loop-de-loop

I love poetry. Really really love it. It's unusual if a week passes without me reading some.

At some point during my bad anxiety period, I was reading The Swallow Anthology of New American Poets (which is a fantastic collection) and came across this poem "A Math Grad" by Daniel Brown. I wouldn't have expected from the title (or the first few lines) that it would impact me as much as it did. But it immediately went into my internal file of things to think about when everything felt hopeless and it seemed like I would never get any better than I was at the time.

Because it is possible that things will never get that bad again. And on top of that hope, the poem also makes me feel better about even having this dark period as part of my past. There were times that I felt defective or weak or like I would always be branded as mentally unstable because this had happened to me, and because it was so difficult to come back from it. But the breakdown in the poem is only a blip on an otherwise happy path. It's only a "loop-de-loop." And even better, the word "beauty" is used to describe it - which could just mean a pronounced example (like "that black eye is a beauty"), but I like to think it's implying that the breakdown itself was beautiful in a way, because it was part of the function or part of the path that had to happen in order for the function to be complete.

But that's enough babbling. I'm super happy it finally got posted online so I could link to it.