About the poem

    I started writing this poem about three years ago (it has been revised many MANY times). Although I enjoy poetry I cannot write it easily. I have found that my best poems come when I experience an intense emotion or thought. This poem was originally written in my junior year of high school when my depression and anxiety was at its worst. I was told I was emotionally numb and that it was common to experience it after being put on so many medications and being severely depressed for a year. I was unsure of what love felt like at the time but mentally I knew I loved people (such as my parents). The depression and anxiety became so intense that I had to skype into my high school classes. I spent most days sitting in a dark room looking up at a ceiling while in bed. I rarely showered, I only left my room to go to the bathroom, and I had lost all connections with any friends I had. I was on medication and in therapy, but nothing seemed to be working. Strangely enough I wrote this poem while “emotionally numb” and somehow expressed exactly how it felt to be in my situation. I read the poem over and over again and every time I do I am taken back to that horrible time. Sometimes I worry that if I read the poem it will impact me negatively. However, looking back at the poem reminds me of how far I have come and how much that year taught me. In this poem I express the depression and emotional numbness as the “emptiness” or “bear den”. The anxiety is represented by the twigs in this story. The forest itself is my mind. While in my depressive state my mind was filled with horrible thoughts and it felt dense like a forest, and the hope I had to recover was slowly dying off as time went on.

I am my biggest fear

    This last line of the poem was not added until I had begun to recover. Near the end of my junior year in high school I got into a car crash, and totaled my car (while going 17 mph). It was scary and I had to be taken away by ambulance to have cat scans done. I sprained my wrist and had a few bad cuts, but I was okay. Most people would think this would make someone feel more depressed, but it did the opposite for me because the crash made me feel scared. That was the key. I felt scared, I felt something. Feeling any emotion is better than not feeling anything at all, trust me. So it made me think, “If I can do that much damage going as slow as 17 mph then chances are no matter how safe I try to be I will always be at risk of having something bad happen.” It made me realize that I cannot be afraid of everything and basically that I am the one causing the depression and anxiety and only I have the power to stop it. The crash made me realize that I am my biggest fear and I need to overcome myself. So I did.