My Therapist & I

My tongue is a trigger that I am learning to praise my finger from

Too good at pointing it inward

I aim and I fire and I fire throughout the night and it does not light me up but burns me down

Morning breaks and I sift through the battlefield looking for survivors and there’s nothing but an empty shell of myself that’s become too familiar with the floorboards.

So I peel myself off them and wonder how many deaths I need to die before I’ll consider getting help

I wonder how many oceans must spill out of my eyes before I reach out

How many invitations must I turn down because I’m too down to turn up

How many times I’ll tell my friends I’m busy so that I can sit alone on my bedroom floor, back pressed against the radiator because it’s the closest thing to being held.

So I get help

I go to therapy.

And when she asks me to tell her about myself my tongue no longer has anything to say

I stutter out my education, the books I like, and where I was born because

Facts are easier to hold than feelings and I don’t have the words to tell her about the emptiness in my chest

The hollowness that came the day you left and how my body is still trying to hold you

As if my muscle memory remembers the shape of you and my stomach contracts with longing every time.

She asks me if there’s anything particular I want to talk about and I wonder how to condense years of trauma into 60 minutes

How do I tell her that my father’s absence has me falling for men who never stay

That my mother’s sadness has soaked into my bloodline and I’m afraid it won’t wash out

That I keep meeting men who only know how to love in clenched fists and how I still can’t love myself enough to leave when I should

I don’t know how to tell her that I’ve tasted abuse in all its flavors and it’s left a bitterness on my tongue

I cannot find the words to explain that I have become half wolf in my wandering and howling at the moon is the only way I know how to cry

So I say nothing

Then all of a sudden I say everything and the words become an amen

They become a battle cry and my own manifesto

They become a promise and I learn that grace comes in many forms

I am learning that smiling is a form of grace

That this poem is grace

That grace can be found in the bottom of a teapot and in the crumpled tissues I shed in my therapist’s office

I learn that cold bathroom tiles and rivers of sadness that pour from my eyes have a grace all of their own and I’m allowed to cry at as many parties as I like

That going to my therapist and not saying anything is better than not going at all

That in the silence of that one room I am free

And the demons that chase me must always wait at the door.

- Salma El-Wardany

(This poem was originally written for the BBC’s mental health awareness week and first performed on the BBC)