[Y]oung Writers Project, an independent nonprofit based in Burlington, engages young people to write and use digital media to express themselves with clarity and power, and to gain confidence and skills for school, the workplace and life.
Check out the most recent issue of The Voice, Young Writers Project’s monthly digital magazine. Click here.
Each week, VTDigger features a writing submission – an essay, poem, fiction or nonfiction – accompanied by a photo or illustration from Young Writers Project.
YWP publishes about 1,000 students’ work each year here, in newspapers across Vermont, on Vermont Public Radio and in YWP’s monthly digital magazine, The Voice. Since 2006, it has offered young people a place to write, share their photos, art, audio and video, and to explore and connect online at youngwritersproject.org. For more information, please contact Susan Reid at sreid@youngwritersproject.org.
Within the medical community in recent years, long strides have been made to reshape our understanding of mental illness as no more or less valid than any physical condition. Despite this, the stigmas surrounding topics of mental health are just as present in American society. It is with admirable courage this week that St. Johnsbury student Emma Mauceli writes about the debilitating effects of anxiety on her daily life. The ordinary actions she describes – waking, dressing, preparing for the day – may to some be surprising as sources of stress, but such is the strength of Mauceli’s voice that it is not difficult to comprehend or sympathize with her thought patterns. From a place of dark inspiration comes a poem of catharsis and legitimacy for those afflicted.
Me and my pal anxiety
By Emma Mauceli
[I] fall asleep. Maybe when I wake up, I’ll feel different.
I wake up at 6 a.m. tired. Maybe this life isn’t for me.
I roll out of bed at 6:30.
I drag myself to and fro –
from the closet,
to the mirror,
back to the closet.
I cast aside each article of clothing as they fail
to turn my torso into an hourglass,
or make my ass so fat all the home boys would want to hit it.
I tug and pull the clothing around my figure.
Each shift of fabric reminds me that
perhaps it will take more than something pretty
to make me someone pretty.
My hands wade through the waves of my hair.
Frantic, I gaze at the clock.
7:15.
Time keeps flying past.
The anxiety that was sleeping in chest
has awoken in full throttle –
a raging storm, lightning piercing my stomach.
My knees are weak
as I shrug into my clothing and gaze
too long in the mirror.
A feeling in my soul is desperately trying to escape,
a sense of immense discomfort
in my own skin.
I’d rather be someone else.
Anyone else.
