I'm delighted to announce that I've been accepted for the Carnegie Vacation Scholarship, a brilliant initiative dedicated to undergraduate students willing to undertake a research role over the summer vacation. The project must be of ‘direct benefit’ to the undergraduate degree and produce some sort of quantifiable output.
My project – which is soon to become a reality (of the head-spinningly awesome variety) – is based on a subject close to my desire to study and produce literature, my own mental health.
I'm twenty four now, and have been struggling with various mental health issues for half of my life – half of my whole life – in ways that I've come to regard as normal, or at least, normal for me. I've been treated and diagnosed and medicated on and off through the years enough to realise that mental health doesn't just go away or heal, but is carried around with you, like a headache that doesn't appear all the time, but when it does…
The point is, this isn't a headache I'm fighting alone. At my worst, in days when I couldn't even focus enough on a page to read a book – me, the child never without a torch to read under the sheets and a novel held firmly under the plate rim at the dinner table – I thought I was losing such an essential part of me that there was no way I was going to get better. This is when I found poetry.
Poetry – a language so condensed the page has more than enough white to rest tired eyes and throbbing brains – a story so evolved it doesn't need pages into the hundreds to get across the message – poetry, poetry poetry! And there were friends in poetry – lines that waved at me from the page and said, ‘see, it’s not just you, others feel this too’ and feelings that reached across the literature to fill my heart and hands with something familiar.
This is the thing about mental health. Knowing that someone else experiences life the way you do, or don’t, that the wrongness isn't something you carry alone, is a huge part of validating your experience. It’s a huge comfort when the world feels so huge and overbearing that someone is on your side and knows what you’re going through – someone that isn't peering at you over a clipboard and making notes, but sitting down with you like an old friend and just being there.
So how does this shape itself into a project?
‘Talk to my poems’: A creative project examining and responding to female mental health experiences in confessional poetry.
This is how. Over the course of six weeks (taken non-consecutively May through July) I will be undertaking research and creative output of my own in the genre of confessional poetry. The projected final result of this is self-publication of the poems produced as a pamphlet.
I'm excited to start and push myself to document and share my own awareness of mental health in ways that I know have helped me. It’s a little bit like inviting everyone in to my own head which is weird, but I think maybe in a good way? We’ll find out.
‘Talk to my poems’ will be documented here in six further blog posts, featuring research details and creative meanderings for each of the two-week research periods.