i told my mother that i’m depressed

i told my mother that i’m depressed

i told her that i was tired

She cried

Where was the Support?

She cried

dad has an ulcer

i cant cry

i

don’t

cry

who is allowed to be depressed

why is it never me

sometimes i hate her

usually i hate myself

there is screaming downstairs

i turn on music

i don’t see my mother for days

she says she misses me

I feel better

better when I’m alone

it doesn’t last until i am the comforter

it’s not my time to grieve

never is

and that’s fine

i’ll be fine i don’t need to

grieve to feel empty

i’m already there

i

don’t

need

whatever whatever whatever

i think i need i don’t

She needs it more more

sympathy love forgiveness

so i give it

i tell my mom i’m fine

i’m just tired

This poem is sort of a response to Sabrina Benaim’s “Explaining my Depression to My Mother.” Instead of looking at the difficulty in discussing mental health challenges with others, particularly older generations, I wanted to explore the conflict and pain that comes from multiple family members struggling with mental illness. There can be a rebounding effect as depression feeds off itself and close-knit families often experience painful, shared depression or anxiety, just through shared empathy and compassion. For the majority of my life I have been a caretaker while struggling with my own mental health. A part of 21^st century poetry that appeals the most to me is the attention paid to health and wellness; as talking about mental health becomes—for lack of a better phrase—more mainstream I feel like we are seeing freer expressions on pain, depression, and anxiety. This expression is a healing and often cathartic release, it can be permission to rage and rant and let go of stored resentment at those were disbelieving or unsympathetic. Benaim’s spoken word poem rattled her body and that of the listeners’ under the torrent of discharged feelings. There is righteous frustration and anger that Benaim’s mother cannot understand her daughter’s depression, neither did she seem to care. When I read these outburst poems they tend to follow a similar plot to Benaim’s fantastic poem. What I don’t often see, in poetry or elsewhere, is a lot of attention being given to the daily caretakers. That is what drew me to write this response. For the times where both parent and child are sharing a mental health struggle, one person can feel neglected or responsible for “carrying” the other family member through daily life. This was my way of releasing emotion and frustration, and my way of telling an alternative version of Benaim’s poem.

The form is decidedly different, mainly, this is not a spoken word poem! But, in other ways I tried to capture some stylistic elements that appear in other contemporary poems. Now, several of these elements I incorporate such as lack of punctuation, lowercase letters, and line counting that appear in other poetry schools and time frames. However, I feel like my more vague and slightly confusing existential monologue captures a bit of those modern traits found in contemporary poetry. One of the last alterations I made was to remove the line spacing between sections of the poem. I realized that in order to better mimic and reflect the style of Benaim’s poem, I needed a way to have the reader feel rushed and overwhelmed by the words. There’s no pause or break, no slowdown of the reading through punctuation. The only reason I chose to break the poem into short lines was because I was interested in playing with shape and form. In a way somewhat similar to Nate Marshall’s poem “Palindrome,” I wanted an optical sense of symmetry, imperfect as it is, I found it satisfying to mirror line groupings and make those groupings visible only upon careful study. Probably the first decision I made was to lowercase all the “i” words in the poem, all except the two middle lines where I say, “I feel better / better when I’m alone.” By structuring the poem in this way, I hoped to highlight the core identity of the speaker and how small that core of self is. Surrounded by “frayed” and diminished identity before and after the central focused “I.” There are a few more ways to read my capitalization choices, but I would rather the reader extract their own meaning behind these decisions.