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anniversary: a poem

-anniversary-

it’s not easy to dream,
on a pillow drenched,
by the storm inside of me,
as scenes and memories,
form a supercut,
like the racing of pain,
back through my veins,
as i do the most difficult task,
one year after trauma,
i remember.
droplets of galaxy,
fall from the ceiling,
into my dry eyes,
i see from above,
the view of the sky,
i remember how it felt to come so close,
to the end,
so close, that i could taste the salt spray,
of the dark ocean,
i felt was my inevitability,
the willingness to succumb,
to the darkness which,
tore at me.
each day i breathe i am haunted by the frozen ground behind me,
in the shadow cast by my ever-expanding memory,
a night i tried to forget,
but at every corner,
in every conflict,
in every relapse,
in every new memory,
on every breath,
i will taste the blood in my mouth,
from the injury,
which, even after healing,
still remains with residual bleeding.
but i am not defined by a buried memory,
one i pieced as well as i could,
then shelved,
one that i unearth to learn from,
whenever i feel my path,
is leading,
there,
i’m scared,
of feeling alone enough,
of feeling not enough,
to fall beyond return,
but that will not happen,
because i am celebrating today,
my eyes slowly open,
on a new day,
surrounded by life,
surrounded by love,
still figuring out the great problem,
of the life i did not take away,
and i feel comfort in this,
being the place i stay.

I am here.
my eyes open, 
on a morning,
three-hundred and sixty-five days later,
and i find it’s hard to breathe,
i’m overwhelmed by unnamed emotion,
i’m scared of possibility,
but i’m here to see it all,
happy anniversary.

“six months”- a poem

The day i sent these five books in,
Five years of pain,
Suddenly ceased.
I was in a bubble,
An air pocket,
At the bottom of the ocean,
Creating my own space,
Demanding that the depths of my existence,
Let me breathe,
And so I did,
Breathe.

There i was,
A sliver of silver, wiped clean of its tarnish,
Still scratched,
But exposed, in a new way.

In these six months,
The fire still burned,
Frost moved in,
Rain cleared the slate,
The sun dried the stone,
And in the cracks,
Blooms and fields were born.

Growth was a journey,
To take my pieces,
Melt them down,
And cast them in a new shape.

Now I see,
The cycle holds true,
With much less severity.

I chose life.

And as I approach the anniversary,
Of trauma,
I don’t feel dread,
I feel—
Complete.

Or at least completely uncertain,
Of what lies ahead of me.

-thomas jackson

Mental Health is a Continuum

I have an approach to mental health that has helped me process both triumph and failure. It helps me move through rough patches on my journey and recurrences in symptoms I thought I had under control. It’s difficult for me to speak on disorders other than depression and generalized anxiety disorder, as I have not personally experienced those symptoms. This is my attempt to unify them. I feel a change in how we approach mental health will help speed up the “treatment lag”, or the difference in time between when symptoms present themselves and when treatment is accessed.

The way our society approaches mental health is as a moment or a concept that can easily be summarized through the binary “I’m fine/not fine.” We also treat it as a “problem” that needs “fixing.” While the widespread societal issue of ample mental healthcare is an important topic to discuss, on the individual level there is one bottom line: Mental health struggles are not problems to be solved or permanent check boxes that can be run down like a to-do list. They are ongoing in any capacity, and require you to be more in-tune with your emotions and actions — regardless of severity.

I’d like to suggest a new approach that treats mental health as a continuous process, a multifaceted evolution with certain imbalances trading off for others. We all have areas of struggle: public speaking, maintaining a schedule, sleep, self-esteem, exercise, irritability, optimism. Everyone struggles with certain areas to varying degrees of severity, and everyone has moments where each struggle has little triumphs and losses in smaller areas. For public speaking it could be finally figuring out what to do with your hands, but then you realize you were so focused on your hands that you picked up swaying, or you notice swaying more now. It’s a collection of different levels that come naturally to some, like breathing, and are problems for others — like when you think about breathing and suddenly have to consciously manage it until it becomes natural or until it’s brought to your attention once again.

Consider how you are feeling right now.

What emotions can you label? Can you assign a degree to your stress? How attached do you feel to reality or your situation right now?

This is your mental state, the moments that make up your mental health. States are units of health on a line moving through time. They are the current summation of all emotions and stress in that moment. Whole days are not units of your mental state. The largest unit is “afternoon” or “morning.” I challenge you to assess how you are feeling and why you are feeling that way, be it up or down. This helps to form an initial understanding of what general situations, places, people you source certain energy from. It prioritizes not the spectacle of the situation, but the reality of your emotional reaction to the stimulus. Answers to evaluations of your mental state can be reached immediately, or worked at through art of any form. It’s entirely possible to feel a color or like an abstract concept that is difficult to convey, maybe it’s a melody, a color, a scene, a single word, or sound. Whatever it is, you assign meaning to that and can recognize when you are feeling a certain way based on these associations.

I use test questions as an example of how evaluating your mental state proactively is better than retroactively (retroactive processing is better for big events or moments that require attention with no breaks) because if you are taking a test and are stumped on a later question after blowing through content you knew, it’s difficult to not “ruin” your picture of the whole test. Your mental state in that moment can’t be generalized to the whole test, yet generalization is what our reaction is. Think about all the times you generalize in life. Does someone else’s bad day make you forget the good parts of them? Does someone’s good day make you overlook all the bad effects they have on you? Generalization isn’t easy, it’s efficient. It boxes perceptions into absolutes in order to rapidly associate it with past responses to ensure that you are behaving consistently with past experiences. That reaction isn’t always the best.

A mental disorder is an irregularity in the composition of factors in your mental states. Fluctuating mood, constant worry, obsessions and compulsions, impact the makeup of your mental states. It makes imbalances more consistent. People can have mental disorder without a diagnosable “illness.” Consider it the larger “war” and causing smaller “battles” across different grounds with a different army from a common set involved in the conflict. A disorder is not your enemy, it is a part of you. Disorders are often spectrums. They are rarely constant in the beginning, which makes the onset subtle.

Anxiety is an imbalance in the natural fear process in our brain. Without fight-or-flight, we would be ill-equipped to deal with physical danger. The imbalance of that process in relation to the stimuli the brain is presented with throws off other scales, and creates a wide array of symptoms. Some of mine are chronic muscle tension, irritability, focusing issues, stomach tension, and nausea. Anxiety manifests often in deeply physical ways. Panic attacks are most commonly recognized by elevated heart rate. They change how your body is behaving in that moment. Depression most commonly drains you of energy or interrupts your sleep cycle. All disorders have their basis in chemicals and processes the brain naturally uses, so they don’t make you any less human. That is the unity between taking care of your physical and mental health, they physically are inseparable. Your nervous system is expansive throughout your body, like your cardiovascular or lymphatic system. Dehydration doesn’t require drinking only water, you’ve also got to balance other chemicals in your body. Yet, when we attempt to solve mental health problems through drugs or by covering it up, we drink a lot of water. The chemicals remain out of balance. This does not mean medication is always necessary, but it is extremely helpful for those that require it, and research is ongoing into more effective medications

This attitude change was how I was able to change my mindset, the one factor in the progression of mental health that is under your immediate control. While it is important to combat the forces that advance and propagate the stigma around mental health, there are still lingering pieces left in my mind. It scares me to admit that I am not okay. It saddens me that I had to endure this, and continually have to struggle. The worst thing that the stigma does is make those affected search for the magic wand. It turns the speed up on life so that it appears to be difficult to pause and take action. But there is no magic wand to wave away the disorder, to find the right drug on the first try, to have hope. The magic comes from the connection to the immense strength within that appears when you convince yourself that living has much more worth, although it may be difficult at times, than finding a way out that dashes your chances.

It takes more work to change behavior patterns than it does to change your attitude. Changing your attitude is confronting the symptoms, the cycles, and interrupting them. It’s changing a lightbulb. Reframing your perception to influence your reaction is a ground-up process that is necessary, but more timely. It’s changing the energy source for the light. These are both important things to do. Taking care of only the symptoms or the base of the disorder itself is like plugging one leak only to have another appear. They reinforce each other. In order to confront a positive feedback loop, you have to interrupt it, target the two sources of momentum, and handle them with equal effort.

Even on the worst days, I was able to return home to my cat or eat a nice meal. There were still glimmers in the dark that did not discount the existence of the bad. Reminding yourself of that good helps to process the “bad” events because you have practiced processing emotions with something that leaves you happy in the end. Pushing off processing by watching a show or munching on comfort food can be soothing, but they are not healing. You neglect all parts of the day in that case. Reframing means reaching the understanding that panic attacks cannot be stopped once they begin, as you can’t run back in time on this linear progression. You can find ways to ride the wave, to ground yourself, to breathe deeply in order to take control of that response back gradually. Then, once it subsists, it’s important to consider what set it off, what did you feel beforehand (there is often a rise), what you felt during, and then you notice the signs the next time, and can apply the same techniques as aversion principles. This is how I stopped having panic attacks although the triggers were still there.

When I had mononucleosis in August of 2017, I felt, truly, like I was going to be sick for the rest of my life. I fell into a deep emotional rut while I was bedridden in the last two weeks before my tumultuous junior year. While that illness has relapsed, which is rare, I feel so much better than before. Just because you are in a situation does not mean you will always be there, and although it may sound like an “I Know” moment, check if you truly believe it or if you secretly treat it as the opposite. Do you truly support the statement with action?

Does an experience determine your future? No. You determine how you set yourself up to handle the future, and work through it as it comes. Sometimes that requires working through past trauma and experiences, but you can’t change them, only how you treat them and how you use them.

I do not believe that every individual is purely capable of all this effort from the get-go. It takes practice, counseling, reinforcement, gradual introduction, and sometimes medication to truly help. I hope I have been able to at least open your mind to considering this perspective, and that you find success in whatever way you can. It’s been one month since I released my book and I have had two depressive periods and four moments of heightened anxiety that I worked through and failed on. My first reaction was “you’re a published author, why can’t you just be happy?” And, had I let that thought continue, I could have been in a negative mindset again, one not oriented toward growth. But I worked through my emotions, had a good healthy cry, and remembered what I told myself on the release day of my book:

“Your depression is not cured, neither is your anxiety. This book is not the end of all of this emotion, but it’s the path that led to the progress you have made now. You are living the sequel, now. Don’t ever give up.”

The illustration represents the differences in journeys along this path. Sometimes you plateau, sometimes it’s a rocky climb to a good place, sometimes it’s a rounded curve, often it’s an amalgamation of several different progressions.

Thank you so much for supporting my work and my ideas.

Whoever is reading this, I hope that you take care of yourself by prioritizing the climate of your mental health, by advocating for yourself when others or you neglect your mental health, and never sacrifice your happiness.

Love,

Thomas Jackson

Originally published at medium.com/tbjwrites

Self-Minimization Is Common But Unhealthy

Even after the release of my poetry book, I still find difficulty in balancing my confidence, especially during the time of college applications. Rather than state my accomplishments, accept compliments, and then repeat for those around me, I pull the rug out from under my excitement. Applying for college really scrutinizes the fear I have of talking about myself when I’m not venting my problems. It forces me to talk about myself like I love myself, when I am still improving my self-confidence bit by bit. Even after the worst of my mental health struggles, I find that I am thrown back into certain cycles by a creeping behavior pattern known as minimization.

Self-minimizing is, in its nature, a form of denial. It is the product of a cycle that produces guilt and consumes confidence. It is the act of denying the validity of emotions and their causes, the avoidance of opportunities due to beliefs about oneself, and the severe underestimation of one’s abilities. I frequently see it during school, most often after public speaking opportunities or after someone has completed an art project. It’s the act of nervously pointing out perceived flaws in order to have control over the situation. I perceive it as easier to insult myself than have someone else do it. It was also less damaging than personalizing someone else’s criticism, the major source of conflict in my life. They are both mechanisms that incite other cycles and exacerbate already spinning ones.

Minimization is commonly seen as a mechanism for emotional abuse, exercised on the target of the situation. But on the cognitive level, it is a form of self-abuse designed to “cope” with pain. You deny yourself care because of a deep belief that you do not deserve love.

I challenge you to pay attention to what you say about your accomplishments. Say you get into a program or a school you were passionate about. Do you state that it’s not a big deal? Are you thinking of the parts of the application that were lacking? Do you forget to say thank you to compliments in rushing to downplay?

The reason why self-minimizing is a difficult process is because it is a commonplace subtlety. We are all so scared of pride, that we refuse to be proud. The most important action you need to avoid is treating minimization as another reason to dislike yourself.

It’s important not to tell yourself to shut-up, or to stop contributing to conversations over fear of “ruining” them. In the moment, if you feel you can’t stop, don’t ruminate or obsess over the fact that you can’t stop. Habits are better fought when they are weaned — rather than cut — off cold turkey. Find ways to reframe what you are said after the fact, and use that lesson from failure to influence the next moment. In reframing, shift the foundation of the behavior from an insecurity to a “neutral” topic. Instead of talking about opinions or personal stories, talk about impactful stories or articles or tv episodes. Once you get used to comfort in conversation, begin introducing personal elements. Gradually talk about interests and then about events in your life.

I used to minimize my panic attacks as just bursts of nausea because I was worried that someone was going to think I was being too dramatic. Once I confronted that insecurity over the public image I was presenting, It became easier to dignify my emotions. Dignifying my emotions as a rational problem allowed me to take the necessary steps in order to better my situation.

Minimizing your emotions by saying “it’s fine” or “i’m just being overdramatic” prevents you from processing events correctly. The first reaction I have to my anxiety is to say that it’s out of proportion to the source. “Saying” does not require understanding. You need to understand what you are feeling, what is causing you to feel that way (do this even when you’re happy) in order to find the sources of empowerment in your life. You have to analyze the conflict in order to implement the best solution.

Depression is not an on-off light switch, it’s a dimmer. Just as your eyes adjust to increasing levels of light, this process takes time. I did not become confident in a sudden moment. I had to overcome legitimate fears I labeled as stupid, and it was in no way easy. Now that I am in a better place, I am able to feel more of the warmth I thought was gone. There is always hope for you.

-Originally Published at medium.com/tbjwrites

The Power of A Story

Anyone who has endured mental trauma — the overwhelming of your ability to cope and emotionally process stress — or any level of situational or clinical mental disorder will know that finding something to cling to, is vital to survival. This can be a pleasant memory, an object, a color, a room, a place, a moment, a sensation, an activity, etc. Because the trauma will cling to its own spaces in your mind. That is why flashbacks are crippling. The wound is hidden but open, actively fighting to survive, just as you are. It makes it difficult to control the presence of memory in your everyday interactions with the world. I remember the entire night under a blue filter, and through poetry I unpacked the events to find the truth without compromising the safety of that blue memory. I can’t piece through every minute, where I was, exactly what I did, but I now what happened. I know what I did after.

I used my story to get through.

In the act of illuminating my wounds, I discovered that I had done what I thought was right. I modeled how we as a society hide our wounds. In the moments I described in growth, I was unable to find words until after the fact. Explaining to an audience helped stitch the wounds. It healed me to dignify my flaws, and finally adjust my trajectory toward cleaning up the mess of the past five years of my life. Reading my collection is not triggering for me. I can see clearly how deeply I dug my nails into the writing process. Holding onto a rocket as it blasted through a vacuum where the solutions were unclear. All I see is healing. All I feel is grateful to be alive, love for those words, and drive to prevent myself from ever falling that far again.

We all reach a trauma point in our lives. It’s a moment without a reaction. One does not remark on the beauty of the sun while staring directly at it, the pain is overwhelming, and the damage lasts. Your body freezes, time ceases to exist. You find the meaning after the fact. But you frantically search for it during the storm. In moments, I cried instead of breathing, as my body was unclear on what to do. There were no emotions for it to latch on to. My base processes that keep me alive were overcome by my disorder, and I ultimately was severed from my body. Nearly ending my life ripped my mind back down to Earth, and left it to clean up the injury. So I returned to writing poetry.

I never once sat down and considered what I was doing. Writing was incoherent sentences yelling at the back of my mind right as I sat down to go to bed, or during a class. It was inconvenient, but I took the time to pause and transcribe. Inspiration is not an action or a skill, it’s a moment. You can develop your receptivity to be able to find inspiration in unconventional ways, or to effectively channel that voice in your mind. The most important thing to do, is to capture whatever inspiration has been thrown your way in a rough manner. Then you go back and correct it at a different time. In overcorrecting ourselves we forget the central idea as if we had moved on from the thought and tried to return to it later.

I wanted to forget and move on, as I had done with my previous panic attacks and depressive episodes. In my attempts to kill my anxiety, I allowed it to recuperate and manifest as an insidious phantom. My legs were filled with pain, my muscles filled with tension. It collided with years of depression and boiled over like hot tar. Slowly moving, burning, covering.

Clinging to my story meant continuing that story and, most important, wanting to continue that story. I continued to capture my story, feeling more need in this world than ever for the mending of wounds we all have unfortunately been marked by. Across all traumatic situations, there are situations that exert an influence great enough to break and re-break us.

Nothing filled me with more conviction than looking out into a relatively small community and seeing traces or worse symptoms than mine. Than seeing the direct exercise of the belief that silence is the best reaction to pain. Seeing the expression of symptoms ruin and take lives because those individuals were unable to recognize or be recognized as needing help. The belief that there are not enough hours in the day or the barriers are too numerous and monumental to overcome is a toxic padlock preventing success. So is assigning immense monetary value to mental heath care and shellacking on the stigma. We keep losing people to their pain, to the two forms of trauma that often act together. The trauma we create in ourselves by improperly preparing ourselves for and mitigating stress, and stress enacted on us by forces outside our control. We should take responsibility for the solution, as finding the strength in ourselves to overcome, often not alone, is empowering.

We destroy each other when we assign blame for the cause. Beating yourself up for mistakes or for the inhumanity of others is never healthy. It is vital to believe in yourself when some force has burned what you built in life to the ground. I like to think of it as building a house out of charcoal, a house you keep rebuilding and refurnishing as the world around you sinks back into order.

My dream is for someone to feel okay, for even a moment to be at peace with their progress, and able to find the source of energy inside to continue. It strikes me so deeply, seeing stories of people who ended their lives. I always feel pain deep inside, even if I didn’t know the person, because I know that brutal situation. I think it strikes us deeply as humans also when trauma survivors share their stories. It awakens the remnants of or still active wounds in us all to see pain. It makes us feel less alone. It inspires us to see survival. There is so much work to do to support each other fundamentally through trauma, even those we do not like. We also have to improve mental health care and the access to it, and prevent the societal silence we extensively force upon trauma. There are still days when I do not feel okay. Breathless moments when I feel the anxiety rising inside. Times when I just need to cry. Through therapy and poetry I am developing skills and failing in other areas.

The power of a story is the shockwaves it sends into the silence, breaking through the crying of souls not unique to any culture or geography. In my own community, I find it hard to think of anyone that is truly content with their life. Acting upon love to make those around you feel worthy, acting to make yourself feel worthy, and breaking cycles will always help, even when you aren’t actively combatting trauma. I want people to feel that they are a story that matters, likely to someone they do not know. If I am able to help anyone with my words, that is the ultimate dream. Too many of us suffer for too long before we find our way to a new mindset. We cannot find the time to take care of the warning signs, until the breaking point makes us unable to carry on with the same path. It does not have to be this way.

We only advance ourselves along the trajectory we set toward a dream, by setting goals and taking what life gives us, and making it into something. Positivity is not a state of constant happiness or success. It’s a movement onward and upward. Sometimes that momentum is generated by a good, healthy cry. It is hindered when we get lost in the tears. I have dreamed of being a writer since I was six years old. I set goals to never stop my creative ventures. Life gave me a mental disorder that I am still learning to live with. In a process I could never have predicted, I achieved my childhood dream of being a writer.

I turned pain into poetry, and would like to turn those words into change in the collective mental health of my community.

–Originally Published on medium.com/tbjwrites