Sadness

A swirling void that consumes all
Too much, too much
Turn away, don’t look
And yet it’s there, behind me
Dragged along

I feared it would destroy me
But even then it could not turn both nuclear keys
A gentle rain showed me that it was not a void, but a sea
Waves can crash, but also recede

Now. I invite it in
A Valentine’s heart, weighed down with oily black sludge and broken metal scaffolds
Are you the same? The mighty void that swallowed all?
Perhaps, perhaps.
There is strength in you
What are you trying to tell me?
I don’t know. I don’t know.
You float there, pulsing.
I can wait for your secrets.

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For a while now I've been trying to improve my mental health by going to therapy, where we've been using a Dialectical Behavior Therapy approach. A big aspect of that is mindfulness, and some of the imagery in this poem was inspired by visualization exercises I did where I was trying to better engage with my emotions. I feel like one area where I've improved from when I started therapy is in being better at accepting rather than trying to bottle up or suppress my emotions, a technique that helped me with that was the RAIN of self-compassion, which is sort of referenced in the middle part of the poem.

(header image cropped from this Pixabay image)