Tamara Wood’s About the social change you want to see prompted me to dig down deep before I started to blog, to a funky old BBS in Ann Arbor, MI that’s still running somehow. I think I might be able to submit this to the No More Shame project as well, if there’s still time.
I was really inspired to write poetry then. Looking back now, I see that even then I was writing about my inner pain, although I didn’t feel safe enough to write about it more directly in prose. There were a few poems I wanted to choose from, but the following sums up so much with mental illness, trauma, fear, and so many other things I was dealing with:
[Mar 8 19:09 EST 1999, from the poetry conference at Grex (with one small edit)]
the drowning man. a plethora of feelings still come to engulf me or drag me in when i find them unexpectedly sometimes they come like a great wave crashing down on me or a swirling whirlpool spinning faster and faster or there are the times i am forced to wander through the jungle of life and i misstep into emotional quicksand that gradually sucks me in emotions. so many emotions flowing about me but so often dark and murky i can't see and i'm not sure how long i can tread through them as i gasp for logic take my hand i'm drowning inside
[note: this was inspired by U2’s “Drowning Man”]
the tao of jaklumen 