It ain't me, Babe.

018: early hour catharsis poetry of a wilting flower.

“All great and precious things are lonely.”
― John Steinbeck, East of Eden

Looking into your warm eyes 
turns my insides into tumbling yarn; 
I can feel myself coming apart at the very seams. 
This feeling is not new to me, you see -
For my entire life, I've known this repeating looseness. 
The chord of my spine is taut and decorative,
it might as well have never been placed there.
I am a work of predictability and watercolour tones -
A deep yet washed-out navy blue of craven waters
and peach hands that good things only slip through. 
My resolve is slackened and hangs in my throat 
like salt water; I gargle ferociously and choke it down.
I fear that I feel things far too deeply, too soon,
just as the feeling of your hands on my hips 
elicits such a guilty pleasure I can't turn away from. 
My reflection feels muddied and spoilt
I can't see myself from the view you must. 
When I see the photographs hung on my wall
or littered through my phone, I feel sick
How can I compare to the image I have projected?
The nothingness inside me
has been too well camouflaged - 
You've fallen for my heartless trick;
The one I never intended to lay
yet have been spinning since I was young. 
That trick where people find me endearing or kind;
the manipulation I've cast to the general public
to cover my sickness and detestability. 
In your seafoam embrace I feel warm
and washed clean of my ancestral filth 
borne into my spiral-staircase veins 
circulating through my system;
down into the well that is my poisoned frame.
I am a sinkhole of imposed feelings and thoughts
of senseless abandonment and rejection. 
Your furnace heart has eased away my cold
And I feel loved in ways that 
I never saw as possible for myself
yet I cannot push away my suffocating guilt
that you've been saddled to something 
uneven and badly cauterised like myself.
Every wound I bear is open and seeping;
Sadness spills from me like a spitting faucet. 
I am a puzzle with no pictures or guidelines
19 years and I haven't even begun
to find where I begin, nor where I end. 
I only recognise the black tar of my centre
like the problem clause in my unfinished stories.
I am a predicament, a disease with no cure
So I must apologise over and over - incessantly.
Please believe I wish I knew how to end it,
My meticulous way of finding faults and flaws
buried deep within my breast 
like a pretty rosebush's defensive little thorns
with petals dried and translucent, and weeping.  
The decades of 'how's and 'why's to who I am 
are all filled out into lonely soliloquies
that I am too shame-filled to recite 
for fear you might deem them all-too right. 

I’ve been struggling to sleep, write, eat, think, or do anything at all. I found myself crying off-and-on yesterday and haven’t been able to peel myself from beneath my bedsheets. My depression is no secret and it hits me at the most random moments. It hit 6am and I was still sleepless and felt drained yet unable to rest or even think past the deep fog I’d been resting within the whole day.

I don’t know how to summarise this poem aside from being a dark confessional - I really struggle with self-worth and feeling like the person people see me to be is real. I have impostor syndrome and feel like a fraud when people compliment me. I find it especially hard to believe on days like I’ve been having recently because I get some dark and untoward feelings of anger and resentment. I convince myself that people are either lying to me or that I’ve manipulated them into thinking I’m someone good and pure, and then hate myself for putting them in that position. I don’t think that I’m particularly strong-willed: I’m a people pleaser and have deep-rooted trauma that makes it hard for me to say no to anyone, even when I need to. Because of this, I often feel like even though I might feel things, I’ve in no way earned reciprocation because my kindness must be a façade, even when I’ve been completely genuine.

This poem surrounds the idea of feeling like, by simply being around me, I’m putting other people in a worse, more precarious position in life. I sometimes find it hard to feel like I’m not burdensome or a piece of work that would just cause stress. Adding anxiety and an incessant need for reassurance makes this all the more severe; I often feel like by simply asking if I’m annoying or bothering someone, that I’m reminding them of my imperfections and providing all the more reasons to hate or leave me. The poem essentially works as a grovelling apology for the way I am and for how sickened I can so clearly make myself sometimes.

Now, writing this poem in general was meant to be catharsis for my own sadness, however I worry for the underlying message it might convey. I hate the idea that I might project the whole concept of being pitiful for the sake of reassurance or told that I’m wrong. I don’t write to accurately portray the reality of a situation, considering my perception of reality in these mindsets is altered so much from the jump. During better days, I can wash these thoughts away better. However, yesterday was sadly not one of those days, and I felt I needed to write it out to understand it better myself. I do think that I can be a good person, don’t get me wrong. However, my brain has me convinced that I’ve achieved this feat with some toxic plan to forge a fabricated opinion of me from those I hang around.

This poem revolves around the sad and anxiety-ridden feelings of inadequacy I face pretty much all the time, with everyone I meet. As soon as I form good relationships with people and become aware of how positively they might feel about me, I get this inherent and deep-seated feeling that I’ve tricked them into falling for some trap I must’ve unintentionally laid. Recently, I’ve been obsessed with ‘It ain’t me, babe’ by Bob Dylan and Joan Baez. The song really reiterates some feelings I’ve always had about myself, which I’ve typically kept secret. I struggle to feel like I could ever be truly loved for the person I am; trauma and anxiety and sadness, and all. For a long time, I’ve felt like my sadness and my sinking feelings were too much for anyone to handle or put up with for long. It’s also hard for people not to take my self-doubt as a reflection of how I feel about them, too. It isn’t a matter of trust or not being in love enough to throw these feelings into the wind; I simply have felt this way since before I reached double-digit ages. I can’t just disregard the pain I feel just because someone might seem to prove how sweet they find me - I feel like that might feel like some twisted lie for a long, long while. (I need therapy, God, I know. No need to tell me).

All-in-all, this poem was incredibly raw to write and I almost feel anxious publishing it. My capacity for vulnerability is greatly stunted, and yet I want to share this piece in the hopes of maybe finding someone else who might relate to my inner hopeless war. I know that this piece is incredibly self-deprecating, and I know that those feelings are ones you should fight and that you shouldn’t always feel like you’re not deserving of the people around you and the love they give. However, I sometimes feel like, even though it makes me feel slimy and disgusting and toxic to admit out in the open, I do need to vocalise these thoughts somehow or they might crush me. Even though I worry this poem might be offensive to those who care for me, or at least put me at risk of looking even more depressed than I usually allow people to notice, I needed to publish something and write for my own sake anyway.

Once again, thank you so much for reading and any feedback/restacks. I appreciate it immensely. You all make this worth it for me.

Hoping to catch you next time! Thx for reading xoxo

Yours, Jas. ∩⑅∩