Names

“Try giving it a name.”

My psychiatrist smiles at me as we pinpoint the self-hating voice in my head every minute, fruit of the mental illness that runs in my family, it practically gallops!

…as I said when I first met her, after “Hello, what’s your name, it’s Ruth, how nice”- and now there must be another name in the room with us.

“Sometimes giving it a silly name helps you laugh at it, and reject what it says.” I hear an exorcist speak too: cast out the demon with its name.

A name for the voice that whispers louder than thunder, heals where it cuts so it can say “I was never here, despite the sting, so you’re a coward for crying, for needing help, for… naming me.”

My friend’s voice is Karen – ignoring her is like Avon knocking at the door, HELLO, OUR SELF-DESTRUCTION IS HALF OFF, STOCK UP FOR SUMMER!

My voice feels too heavy for that. I speak to it like Greta Thunberg to the leaders who don’t lead: You have stolen my dreams and my youth with your empty words.

How dare you?

So, demon, dream stealer, what is your name? Donald? Boris? Vladimir?

What name for the terror of catching a bus because you will be looked at, be real to others?

The sexual trauma that still haunts ordinary words?

My pathological fear of being toxic to others, of the poison choking me escaping the valve of my mouth when I scream like the open Chernobyl core - WHAT NAME?

Sometimes I sing you songs, dream stealer… you don’t own me. Don’t stop me now. I will kill you with kindness and paint with your blood. My best friend lay dying in hospital and I charged my wand in her palm.

My room is like my heart, overflowing with treasures and love and absurdity like a hat that lights up. The longer you stand in it the more you know there is nowhere like it, I have yanked joy and magic from my bootstraps and flung them to the sky to meet the moon.

Here we are, dream stealer, before a room of warm bodies, with 28 years in our cold hands. I have snatched all of them from your jaws for a decade, from first diagnosis to last drink at graduation.

And so this demon, dear humans, what is its name?

Mine is Tess.

What’s yours?

(originally a slam poem performed in 2020)