You Are A World by Tara Rae Behr

You are a world.
You are not a sign,
a category, a personality,
a label, a diagnosis, a spectacle,
a thing to be analyzed, or figured out.

Others who lost their world
will try to eat your world to be their world.

You are a world of infinite possibility.

We do not know you totally, and anyone who promises they do,
wants to consume you.
They secretly say, and I know it well, “Come, be like me.
Let us conform, lose our names, be the same.”

Your friends are those who look at you with an eye in the heart,
laughing, praying, welcoming you, saying,
“What kind of world are you?”

Here, you remember the name of your soul.

Your world and my world—
worlds apart.
I am a world. You are a world.
If we let our worlds collide, we may create whole other worlds out of the coldest, darkest nights.

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This poem is inspired by the concept, “Live and Let Live,” in Laingian therapy, and an erotic ecology that values uniqueness, and the dignity of difference in connection. Often in the psychotherapeutic worlds, we categorize, analyze, and label one another. This leads to a totalization of the other, assuming we have others “all figured out.” This thwarts and prevents life force, the utter wildness of every human and non-human soul, and the vast possibility for emergent connection between us.

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Mad in America hosts blogs by a diverse group of writers. These posts are designed to serve as a public forum for a discussion—broadly speaking—of psychiatry and its treatments. The opinions expressed are the writers’ own.

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