Listen, Poems on being Gay, Bipolar, and Alive

Writing is my Pandora's Box. When I open it up and write, I do not know what hopes come out. Writing is cathartic to me. It helps me let out my frustrations and alleviates my pain. My illness, bipolar, is a chemical in-balance in the brain.

When I was diagnosed with bipolar, the first four or five years flew by without a peaceful moment. I do not remember much about those years, only that I was asleep, lethargic, forgetful, sleeping most of the time, suicidal, manic, depressed, and forgot what else. It was a dark time.

After a while, I started to feel that I had just woken up. I tasted everything for the first time. I saw things in a new way. Life was good. It was re-birthing for me. I could not keep Hope bottled up. I let it out.

In the interim, I went to therapy, and fortunately, I got something good out of it, Journaling and poetry. I wrote my feelings, fears, desires, and how I wanted to kill myself, contrasting them with how I wanted to live.

I found a website where members would critique your poems. They wanted to publish a few of my poems. I submitted my first poem, "My Vanessa, My Butterfly." A poem dedicated to my sister, who never gave up on me.

Someone had mentioned combining my stories and publishing them. I did. I combined the best ones, created new ones, dedicated a few, and published them. My first book of poetry is full of errors, bad grammar, and frightening poems. I kept it that way and hoped people would see those poems' underlying illness. They are raw, passionate, and truthful.