By The Thirties Circus
(A reflection for World Mental Health Day)
You fell in love with words on the living room floor, cross-legged beside a dying kerosene lamp. You were meant to be finishing your Math homework. Instead, you kept sneaking glances at Shakespeare, Oscar Wilde, Enid Blyton, and others. You hoped their words would keep you awake. They always did.
Words kept you company in those long nights when the rest of the world slept. When you are a teenager with sixteen-hour days, stories can feel like small miracles.
Sometimes you think the love began in the quiet of your school library. Your English teacher, bless her heart, used to let you in during break time. The room was always still, clinically white, lined with chipped wooden shelves and the smell of paper and dust. Outside, your classmates chased balls in the sun, their laughter echoing through the open windows. Inside, you learned the music of silence.
Other times, you think it bloomed on the walk home from school. You and your siblings carried heavy 600D Cordura backpacks that made your shoulders ache. The roads were calmer then, so you read as you walked. Even when your sister grew tired and you carried her on your back, the book stayed open in your hands.
The book and you would be briefly parted as you bathed your siblings. You would be reunited with it once it was time to help them with their homework. You would have to put it down to do the dishes. You also had to wash the uniforms and mop the floors. The firewood was then lit and the pot set atop the three stones, book in hand.
When your parents can only afford the books the syllabus demanded, you read whatever you can find. Newspapers meant for the fire pit, borrowed storybooks, old textbooks, even the dictionary. You take what you can get, and somehow, it shapes you.
You did not know it then, but words were teaching you how to stay alive inside your own head. They gave you names for things you could not yet explain. They made the noise quieter. They made life worth living. They offered an escape.
You had reached high school. By then, you were deeply engrossed in the works of Edgar Allan Poe and Emily Dickinson. You also explored the writings of Maya Angelou, Langston Hughes, and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. But then came the bullying. You were no stranger to it. You grew up dark and skinny. However, nothing could have prepared you for the hopelessness of being bullied not just by students, but by teachers.
The rumor began quietly, like a whisper slipping through the cracks. You were too young to understand what it meant, but the weight of it grew heavier each day. Soon, the laughter that once drifted toward you in the corridors became silence. Then, it turned into stares that followed you everywhere.
You learned what it means to disappear while still being seen.
For one and a half years, you lived as a ghost among your classmates. You understood that you were not quite welcome, not quite gone. The teachers who should have been your refuge became part of the noise. Your words were held up as evidence instead of art. What you had written to survive was used to shame you.
You were suspended. Your parents, not knowing what to do, sent you to the church and called it deliverance. And just like that, the words that had once been your sanctuary became your undoing.
You stopped writing. You stopped reaching for your journal. Even now, your fingers sometimes hesitate before touching a blank page. The silence that followed felt endless. Sometimes silence is fear, not peace.
You wanted to die but lacked the facilities. Maybe it was the walls of the boarding school that kept you from it. Perhaps something small and stubborn inside you still wanted to live. Who knows?
Sometimes it feels like yesterday. You have lived whole lifetimes between that classroom and now. You crossed oceans. You gathered new titles and wore new faces. Still, there are days when the silence returns. It comes uninvited and familiar.
Lately, you have known failure again, and the subsequent shame, if not guilt. Not the loud, dramatic kind, but the quiet ones that chip away at your confidence. Plans that did not work out. Doors that would not open. Mornings when even getting out of bed felt like too much.
A young man jumped off the bridge 10 minutes away from your house. You sat quietly as your friends called him a coward. You read the comments on the news post announcing his final act. There was no compassion. You felt a knot tighten in your chest. And sometimes, you stand at the edge of your balcony. You stare blankly at the ground seven floors down. You wonder if freedom waits at the bottom.
You no longer write every day, but sometimes the words come back in small ways. Your words visit you in a line that lands just right. You see them in a message you craft with care. In the soft whisper of your own thoughts, you learn how to trust the page again. Each word feels like a step toward yourself.
You are not who you were before. But you are here. You are learning that strength does not always roar. Sometimes it sits quietly beside a half-written sentence and says, keep going.
If you can find your words again, you will be okay. And maybe, that is enough for now.
Belated Mental Health Awareness Day, Beloved!
Oops! My Thirties. 