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From Anxiety to Poetry

Anxiety: those debilitating periods when time stops, and your head and stomach are bursting with exponentially negative and spiralling thoughts and feelings of chaos, doom, and sickness. When darkness unexpectedly and rapidly descends, the world closes in, and your senses are overwhelmed by the impending catastrophe graphically imagined and entertained in every minutia by your overanxious mind. When your ability to function in any capacity resembling normality completely breaks down and you’re frozen to the spot, unable to think, unable to process the consequences of an event that has, or perhaps never will, happen. When no one can reach you because you’re pinned and immobilised under an immense burden of dread at the bottom of a deep chasm of despair that no one else sees.

I have suffered with anxiety (the kind that’s the constant and general worry and fear about everything) for as long as I can recall. It’s there with me the moment I wake, when I go to bed and for most of the time in-between. In 2022, I became interested in poetry and decided to give it a try; not as a deliberate exercise to improve my mental health, but simply as a casual distraction from the day-to-day grind of life in my late forties. Without any conscious decision or forethought, the context of my writing immediately started channelling my anxiety-ridden thoughts, probably because my mind was always so full of them. Very soon, thinking about rhymes and poems and writing them down became a natural and comfortable outlet for my anxious energies so that they could be gently coaxed out and calmly dispersed and not suddenly explode and violently overwhelm me. The simple and cathartic acts of both thinking and writing have been enough at most times in this past year to slow down the anxiety process in me such that I may manage it, rather than have it consume me.

These two hundred or so poems are simply concentrated distillations of my observations, thoughts, and feelings, at the instance of their creation. Some are very sombre, some are personifications of nature’s elements (a very relatable theme that I very much enjoyed exploring), some are simple experiments in wordplay, rhyme, syllables, symmetry, and alliteration, and a small few are intentionally humorous. I’ll let you decide which is which.

Wherever you find these poems on the mood spectrum of dark, grey, or light, I hope that you may be able to relate to some of them in some small way. Furthermore, I strongly encourage you to start creating poetry as an outlet for expressing and releasing your own anxious energies – should they exist within you. Perhaps, through thinking and writing about your own feelings, thoughts, and observations over a sustained period of time, you will be able to include poetry as an invaluable addition to your own mental health wellbeing, just like I have.

11^th May 2022