Confront

Clawing at my heart, as if that would make me to stop feeling things

I don’t want to feel, don’t know how to feel, don’t know what to feel, was told never to feel.

Maybe if I do my own heart removal surgery I can control

And not be pushed over by my own personal bully

Telling me to stop, don’t feel that, only feel something else.

I keep struggling, trying to get the beating organ of feeling out of my chest

So that the bully in my head won’t tell me

To shut up and be quiet and stop it.

I keep trying to get the feeling out of myself

Because the bully of my programming tells me

If my feelings aren’t “good,” they’re wrong, and not right

And need to be fixed because I must be a problem

Broken, weak, bad.

I keep trying to reach inside,

Scratching to bleed, to remove the source of blood

Because the bully tells me it is not the one at fault,

That it’s really me, it’s my heart that is to blame.

I keep fighting my heart because I have a terrorist for a bully

And I keep battling what is not the enemy – me.

I choose to not turn on myself anymore.

I choose to confront the bully and tell it that

I won’t fight myself anymore.

I’ll fight and battle the bully now instead of myself.

And I won’t struggle to pull something out of me

That I desperately need to survive.

I will push the bully out who would destroy me

If I didn’t fight for my life against it

And I will not fight me.

• anxiety
• Christian
• Christianity
• depression
• faith
• mental health
• mental illness
• poem
• poetry
• religion
• social anxiety
• suicidal ideation