have ever been to a performance poetry
event that’s quite good it’s quite good
noonim
a very cosmopolitan so performance
poetry basically depending on who you
ask
some people might say it sounds a bit
like a rap some people might say it’s
definitely a poem and I would say it’s
just me shouting things that rhyme
incessantly until you hopefully have
some emotional response so yeah today as
Julie said I’m going to talk about
depression the Evening Standard may have
named me one of their top ten feminist
modern day icons but funnily enough the
paramedics who came to section me in a
South London Hospital in 2015 hadn’t
read the hot-off-the-press news and so
yes I live everyday with multiple mental
illnesses including anxiety and
borderline personality disorder and but
I also am still alive and I take 150
milligrams of searching in every day and
I see a therapist twice a week and I’m
not ashamed of that and this poem is a
kind of way of looking looking into that
and I I decided to focus on a Japanese
joinery practice called kintsugi now for
those of you who do not spend most of
your lives on Shoreditch High Street
mixing with folks who perhaps have
decided to appropriate ancient spiritual
cultural practices and stroked their
long beards and think about them in a
sort of very very unmeaning full kind of
way you might not be familiar with the
term kintsugi so kintsugi is the idea
that when a pot breaks this is a
Japanese practice so when a pot breaks
instead of repairing it so you don’t see
the kind of cracks and the kind of flaws
of the objects you instead pipe gold in
those into those cracks so they show up
even more and that makes the thing
actually a much more beautiful objects
and I thought it to be an appropriate
metaphor for having many many floors
myself but still being alive I’ve been
knocked off the shelf for a while now
fractured fissure and forgotten on the
floor I have poured every pore of my
person into being a person but it still
is not working I am still hurting
bursting burning lis broken I have tried
to paper over the cracks in my coping
hoping that no one will notice the
damage the severed ceramic there seemed
split unseemly girl fragile and frantic
I have danced this devastation in traces
and scrapes across my brain sometimes
across arteries and veins I have carved
my shame into my skin turned it tracing
paper thin made a battlefield of my body
waged a war I can never hope to win but
in the throes of this fitful friendly
fire I clutch and I cling to that thing
that Leonard Cohen used to sing about
the crack in everything and that is how
the light gets in and that is how the
life gets in and that’s how we might
begin to be better seized to be our own
aching ailing aiding a better unclasp
the pressure and rebuild refill rhe will
our worlds into being full of feeling
beyond measure when your storm feels too
hard too harsh to weather remember
kintsugi the art of building beauty from
that which has been broken repairing the
ruptures until at last they clean golden
where Murph and dirge converge the hurt
the worst the hurtling verge the hurts
are interwoven not hidden left showing
exposing the past of the pottery the
cracks in the crockery the flawed and
the tortured the confident and cautious
the gaps and the gates the tragic
mistakes that we fit back into place
reshape and glue into gorgeous
so forfeit the fort of being flawless
find the sacred in your scars don’t be
marred by the marks or the masks you
have hidden behind stand adoring at the
alter of being alive of keeping the
coverage to sustain yourself and survive
strengthen your not your fault lines
until your majesty shines your vicious
incisions in your soft skin arms your
beating heart your precious Restless
mind give them time REE Stitch the seams
extend and expand your care there every
piece of your being stay seeking the
season of your soul stay believing in
your bones embrace this holy unfolding
find comfort consoling in knowing you
are holy whole heartedly whole for
everything grows nothing is forever
inevitably sterile and stagnant life can
be built out of dazzling filigreed
fragments [Applause]