Inspiration #1: Love and Understanding Conquer All

This makes me teary-eyed every time I watch it. There are amazing words and emotions attached to this poem and reading for me. It inspires me to keep on keepin' on!

Neil Hilborn, performing during Individual Finals at the 2013 Rustbelt Regional Poetry Slam.

It's funny how sometimes words come to some of us better through the medium of writing. This has always been true for me. I've always written poems, short stories, journals, and 
the beginnings of books that never quite got finished. 

I started writing in junior high school. I still have many of my poems that I wrote in high school and most of the writing I have done from then through today. Looking back, it's funny to think that I realized sometime long ago that I had OCD, but had never specifically been told so. I knew I was different and my mind thought differently. I think I didn't really know how to go about changing it. I knew my mind was sometimes irrational, but I didn't know how to stop it. I wrote this poem during my college years:

Hysteria

An army of killer ants march past my window.

I rush to the door to check the lock, 

check the lock, 

check the lock. 

Must be my obsessive compulsive mind coming out to check the weather.

Wonder how those ants got to be so big?

Must be the coconut-flavored water?

Or maybe the acid rain?

Or maybe a trial study of a new muscle-enhancing drug gone completely and utterly wrong?

For some things, there are no logical explanations.

I remember sitting in my geography class my sophomore year at Miami University in Ohio, starring out the window and writing this poem. I had been stressed out a lot since college started, and I think my anxiety had really taken hold since freshmen year. I knew I had trouble coping, but I don't know if I could or did really understand my OCD completely then. 

I always could write more about something than I actually understood in my own head, if that makes any sense. Words just seemed to come to me when I wrote. I wrote this at a time when my life was not making sense, but I didn't know why. 

Today I'm glad I know the "why." And I'm also glad that I understand that my OCD and anxiety don't really make sense and that I do just have to work through them. They are not always logical, and that's okay! It's just the nature of the beast. Here's to things that don't make sense and just accepting that some things never will. Letting go of understanding has helped me to move on in huge ways. Here's to moving on :)

Love and happiness <3 Holly