I’m building up these walls inside my mind
Protecting all the broken pieces I can’t let you find
The parts of me that I have left behind
To build myself this fortress I’ve designed
It’s called My Mind
A note from the poet: I wrote this poem during my second to last psychiatric hospitalization, but it rings true for me now more than ever. I recently had a severe flare-up of my ptsd symptoms and became caught up in my head and in my trauma in a way that was very hard on not only myself, but the people I was close to. I had a psychiatrist for meds, but no therapist at the time, and was letting a lot of my thoughts, feelings, pain, and trauma out to my friends. With everything I was going through, I also couldn’t see when they needed support back. In hindsight I know it wasn’t right to lean on them so heavily, but I was blinded by pain and couldn’t see what I was doing at the time. Some of them couldn’t deal and I lost some people I really cared about. Since then I’ve put up a lot of walls around the darker places in my mind to try to keep it from happening again. I still create and share poetry and art relating to mental health and sexual violence, and I still talk to people about it, because I am all about raising awareness and battling stigma. I try to focus on the fight though, and try not to get caught up in the trauma; or at least when I do, not to talk about it much.