(For Mental Health Awareness Week/ Month)

Sometimes the dreams lead me to this questionable reality. Sometimes not. There is no sense of being awake, or of sleep. There is just confusion. Time is littered with events real and imagined… events yet to be, or somehow those that filter into my consciousness from an alternate branch of existence, like leaves falling from a windswept tree.

Each thought of unhappiness leaves its own scar, a perceived abrasion in a character defect, until the landscape of my mind is littered with ravines and fissures that swallow reality and change my physical connection to this world.

I know the sun shines, but not where it hides when the darkness comes. There are constellations that will never be reached, lights that blink now in the night sky that perished aeons ago…ghosts of once what was, like the most splendid dreams, the firing of neurons that transmit hope…and like a fool I set-off for them knowing they will forever be out of reach.

(c) Darren Hawbrook

I wrote this piece a little while ago, a kind of self-therapy as writing and music help my anxiety massively. I haven’t shared until now because…well, because I’m of an age where mental health was something we didn’t talk about, or acknowledge we suffered with.

Thankfully, though, that is changing, and I see and read so many stories and posts from people who are brave enough to share their most inner thoughts, that I thought I owed it to them to share my own, especially as it is Mental Health Awareness Week (UK)/ Month (US).