inhale exhale talk yourself through the motions sit in silence and ponder review revise refine but don’t repeat do something with your hands occupy your mind, music, drugs, sleep, a bike ride, a scream

acknowledge five things you see around you 
acknowledge four things you can touch around you 
acknowledge three things you hear 
acknowledge two things you can smell 
acknowledge one thing you can taste

anxiety turned hyper awareness turned highly functional survival

highly functional avoidance 
highly functional overthinking 
highly functional self-soothing 
highly functional dissociation 
highly functional anticipation

the kind where you know every exit in the room 
every shift in tone 
every pause in someone’s sentence 
the kind where your body learned to stay ten steps ahead so your mind wouldn’t drown

you breathe through it 
stretch through it 
write through it 
smoke through it 
sleep through it 
ride through it 
scream through it

not because it’s healed 
but because motion feels safer than stillness

and sometimes healing looks ugly first 
looks repetitive 
looks like grounding exercises done with shaking hands 
looks like trying to convince your nervous system that the war is over even when your body still hears alarms

“acknowledge five things you see”

not because the room changed 
because you’re trying to return to it

anxiety can make a person hyper aware 
hyper awareness can make a person adaptable 
adaptable can become functional

but functional doesn’t always mean peaceful

same way fake smiles don’t mean happiness 
my tears can’t always explain themselves

some things leave the body 
before they ever reach language

sometimes tears are grief 
sometimes exhaustion 
sometimes anger with nowhere safe to land 
sometimes your nervous system pulling the fire alarm 
because your mouth never got the chance to

people want explanations because explanations are clean 
but emotions rarely arrive organized

a fake smile can hide a collapse 
a tear can hold ten different feelings at once

and that’s the strange part of being human 
the body confesses 
what the mind still can’t translate

i’m living and learning at once

acknowledge five things you see

how about the five things that haunt me instead 
the five memories that replay so often 
they’ve worn paths into my mind like restless footsteps in a hallway 
they make their own desired path to my mind, they don’t follow the rules

the conversations i should’ve ended sooner 
or started so long ago 
the conversations in which i’m really only talking to myself 
where i’m craving to be understood 
the silence after i finally stopped speaking 
and the silence that reaches my mind after i finally get over it 
the versions of myself built only to endure 
and the fear that healing means becoming something unfamiliar to myself

unable to live in the present 
survival has become ritual 
pain has become routine enough to decorate itself like comfort 
like my body is always expecting something 
and if it feels too good my body creates something out of nothing 
not because i prefer survival but because that’s the only currency i’ve lived in

living and learning at once 
growing while managing 
the damage is already done 
stillness doesn’t mean still 
it’s just exhaustion sitting in a corner forced to get up again

acknowledge five things i see

i see my shoes as i keep my head low 
my shaking hands 
my bitten nails 
and as my eyes wander to give you two more answers i go completely blank

inhale exhale talk yourself through the motions sit in silence and ponder review revise refine but don’t repeat do something with your hands occupy your mind, music, drugs, sleep, a bike ride, a scream

anxiety turned hyper awareness turned highly functional survival

see how repetitive it really is

currency of survival
it continues to circulate
it keeps moving hands
keeps moving through the body the same way
survival becomes transactional
something learned
something spent daily
something my body defaults to
because it’s the only language it was taught

i don’t know how to transfer dollars to euros
and i don’t know how to transfer survival into peace

review revise refine but don’t repeat
as i continue to repeat
fighting my own instincts

but if you don’t teach a bird to fly
how do you expect it to soar 

is this good