The Inconvenient Humans.
The Inconvenient Humans.
Contemplation and poetry for Mental Health Awareness Month
First, I want to welcome you to my new page and a special shout out to all of my new subscribers. I hope you enjoy this page and its musings. It’s my goal to post here weekly. I hope it’s a place you come to often to find something that is meaningful for you. That said, enjoy….
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My first encounter with serious mental illness happened when I was thirteen years old. My sister, at the age of sixteen, had a mental health break. Even today, decades later, sometimes it is still difficult to think that in a single day my sister was forever changed, and was no longer the typically developing teenage girl that I remember. My family navigated what happened, while never learning how it happened, or why it happened.
As May is Mental Health Awareness Month, today I reflect on how my life has been affected by conditions of mental health, my own at times and that of people I love. There are many who suffer silently with problems that are complex, difficult to treat and can make living a happy life seem fleeting but there is always hope. It’s true the road toward healing is not paved in smooth stone but the journey does not have to be taken alone.
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Two Minds
a poem by Corena Young-Dixon
When I was a girl
An unpredictable life awakened
Chose a family
Made each day different
I woke with an agenda
Your illness had other plans.
A sister, a teenage school girl in the morning
With long hair of two braids,
A bicycle with a banana seat
An illness by night
Unrecognizable
Untreatable
A human moved by hallucination
And made up words.
Womanhood did not wait for her mind to clear
Soon her belly swelled
Her condition spread through the womb
Creating a son
A baby boy who became a complicated man
A complicated mind
A jumble of anxiety and afflictions
A new journey
Yet a familiar uncertain path.
We do not know when the days will be easy again
We long for the distant musings of a teenage girl
One of untroubled conversations
A sweet, innocent crush on a local boy.
We grieve the gentle, gentle laugh of her son
Who runs in his bare feet on his toes
Who plays with cars and toy figures
On the rough looped carpet in the living room.
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The Inconvenient Humans
a poem by Corena Young-Dixon
In different ways
We are told to give up
It’s no use, they say
They are grown men now
They are women of their own
No longer the babies once cradled
No longer the hands held to cross the street
Not the budding artists you watched create with promise.
Fingers dancing up and down the keys of pianos and saxophones
Hands swaying with brush across the canvas.
Lost in the color of life, music and sound.
Soulful,
Joyful.
They are the addicts
Who disappear for days as we pray
They are the mentally ill
Who hear the voices of the unseen
They see unknowable beauty in unimaginable ways
They are the disabled
Who cannot hear with acuity
Who cannot think with clarity
Whose brain waves and circuits are unpredictable.
They are many things
They are many people.
But today one thing they are not
They are not the discarded.
Goodwill has a quick expiration date
So there is nowhere to house
The inconvenient humans.
The cry is loud sometimes.
Give up.
Give up.
Give up on them.
Give up on them all.
No.
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This is beautiful …and probably the 6th or 7th time I’ve read it but I had to again . I love It and I feel it 💕
I love this. Thanks for sharing.