Letting poetry set up shop again & dealing with mental illness

In August of last year, I had a mental breakdown that led me to be hospitalized for a week. I haven't spoken about it much here online, in part because the taboos of speaking about such things led me to feel it was publicly showing weakness and also because it is a little difficult to actually explain to people what my breakdown stemmed from.  Well, fuck the first part of that, because if we don't actually give ourselves spaces to talk about our mental illness, then everyone will continue to trivialize it and push it further back into the corner of our mental dressers as one of the "unmentionables." And as to the second part, I probably need to discuss this out in the open because I know I am not alone, and maybe someone else who feels the same way needs to know that as well. 

I realized back in August that I am non-binary genderqueer, more specifically, a variety of pangender, and I came to some pretty hard truths in a very short time that If I am going to be happy with myself, I need to make some hard changes. One, let people know my pronouns are They/Them, and two, name myself. Many trans and nonbinary find that taking back the power of naming lets us inhabit a new verbal space that fully embraces and opens up opportunities for us to openly exist as our authentic selves. But sadly, coming out at work, in a retail setting in which a majority of people have no background or understanding of gender theory, or even to my parents, is in some ways an impossibility. My parents attitude towards such "deviance" is just to ignore it until it goes away, and in reality, I just don't have the emotional spoons in my in and out bouts with depression to deal with that yet. 

But I can for the first time, speak about it, in the only way I feel at times speaks any truth - verse. So here it is. It doesn't specifically deal with gender outright, but it definitely touches on that world I was tied down to, and still am in many ways, which erupts from dealing with my own mental landscapes. 

Thank you for reading,

Ecco

Celexa

Take this, without looking,

And feel it within the palm

Of your hand, its ridges and dips,

A shape you recognize, but

The dimensions of happiness

Allow for no name

And so the only thing to do

Is to take it in your mouth

And feel the shape absorb into you

Filling those gaps in your worn down

Gossamer wings which fill your chest

And can no longer stretch to fly

Without tearing

And in this moment as you feel yourself

Mending you close your eyes

and remember that melancholy

is not a title for this state

Of liquid you move in

But a space filled by hands covering a hole in the hull

A gap too wide for one lone sailor

and their mother’s jar of cotton balls

To fill