom tiles, about the way the sun shone through the leaves while I waited for my transport back home after school. Finding the way that these things in nature represented situations that were present in my life.

As a curious mind, I love finding out how things work and why. I try my hardest to live a life that feeds that curiosity. I feel like every system on the planet can be used to explain another because they all work quite similarly. I have used that perspective to explain my emotions to myself and how to navigate through life. I have used those same methods to give advice to others.

I believe that my writing has a place in this world because I acknowledge how the literary world has helped me process and communicate better. I have many people say they love to read my stuff for different reasons. For me I write as an expression of both my insides and outsides as well as how I interpret situations in life in general. In my poem The Journey of the creative. There’s a line where I say “I’m flying through the minds of those that have hurt before...” which is to say that if I only wrote about my own life experiences, I wouldn’t write as much, I believe that having empathy and being able to relate everything in life also allows me to be able to understand and write about things I may not have experienced in my own life.

A big step for me however was finally becoming comfortable to allow my writing to be about me and that’s when I started writing about depression and anxiety. And though some of those poems might never see the light of day, I also recognize that sharing the ones I do helps someone else who’s out there know that they’re not alone which is one of the biggest problems faced when dealing with mental health issues is the feeling of being alone.

My hope is that people can relate to my writing. Find a home where they can rest here, set themselves free and process their emotions and eventually release and come back on top, learn to celebrate themselves as this is what I do through my work as well.