It’s Poetry Tuesday! We are going to go back through all my old notebooks and look at the god-awful poetry I wrote when I was an angsty teen and then you will get present day Michelle’s re-interpretation/headdesk horror-filled embarrassment.

Darkness

Darkness,
It’s pressing in
Suffocating
Devastating
It surrounds me as I fall
Down
Down to the depths of hell
No one understands
There is no hope
No way out
My grave is dug
I must lie in it
There was no one
No help
Eyes turned blind
I am nothing
The darkness consumes
Festers
Feasts
It takes it all away
Leaves a shell
Takes your voice
Kills you

My deepest apologies for posting and then pulling this poem. As you might have guessed from yesterday’s post, last week was a bit of a Week. I am hoping to return to my regular schedule and be able to stick to it. That being said, let’s turn to the poem!

It is interesting that this is the poem that I picked out for this post almost a month ago because this is actually quite apt for how I felt last week. I am not going to get into my sob story at the moment, that’s what my other posts this week are going to be about, but I will say that sleep deprivation is a horrible thing and it will mess with you long past getting a good night’s sleep afterwards. I remember in high school we had a speaker come in and talk to us about the importance of sleep and how sleep deprivation can seriously mess you up. He talked about how they did an experiment and had four people drive an obstacle course: one sober driver,  one drunk driver,  one sleep deprived driver, and one driver who was high on marijuana. At one point in the course a “small child” appears in the middle of the course, and he said that all of the drivers BUT the sleep deprived one swerved to miss the “child.” The sleep deprived driver ran the dummy right over and then a minute or so later said, “did we hit something?” That was my week.

I don’t know if I ever talked about this in any past posts, but I have never been actually depressed. Depression runs in my family and I know what it looks like, and I have depressive tendencies, but I have only had down swings, no actual depressive episodes. But if I was going to take a stab at what it felt like, I would say it would be somewhere in the ballpark of last week, and what is poorly depicted in this poem. Unending, unrelenting “darkness.” I swear that I legitimately thought that my life was going to be shit, had always been shit and I was shit. Everything is dulled and awful and I was on the verge of tears constantly or explosively angry. As a privileged person who is able to work only one job to get by, to have my own apartment where I can get enough sleep every night, and three square meals, I cannot imagine what it must be like for people who are perpetually sleep deprived, hungry, and bone deep exhausted every day with no reprieve.

Thankfully, there was a reprieve for me. There was a flip in luck and happiness so I can be back to myself, but it’s not that way for everyone. Not everyone will get to dig out of the mire as easily so be as kind as you can every day.

I don’t think I actually talked about the poem. It’s….dramatic, but fairly accurate. High school Michelle, you are horrible at poetry, but decent with sentiment.