they keep telling her to give up they
keep telling her that it should be tough
that it hurts in this world as a girl
but that isn’t good enough because our
society is stuffed with injustice that
exists to restrict women’s positions
delimit our ambitions and visions but
we’re tired of the division the societal
division between men and women up helped
by artless outmoded patriarchal systems
listen I refuse to live in a world where
millions of girls are the victims of FGM
where the 5,100 companies are invariably
run by men so I’ll say it once again I
refuse to live in a world where there
are forced child marriages where we
enjoy harasses and tube carriages where
hundreds of Nigerian schoolgirls can be
kidnapped and vanish and 500 days on the
Western media no longer bats and eyelids
we cannot close our eyes to this crisis
when one in four women suffer domestic
violence in their lifetimes when that
statistic doubles for death women how
can we choose to stay silent
so women let’s widen our horizons voices
sounding like sirens defying our silence
vibrantly striving and fighting the
violence bright as the diamond shining
like tightens together our change will
be seismic get behind this from kitchen
tables to the tables of power women of
the world know your power claimed the
half of the world that is ours women of
the world you are power
I live a double life by day I work as a
feminist performance art writing and
reciting poems like the one you’ve just
heard I run workshops and schools and
around the country talking to young
women about their own voices and
empowering them to do their best I’m
also doing a PhD and very occasionally I
appear on television and radio also by
day and by night and by day and by night
again some time without sleep
differentiating between the two I live
with a mental illness wearing my first
hat I awake every morning eager
enthusiastic to smash the glass ceiling
and stick it to the patriarchy wearing
my other one I find myself standing
beneath the shattered glass ceiling
being cut and hurt on its shards living
with a mental illness means that I’m
often left quite raw and exposed I don’t
have a hard hat to protect me from the
debris of my own self-doubt and myself
lacerating criticism I often find that
my internal voice and the booming
ruthless patriarchy patriarchy tells me
that I am stupid that I’m useless that
I’m unintelligent and unattractive and
don’t really deserve a place in the
world
it’s not very helpful really and these
two opposite tendencies these two kind
of threads of my life that get into
woven so often seem to battle each other
for dominance in my life I can find that
I’m doing a TED talk today and then
tomorrow I don’t know whether it’s going
to be a day in bed amongst the rubbles
and the ruin of my self-doubts or
another day doing something that I’d
want to be doing so I found myself quite
conflicted by these two two opposite
tendencies that I had in my day to day
life for example during the final year
of my undergraduate degree I was given
one of the biggest opportunities that
I’ve been given I was asked to make a
film for the BBC to be to be broadcast
on BBC iPlayer it was for a series
called women who spit and the idea
behind this was that it was five female
poets making short films about
social issues to inspire young women so
my film that you may guess from the
backgrounds here involved going to the
BBC walking around and criticizing that
the corporation itself for its own lack
of diversity so it was a woman on the
BBC complaining about how there aren’t
enough women on the BBC I am aware of
the irony there however five days before
this still was taken five days before we
started filming this series I found
myself in an A&E department in an
unknown corner of South London having
been dragged from my university bedroom
by two paramedics who I hadn’t expected
to arrive sort of crouched in a blanket
and covered in kind of tears and and
suicidal thinking I spent the night
there being assessed by lots of
clinicians and practitioners then were
sent home at 4 a.m. and back to my
normal life and back to work and noticed
that experiences like this were kind of
dominating my internal landscape for
example I’d find myself on other
occasions at workshops often in all-girl
schools talking to groups of young women
talking to them about their their
experiences of sexism running workshops
with them to talk about their heroines
the people that inspired them to get on
in life and helping them to find their
own voice but in-between moments like
this I’ve been talking and absorbing the
words and the worst of these young women
I’d find myself retreating to the ghost
toilets like a 15 year old me running
away from bullies at school and I’d sit
there sat on the toilet seat with the
toilet seat down my knees up on the seat
and my head between my legs
hyperventilating or sometimes die
feeling the sound of tears but the only
thing that was different from me as a 15
year old is that there weren’t any
bullies anymore outside all the bullies
were my own internal demons they were
all inside my own head and they were all
telling me the same thing you’re useless
they can see through you you’re not
inspiring them you’ll not worth anything
to these young girls and so I found
myself asking these questions time and
time again how do I change the world if
I can’t get out bed
how do I inspire other people and
empower young women if I find myself to
be like trash who do I actually hate
more the patriarchy or myself in short
why was I being such a sad feminist so I
decided to write book a code you sad
feminist coming in August 2017 and I
decided to think about these issues and
to relate into my life and spoiler alert
him I still don’t have all the answers
these are still questions that flow me
sometimes and sometimes when my
depression is at its worst I find myself
not knowing how to pick myself up
scraped myself off up the floor and then
carry on but if I had one piece of
advice that I’ve come to so far it would
just be to talk and I found myself as as
one often does when exploring the dark
recesses of the mind
I found myself turning to Sigmund Freud
he says here being totally honest with
oneself is a good exercise and for me
this is a really simple truth that that
happens to be very true talking to
yourself checking in with yourself
thinking about the way that you’re
feeling and if possible sharing that
with other people is really powerful and
it doesn’t mean that you’re having a
good day or that you’re having a
particularly bad day but it just means
checking in with yourself being honest
with yourself about how you’re feeling
and asking for help when you don’t feel
that you can cope and so one in four of
us in our lifetimes will experience what
it’s like to have a mental illness I
think it’s also important to check in on
that one in one statistic so one in one
of us every one of us knows what it
feels like sometimes to not have
self-confidence to be doubtful about
something to feel bad under stress under
pressure and so responding to that
situation with empathy and talking with
each other about how we’re all feeling
is a really powerful tool but of course
it doesn’t work for everyone you know
one in four people respond very
differently to their diagnosis or their
situation and so there isn’t a
one-size-fits-all rule for for how to
deal with mental illness but for me it
has been about talking
and so I offer you this which is my
disclosure which of course comes in the
form of a poem I live with a mental
illness I bear it bear it where it’s not
as a badge of honor but as a badge of
honest and unashamed sonnet an
unconquered kingdom the sting the Djinn
malingering beneath my skin without the
tonic I will not keep it in the closet I
promise to be a per sister resisting
your stigma reclaiming my sickness
repainting the picture landscaping
reshaping my vistas this is something I
will live through and live with not
without medical assistance not without
pain and shame and indifference not
without therapy not without an internal
enemy but I intend to be restless
relentlessly spectacularly and endlessly
for every single precious minutes I have
more I am more than my mental illness
and so basically that that’s how I feel
about talking about mindfulness and then
once I started talking I found that I
really couldn’t stop myself
I started writing about it I started
performing on stage about it even
appears here in my Twitter buyer at meg
Beach poetry follow me there and so I’m
like to be honest about the fact that I
live with a mental illness and it’s not
something that I’m ashamed of but there
have been two kinds of talking that I
found really really helpful the first is
to go into therapy
now therapy seems to be another one of
these taboos that we feel a bit
uncomfortable around we think that we’re
going to be taken in and shoved on a
sofa and forced to talk about our mom
and dad and how they screwed us up but
it’s really not the case that that’s
what it’s like having someone that you
can sit actually in a chair opposite
twice a week in my case and with then
with the knowledge that what you share
there is safe is something constructive
and something that you can work through
and not something that has
and answer so in the article I wrote to
The Guardian I was I was asked to talk
about what the gift I had been given
from therapy was and actually to be
honest it wasn’t one thing it’s not a
solution you don’t walk into a room and
someone says oh these are your problems
and this is how you sort them out it’s
about kind of developing mechanisms for
relating to other people talking to
other people and therapy really relies
on strain and failure collaboration and
effort and somewhere in between all
those processes I found that it’s much
easier to do as far as says to be
completely honest with oneself to be
more honest with myself about the way
that I’m feeling and the way that I’m
coping the other way that I found useful
to talk you may guess is to write poems
and so I think that poetry is really
accessible it’s something that we can
all do it doesn’t have to rhyme it
doesn’t have rules and and it’s just a
way again of checking in with ourselves
of being totally honest with ourselves
and and for me therapy poetry rather has
become the primary tool that I use in in
my toolbox that are called getting
through life it’s a way to unravel the
things that have been happening to me
it’s a way to share my rage about
anything from Tori cuts to brexit to
depression to sexism in in our day to
day lives and and it’s a way to share
and communicate that with other people
who often respond positively to that
because people respond well to one
opening one selves up so for me I write
poetry not in spite of my mental illness
but because of my mental illness so I
write poetry because one in four women
will suffer domestic violence in their
lifetime because that statistic doubles
for deaf women I wrote poetry because I
have depression because I am part of the
one and one because I’m part of the one
in four and I write poetry because I
actually have a voice I can talk and and
we all have that power all of us even
when we feel at our absolute weakest
have the power to use our voices and to
make them heard whether they rhyme
not so I thought I’d leave you with a
poem rather pretentiously titled secular
hymnal for the lonely but essentially
this is my pitch for anyone who feels
that they maybe don’t have a voice or
doesn’t know how to use it for the ones
with the sadness sewn into your skins
stuck in you soldered into your sinews I
sing with you a song spun deep at the
bottom of my own lungs weighing a ton
too long and some tripping on the tip of
my tongue burning in my bones plaguing
my poorest Ollis awkward so this one is
for those whipped beaten down and blown
by the roughest of winds raging storms
from deep within together we sing
clinging with conviction that we will
survive and defy this sickness clutching
the slice of the something within us
that we can learn how to live with here
I stand as witness as you wake an aura
storm chorus from the corners of your
dark grow a gorgeous corpus of
thoughtfulness from the fractured
fragments of your fishes heart you are
more than your scars you brave bright
day you shy Skylark you tiny piece of
miracle you singer in the choir
invincible you inexplicable formidable
original you mercenary of miserable I
know that it is difficult that the chasm
feels unfathomably unbridgeable but
through courage and strife you can
rebuild a life indescribably rich and
full as holy as a hymnal heavy and
hopeful hearts continue refrain a flame
shake off the shame sing out what’s in
you heavy and hopeful hearts I know that
it’s really really hard but please
please continue Thanks
you
keep telling her that it should be tough
that it hurts in this world as a girl
but that isn’t good enough because our
society is stuffed with injustice that
exists to restrict women’s positions
delimit our ambitions and visions but
we’re tired of the division the societal
division between men and women up helped
by artless outmoded patriarchal systems
listen I refuse to live in a world where
millions of girls are the victims of FGM
where the 5,100 companies are invariably
run by men so I’ll say it once again I
refuse to live in a world where there
are forced child marriages where we
enjoy harasses and tube carriages where
hundreds of Nigerian schoolgirls can be
kidnapped and vanish and 500 days on the
Western media no longer bats and eyelids
we cannot close our eyes to this crisis
when one in four women suffer domestic
violence in their lifetimes when that
statistic doubles for death women how
can we choose to stay silent
so women let’s widen our horizons voices
sounding like sirens defying our silence
vibrantly striving and fighting the
violence bright as the diamond shining
like tightens together our change will
be seismic get behind this from kitchen
tables to the tables of power women of
the world know your power claimed the
half of the world that is ours women of
the world you are power
I live a double life by day I work as a
feminist performance art writing and
reciting poems like the one you’ve just
heard I run workshops and schools and
around the country talking to young
women about their own voices and
empowering them to do their best I’m
also doing a PhD and very occasionally I
appear on television and radio also by
day and by night and by day and by night
again some time without sleep
differentiating between the two I live
with a mental illness wearing my first
hat I awake every morning eager
enthusiastic to smash the glass ceiling
and stick it to the patriarchy wearing
my other one I find myself standing
beneath the shattered glass ceiling
being cut and hurt on its shards living
with a mental illness means that I’m
often left quite raw and exposed I don’t
have a hard hat to protect me from the
debris of my own self-doubt and myself
lacerating criticism I often find that
my internal voice and the booming
ruthless patriarchy patriarchy tells me
that I am stupid that I’m useless that
I’m unintelligent and unattractive and
don’t really deserve a place in the
world
it’s not very helpful really and these
two opposite tendencies these two kind
of threads of my life that get into
woven so often seem to battle each other
for dominance in my life I can find that
I’m doing a TED talk today and then
tomorrow I don’t know whether it’s going
to be a day in bed amongst the rubbles
and the ruin of my self-doubts or
another day doing something that I’d
want to be doing so I found myself quite
conflicted by these two two opposite
tendencies that I had in my day to day
life for example during the final year
of my undergraduate degree I was given
one of the biggest opportunities that
I’ve been given I was asked to make a
film for the BBC to be to be broadcast
on BBC iPlayer it was for a series
called women who spit and the idea
behind this was that it was five female
poets making short films about
social issues to inspire young women so
my film that you may guess from the
backgrounds here involved going to the
BBC walking around and criticizing that
the corporation itself for its own lack
of diversity so it was a woman on the
BBC complaining about how there aren’t
enough women on the BBC I am aware of
the irony there however five days before
this still was taken five days before we
started filming this series I found
myself in an A&E department in an
unknown corner of South London having
been dragged from my university bedroom
by two paramedics who I hadn’t expected
to arrive sort of crouched in a blanket
and covered in kind of tears and and
suicidal thinking I spent the night
there being assessed by lots of
clinicians and practitioners then were
sent home at 4 a.m. and back to my
normal life and back to work and noticed
that experiences like this were kind of
dominating my internal landscape for
example I’d find myself on other
occasions at workshops often in all-girl
schools talking to groups of young women
talking to them about their their
experiences of sexism running workshops
with them to talk about their heroines
the people that inspired them to get on
in life and helping them to find their
own voice but in-between moments like
this I’ve been talking and absorbing the
words and the worst of these young women
I’d find myself retreating to the ghost
toilets like a 15 year old me running
away from bullies at school and I’d sit
there sat on the toilet seat with the
toilet seat down my knees up on the seat
and my head between my legs
hyperventilating or sometimes die
feeling the sound of tears but the only
thing that was different from me as a 15
year old is that there weren’t any
bullies anymore outside all the bullies
were my own internal demons they were
all inside my own head and they were all
telling me the same thing you’re useless
they can see through you you’re not
inspiring them you’ll not worth anything
to these young girls and so I found
myself asking these questions time and
time again how do I change the world if
I can’t get out bed
how do I inspire other people and
empower young women if I find myself to
be like trash who do I actually hate
more the patriarchy or myself in short
why was I being such a sad feminist so I
decided to write book a code you sad
feminist coming in August 2017 and I
decided to think about these issues and
to relate into my life and spoiler alert
him I still don’t have all the answers
these are still questions that flow me
sometimes and sometimes when my
depression is at its worst I find myself
not knowing how to pick myself up
scraped myself off up the floor and then
carry on but if I had one piece of
advice that I’ve come to so far it would
just be to talk and I found myself as as
one often does when exploring the dark
recesses of the mind
I found myself turning to Sigmund Freud
he says here being totally honest with
oneself is a good exercise and for me
this is a really simple truth that that
happens to be very true talking to
yourself checking in with yourself
thinking about the way that you’re
feeling and if possible sharing that
with other people is really powerful and
it doesn’t mean that you’re having a
good day or that you’re having a
particularly bad day but it just means
checking in with yourself being honest
with yourself about how you’re feeling
and asking for help when you don’t feel
that you can cope and so one in four of
us in our lifetimes will experience what
it’s like to have a mental illness I
think it’s also important to check in on
that one in one statistic so one in one
of us every one of us knows what it
feels like sometimes to not have
self-confidence to be doubtful about
something to feel bad under stress under
pressure and so responding to that
situation with empathy and talking with
each other about how we’re all feeling
is a really powerful tool but of course
it doesn’t work for everyone you know
one in four people respond very
differently to their diagnosis or their
situation and so there isn’t a
one-size-fits-all rule for for how to
deal with mental illness but for me it
has been about talking
and so I offer you this which is my
disclosure which of course comes in the
form of a poem I live with a mental
illness I bear it bear it where it’s not
as a badge of honor but as a badge of
honest and unashamed sonnet an
unconquered kingdom the sting the Djinn
malingering beneath my skin without the
tonic I will not keep it in the closet I
promise to be a per sister resisting
your stigma reclaiming my sickness
repainting the picture landscaping
reshaping my vistas this is something I
will live through and live with not
without medical assistance not without
pain and shame and indifference not
without therapy not without an internal
enemy but I intend to be restless
relentlessly spectacularly and endlessly
for every single precious minutes I have
more I am more than my mental illness
and so basically that that’s how I feel
about talking about mindfulness and then
once I started talking I found that I
really couldn’t stop myself
I started writing about it I started
performing on stage about it even
appears here in my Twitter buyer at meg
Beach poetry follow me there and so I’m
like to be honest about the fact that I
live with a mental illness and it’s not
something that I’m ashamed of but there
have been two kinds of talking that I
found really really helpful the first is
to go into therapy
now therapy seems to be another one of
these taboos that we feel a bit
uncomfortable around we think that we’re
going to be taken in and shoved on a
sofa and forced to talk about our mom
and dad and how they screwed us up but
it’s really not the case that that’s
what it’s like having someone that you
can sit actually in a chair opposite
twice a week in my case and with then
with the knowledge that what you share
there is safe is something constructive
and something that you can work through
and not something that has
and answer so in the article I wrote to
The Guardian I was I was asked to talk
about what the gift I had been given
from therapy was and actually to be
honest it wasn’t one thing it’s not a
solution you don’t walk into a room and
someone says oh these are your problems
and this is how you sort them out it’s
about kind of developing mechanisms for
relating to other people talking to
other people and therapy really relies
on strain and failure collaboration and
effort and somewhere in between all
those processes I found that it’s much
easier to do as far as says to be
completely honest with oneself to be
more honest with myself about the way
that I’m feeling and the way that I’m
coping the other way that I found useful
to talk you may guess is to write poems
and so I think that poetry is really
accessible it’s something that we can
all do it doesn’t have to rhyme it
doesn’t have rules and and it’s just a
way again of checking in with ourselves
of being totally honest with ourselves
and and for me therapy poetry rather has
become the primary tool that I use in in
my toolbox that are called getting
through life it’s a way to unravel the
things that have been happening to me
it’s a way to share my rage about
anything from Tori cuts to brexit to
depression to sexism in in our day to
day lives and and it’s a way to share
and communicate that with other people
who often respond positively to that
because people respond well to one
opening one selves up so for me I write
poetry not in spite of my mental illness
but because of my mental illness so I
write poetry because one in four women
will suffer domestic violence in their
lifetime because that statistic doubles
for deaf women I wrote poetry because I
have depression because I am part of the
one and one because I’m part of the one
in four and I write poetry because I
actually have a voice I can talk and and
we all have that power all of us even
when we feel at our absolute weakest
have the power to use our voices and to
make them heard whether they rhyme
not so I thought I’d leave you with a
poem rather pretentiously titled secular
hymnal for the lonely but essentially
this is my pitch for anyone who feels
that they maybe don’t have a voice or
doesn’t know how to use it for the ones
with the sadness sewn into your skins
stuck in you soldered into your sinews I
sing with you a song spun deep at the
bottom of my own lungs weighing a ton
too long and some tripping on the tip of
my tongue burning in my bones plaguing
my poorest Ollis awkward so this one is
for those whipped beaten down and blown
by the roughest of winds raging storms
from deep within together we sing
clinging with conviction that we will
survive and defy this sickness clutching
the slice of the something within us
that we can learn how to live with here
I stand as witness as you wake an aura
storm chorus from the corners of your
dark grow a gorgeous corpus of
thoughtfulness from the fractured
fragments of your fishes heart you are
more than your scars you brave bright
day you shy Skylark you tiny piece of
miracle you singer in the choir
invincible you inexplicable formidable
original you mercenary of miserable I
know that it is difficult that the chasm
feels unfathomably unbridgeable but
through courage and strife you can
rebuild a life indescribably rich and
full as holy as a hymnal heavy and
hopeful hearts continue refrain a flame
shake off the shame sing out what’s in
you heavy and hopeful hearts I know that
it’s really really hard but please
please continue Thanks
you
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