Personal Narrative Individual Experiences
© Sparmatseto
man beings as the main cause of this damage. The planet, though, works on an endless and constant evolution, on a scale where we are merely dust upon the dust of previous generations. No matter what we do, we can’t prevent the planet from growing. With a puff of wind it can wipe us out. Under the guise of saving the planet, we’re really trying to save our own species, fearing that we won’t survive the conditions we ourselves have created. So vanity is the feeling that comes to me when thinking of the current state of the world, and this perception influences me deeply. Given this awareness, can you describe how the process of creating poetry functions as a therapeutic tool in your mental health practice? How does it help navigate complex emotions? Since the question is personal, I will answer with a personal response in return. We all get lost in thoughts and inner struggles. To deal with them, we all have our moments and some people get lost in their heads for a very long time. Yet those who can’t manage to get out of that state dwell in a seemingly endless state of melancholic depression. I have personally wallowed many times and for too long in this melancholic, depressive state, and so has my poetry. But through the act of writing, I have found my own path to rise to the surface. If someone hasn’t found a way to rise to the surface, offer them a hand to do so. This is the
28
difference in poetry that I was talking about. While a psychiatric or psychological essay assumes you are doing something wrong and claims to have the right way to pull you out of the depths you are in, poetry reaches out to you from those same chasms. Essentially, the main factor that allows this contact is respect for what you are experiencing. Otherwise, the writer is just a columnist, a journalist, a psychologist, maybe a yoga teacher. Poetry does not promise you to solve anything, but it vows to stay beside you. What advice would you give to someone who’s struggling with mental health and might be hesitant to try poetry as an outlet? How did you get past the initial hurdles of opening up through writing? As for now, I could not give advice to anyone, not even to myself, since it implies following a precise instruction. I don’t think I can give advice, but I’m not sure if any human being can either. So I believe that my second book, which will be out in the next few months, could shed more light on this topic. I will deal exclusively with the feeling of pain: how a person experiences it and the extreme mental state it can create. Something has to be the generator of this congestion in you, this suffocation, the uncontrollable melancholy or depression that makes it too hard to be released into words. What I can say is that the correct thing to do when dealing with this condition is to first respect your own pain, in order to find the reason why it has come to be so. A situation cannot easily be brought out into full and comfortable communication, if the person experiencing it refuses a thought or a feeling of theirs as dumb, unnatural or pointless. All they’re going to do is make themselves feel worse, bringing themselves down because they’ll think that, seeing everybody around them happier, something must be wrong with them. We have to respect emotions in this sense. Touch your pain, approach it, embrace it, without necessarily justifying it in order to go further and further on your journey toward healing.