I'd like to write a poem,
but perhaps I've forgotten how
I used to write with feeling, forgetting what I was writing down
I'd cry on the pages, scour and scold my emotions
My mouth would begin to taste like blood as I focused
I don't have emotions that strong anymore, my thoughts don't run from my mind
Trying everything to jog across the paper, falling and scratching knees, making dents in metaphors
I miss the times I felt resentment, loss and anguish
I miss feeling out of control and uneasy
Turning words into phrases and phrases into scars
I miss not thinking before I acted, where all of who I was, was freely escaping, not encased and enshrined in a forever normal frame of mind.
Sometimes my artist calls out, tells me to grasp onto anything worth creating
I spin intricate language in my mind and let it fall off the spool and tangle until it's no longer a thread pulled tight, but instead a knot, a knot inside my head.
I've spent some time untangling what my life has been up until now. I've spent a lot of time trying to come to terms with who I am. Who I am... Who am I.
At times I feel like a dazzling night sky, a canopy of hope lingering over the world. With shooting stars carrying dreams, and handing them out.
At other times, I feel like the dirt I pound down with my footsteps. Laying low, barely floating in the air, barely known to exist. But still made up of tiny specks of shimmering glass, stone and wood, the things that make life so beautiful.
Lately I've felt defeated, but I'm not sure why. Perhaps it's because I've forced my inner dialogue to hush. To remain still and stagnant, like a pond untouched by jumping frogs, but rather thinly veiled with ice and silence.
But I want to be the early morning, the morning where the sun catches every bit of dew hanging suspended in the just lit sky over green opulent and fertile fields. I want to be a glistening reminder of a new day. I want to be the floating breath on a cool fall morning. I want to spread out into the world. I want to be something worth admiring and worth remembering.
I want to be who I am destined to be, I want to be my potential reflected on the cleanest, newly pressed mirror.
I want to be free from the shambles of my own inflicted doubt.
I want to share what it is to be me. What it is to be free.


I'm me, because that's who I am destined to be.

School was about me proving to myself that I had worth, now, without school I'm realizing, that in life I get to show people, and share the meaning of having a sense of self-worth, because I have spent years teaching and proving to myself that I am worth something, that I am good at being myself, I am good at taking chances, reaching out, all of the skills I have learned for the most part, had nothing to do with school, they had everything to do with trying to learn who I am and what I am worth. I think I am ready to move on, I think I am ready to walk away from this sense of needing to be in school to prove a sense of self-worth. I can do this. I've spent so much time trying to fill this void where self-esteem was supposed to go, I filled it with schooling, but I'm realizing in retrospect, I filled it with worth and proving that I am capable, intelligent and that I have a purpose. Knowing that I am capable is my constant now. I've shown myself that I am capable. Let that be my path, my learning environment, and my experience. I'm willing to feel the pain of pride. I'm ready to be tortured by a sense of being good enough. It's a different feeling, it will take time to allow it to be shown to others. I know i can't go back to school, I've been avoiding letting my light shine, I've been avoiding the world, I've been keeping myself locked up in those rooms, in those hallways, on those buses, just because I haven't been confident enough to be outside of those walls... I'm ready, I'm ready to scare myself. I can do this, tell yourself outloud "I can do this", even if right now you don't believe it, you've accomplished scarier, more anxiety provoking things. 

If I don't tell anyone it remains a secret with power over me.

I want to start by telling you that I am very overwhelmed with the support you have given me, and the support I see moving into our future. I guess the reason I'm writing you this is because I have never really been good about telling people how I feel through speaking, I've always just written it down. I had to deal with all my feelings and emotions by writing it down or deal with it by self-harming. So, I've never developed the skills necessary to be able to discuss my feelings. 
I want to get better at talking about my feelings, but my defence mechanism has always been to remove myself from a stressful situation and think about it when I'm alone, which clearly has been detrimental. Some things are harder to talk about than others. Talking about abandonment, self-worth, cutting, depression, anxiety and anger are all hard for me to talk about. I guess I've just always assumed that people didn't care, or couldn't handle what I were to say.
I don't want to traumatize you with what I've done to myself all of these years, because I know that you care about me, but you've made me realize that me being unhappy all the time is worse than being unhappy for a couple of hours while talking about how I feel when I feel it.

Self-Harm
You asked me how I used to cut, what my “procedure” was. I'll let you know all of the details and if I hurt you in the process of reading this I'm sorry. It would hurt me to hear you did these things to yourself so I'm warning you ahead of time. I guess I'll start from the beginning. The first time I self-harmed was just by dragging my nails on my skin or digging my nails into my skin. I would feel very overwhelmed with my feelings and emotions. The stinging pain of hurting myself was the only thing that distracted me from the feelings and pain. Unfortunately that stopped being enough. I'd wear hair elastics and would snap them all the time just to get the adrenaline rush. I started being very interested in piercings and tattoos and started researching them in grade 7-8. Because I was so interested in piercings I started piercing my own ears, and I kept going. It felt good to be in pain, because I was feeling something. I would take them all out when I was home, and when I was at school I would have them all in, it was a lot of work in hindsight. I always felt like I was hiding my “true” self from my own family. I always had an affinity to hang out with the misfits, mostly because I identified with them. Unfortunately a lot of the misfits also were dealing with depression and other concerns and started using drugs. The first time I smoked pot I smoked on 420 before grade 9. Because I had already smoked before high school I was able to smoke with everyone and it was a very social thing, it was an excuse to stay out of the house. I feel my smoking pot, drinking alcohol and taking ecstasy all contributed to a worsening feeling of depression. I began feeling so numb and uncaring while I was sober, being high was the only thing that made me feel anything and at the same time helped me feel nothing... I would be so depressed when I was home, I had no one to talk to, I had no healthy way to reach out to others when I was feeling really sad. I couldn't handle the pain of not caring about life, I wanted to be alive, I wanted to be happy and I wanted to feel alive, but nothing inside me allowed for that. I was always self-doubting of my physical appearance, I had feelings on inadequacy that was only exasperated with feelings of abandonment. I was mad that I had moved every year of my life.
Because I was always researching piercings and tattoos I learned about self-mutilation (cutting, burning, erasing etc.) at the time I thought I had found my outlet. I never thought about the repercussions, I always thought the scars would fade, or that I'd be able to hide them forever. At first I would take my razor that I used to shave my legs and try to drag the whole unit across my skin, but all it would do is give me paper cuts. I first did that in the bathroom upstairs at my parents house. I used to stay in the bathroom for hours to avoid everything. I kept seeing pictures of razor blades, but I couldn't figure out how people got razor blades that weren't in a handle. So I took my tweezers and scissors and pried open the razor. At first I was so scared to cut myself, worried that I would cut too deep, I didn't necessarily want to kill myself, I just wanted to feel something. So at first I would “scratch myself” with the blade. But at one point the corner of the blade had grazed my skin and cut me more deeply (still just a tiny scratch). The twinge of pain was uncomfortable at first, until I felt the adrenaline pour through my body. I would only cut myself once at first, I figured just having a very small part on my arm that I could hide with bracelets made it less noticeable to outsiders. I slowly got worse as my life because more and more chaotic. I'd fight with my parents, I'd fight for my freedom but would never gain any. My grades were going down because I was always distracted in class, I'd spend most of my time in class writing about how I felt and I'd spend most of my time outside of school using drugs. When I was home I'd watch tv alone in my room until everyone went to bed and I'd cut, if people were home I'd have a shower, and do it in the shower. I started keeping a tin (an altoid mint tin) filled with things to hurt myself, erasers, safety pins, razors, jewelry, elastics. It felt like a treasure chest oddly enough. I'd write things about how I found my help in steel, that I found my strength in my pain. If you ever want to I can show you my old writing, I have all of it in our home, I just keep them all locked up like my feelings. I began cutting myself more and more every time, because it would take more to get the feeling of adrenaline. I was addicted to it. I became extremely compulsive about doing it, it became a very detrimental habit. I used to write down how many cuts I'd do every night, and I'd take the tissue I bled on, and I'd put them in an envelope, I'd write the date on the envelope, I'd lick it closed and store it away. I remember having hundreds of envelopes that I would hide in a locked brief case under my bed, my blades were in there as well, same with my writings (I've never told anyone that before). It was all private and locked away, overtime i guess my mind took the place of the brief case. My cutting continued to get worse and worse, I slowly was showing the signs of my addiction. I was covered in piercings, I had harmed my body so much that I was covered in scars everywhere. I never was able to wear a bikini around anyone, I'd avoid hanging out with my friends the days they went to the pool. I wasn't able to wear shorts, then I wasn't able to wear pants, I wasn't able to wear t-shirts, tank tops or anything that allowed my arms to be seen. I even had to hide scars on my hands. I felt so alone and isolated in my patterns of behaviour that I just wanted to die, I felt like life was the most painful thing ever presented to me. It seemed easier to quit.
I was so reckless, apathetic and ignorant that I didn't realize I was constantly at risk of dying from overdosing on every drug I could get my hands on, I remember I took 20 wake-up pills (Caffeine pills) and I didn't give a fuck if I would have died. I spent the whole night puking in my room alone with the shakes. I told my mom I had food poisoning because I thought she'd be so mad at me. I continued to self-harm between the ages of 13-16, and I guess in a way I still self-harm by not taking care of myself.
When I was 16 I slashed all the way up both arms, all over my legs and stomach. I laid in the tub for a long time, I lost consciousness (I'm not sure if I fell asleep or whether I went unconscious from shock of seeing my body like that) I think I was detached from my body until that day. When I came back to consciousness I felt extremely weak and ill. I had to crawl out of the tub, I sat down on the floor outside of the tub. I hadn't cried in weeks. I was holding it all in at that point... I never knew how to scream out to the world that I needed help. I didn't think anyone could help, I had done it all to myself, and it was up to me to get better. I wrapped my arms up in toilet paper. The bleeding had stopped. I regained some of my strength after sitting on the floor for what seemed like hours. I unplugged the tub. I collected my blades, my tin. I couldn't handle living or being awake after that I was so deprived of energy. I fell asleep on the couch (my bed for a year). I woke up the next morning, my whole body was sore, anytime that I moved I could feel the scabs ripping open. I threw out my tin of metals that morning, and I haven't cut since then. But I'd be lying if I didn't think about it everyday.
You allowed me to realize that I went immediately from harming myself to bettering myself. Being successful was now my drug of choice, I'm addicted to feeling good about my accomplishments. I never had thought about it as detrimental, it's what I find confidence in, it's what I find my own strength in until you mentioned it. But I now know I get high off of the satisfaction of doing well. And I hurt myself by saying it's never good enough. Eventually I will have to come to terms with the fact that it's okay that I'm not perfect.

Abandonment

Anyone I ever cared about left me, or I left them by moving or by isolating myself. It's become a huge pattern in my life. In a way I even abandoned myself, I gave up on myself and allowed myself to be alone. I used to think that it was always my fault. I thought for a long time that my dad didn't think I was important enough to spend time with me. I always isolated myself when I was upset. I think it has a lot to do with the fact that when I would cry or get upset I would go to my room room. I'd just typically sit against a wall and scream. I guess I realized it never worked, so I'd stay quiet and just pull my hair or kick alone. And it only got worse.

I hope that this can be a start to me sharing more, I will never be able to share all of the experiences I've had in my life... but i hope this gives you some insight into why I am the way I am.. thank you for allowing me to be myself and move forward. You will never know what it means to me.. and I hope in time I can do the same for you.


I'm better now, there is hope, I am saying these things because it is something I've been avoiding it for a long while and I need a new emotional milestone.

If you could erase one thing/memory from your life what would it be?

             Typically, I'd be the person who would say that every experience in my life has equally contributed to the person I am today and therefore those experiences have contributed to my current successes and happiness. However, if I could erase one memory it would be the memory of Dan's death. In October, Darryl and I were the only witnesses of a fatal car crash. To be honest I was scared out of my mind as I was running to the car. I froze when I got the car, I had no idea what to do. When we realized there was no one in the car it felt horribly painful as we frantically began looking for someone. 

             When we heard the crash we were hugging one another. I think that was what made it all so scary. We were standing outside in the dark, it was so quiet that night, everything seemed so calm. Life really has a way of making you feel alive. We spent days talking about it, telling other's the story. It was painful to know that there was nothing we could have done. I don't feel that this experience contributed to my successes and happiness. When I hear a car driving too fast, when I drive, when I hear tires screeching outside, I can't help but think of that night (although it doesn't have a huge baring on my daily living). I know that if we were not there someone else would have found the accident, even worse it could have been the morning and they could have found his body in plain sight. 

            I learned a lot about myself that night, I realized how fortunate I am. I also realized that I have no control over what will happen to me, and that was quite humbling. I also felt how fast my heart could beat. Like I said, life has an interesting way of making us feel so alive. But I feel these moments of realization could have occurred in a less traumatic way. I feel resolved from it all mostly, but today I got a call to reiterate my statement, again when things were calm, and while I was in a car. I feel a sense of pride knowing that I allowed his family to have a concrete statement about what happened to their son. I just wish I could have helped more to ensure they did not have to hurt. I wish we could have saved him, even until the ambulance got there. And at times I feel guilty for feeling thankful that I did not have to give medical care to a dying man.

I'm sorry Dan, I wish you were still around and that we could have met.

R.I.P.