The man behind Poetry From A Wandering Soul

Learn more about the history of the man behind the Poetry From A Wandering Soul known as Keith Williams.

I’ve never talked about my own experiences. Maybe partly because I’m scared. I’m afraid someone who knows me in real life gets to read my post and will hate me for it. I’m still not totally comfortable talking about the entire bit-by-bit details of my ordeal. But I will share what I can.

I always had problems since I was a kid. Thought-out middle and high school I was label as emotionally disturbed, sometimes I would cry uncontrollably in class or starts throwing a violent temper tantrum and throw things around the classroom and I would have to get an escorted out of school. It was hard for me to make a friend because I had such bad anxiety around my classmates and rest of the kids thought I was crazy, and I couldn’t regulate my emotions and anger. I felt that family and everyone misunderstood me and thought that my behaviors were always my choices and that I could control them. Their reactions and attitudes towards me made me feel like a bad kid. When I got to high school, I was a cutter. The best time for me to cut was in the shower. So, I made sure to shower every night and sometimes in the mornings before I started my day. I wouldn’t be 5 minutes into the shower before I grabbed the razor, bared down, and began making dozens of deep lines across my arm. I felt invincible, like no one and nothing could hurt me, nothing could take away my shine, but I felt numb, numb to the fact that I was tearing open my skin and enjoying it, numb to the fact that I was slowly killing myself, and I didn’t mind. I was bitter, angry. I began hating myself. I would look in the mirror and pull at my skin so hard it would leave a bruise

I think all of that caused me to develop this little awful voice inside my head. I think everyone has a little voice in their head that interrupts our thoughts but I can’t silence mines at times.To be honest, I think I always been dealing with all of my life. It took a long time to realize that awful voice was anxiety and depression Somedays, my anxiety tells me we’re spending the day together and doesn’t let me say no and spends all day tormenting me. I know she is not me. I know it’s is not even my friend, but it’s my most frequent companion. It tells me to stop doing things for myself. She tells me there is no point. She gives me a list of fears. Fears so paralyzing that they make you stop thinking about a future. I spend all day paralyzed because of her. How do you explain that you can’t stop the monster in your head without making people think you are the crazy person? I feel it in the morning. I think about all of the things that no one thinks about, and I wonder why they don’t think about it, how they don’t think about it, why I do think about it. Anxiety tells me I should be thinking like this. Anxiety tells me everything will go wrong. Everyone will know. Everything is wrong. Everything you didn’t know was wrong, is wrong.

Some days are okay, some days are less okay, and some days I wake up with shaky hands and a racing mind. Some days my brain decides to remember every single awkward situation I ever been in. Some days my muscles simply stop working, and I’m stuck in bed thinking about my issues, but you can’t do anything about it because I can’t move. These are the times I sit at my desk at work, feeling panic and claustrophobic with a need to literally go run away from myself. These there are the times when I’m at home on the couch, mindlessly flipping through the same websites, the same channels, feeling nothing but a need to not think. These are the times when I should reach out, but the world I created is so narrow that I retreat back into my head, to distractions, to exercise to numb out the pain. These actions become a habit, the habit then becomes an obsession and from there I’m stuck in a vicious cycle again. It's like something is hunting me inside my head Like there is a thing inside of my mind, a dark, dangerous, devious thing and it is stalking me. Depression makes me feel like it is impossible for me to do anything I want to do. Makes me feel like I am controlled by something I can’t see. Something I can’t control. Something I can’t get rid of. The emptiness, the lonely, the aching, that’s all part of it. I want to run away from my brain, I want it to stop. I push through, but there are some days when I feel like I will never feel good again. The depression controls me in ways that I wish it didn’t.

Purging my mind of painful memories and working through grief isn’t easy. It feels good when I do, though. It’s sort of like surgery in that way — the operation itself is excruciating and there is a lot of pain, but on the other side of that pain there is the promise of healing. I have never felt bad or worse about anything after I have talked about it in a way that may bring me more peace and comfort. My therapist helps with this. I don’t always take his advice, though. But when I do, I find that 99.4% of the time, it works. If counseling has taught me anything, it is that it’s okay to be a little crazy or weird. But the challenge lies in accepting that fact, and when we learn to love ourselves in spite of the parts of us that feel crazy or messy or weird. I think that lead me to create my poetry page a few days ago, it’s me accepting and embracing who I am, and being okay with the whole world looking at you. I am aware that sharing my poetry to the world might show some sides of me that I keep hidden, and it might just make people think I’m crazy or that I am one of “those people” with a lot of sad and scary problems. But I am fine with that. For if there is any healing in confession it must start with confessing that we are not perfect to a world that begs us to pretend to be.

Every day I push forward regardless of it is a day that I prove to myself that I am more than depression. Facing my own inner demons every single day, and no matter how much it feels like it is eating away at my insides and taking over my life, I’m still fighting. I feel like I'm constantly fighting the evil monster in my head. Sometimes it's depression. Sometimes it's anxiety. Sometimes it's suicide. Every day seems like a constant struggle to live, but at the end of the night, I can happily tell myself, I made it through another day.

"We can't choose where we come from but we can choose where we go from there."

Poetry From A Wandering Soul is available NOW, on Amazon for both paperback and ebook! Poetry From A Wandering Soul is Keith Williams debut collection of poetry eight years in the making. This young writer exposes his vulnerability, and lets' other people take a tour of his entire mind, body, and soul, including a loose narrative arc about a young man looking for love in all the wrong places. It serves as a reminder to the readers that even in their darkest moments, they are not alone.

The Kindle format can be purchased for $5.99, https://www.amazon.com/Poetry-Wandering-Soul-Keith-Williams-ebook/dp/B079Y17NY2/ref=sr_1_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1520310029&sr=1-2&keywords=Poetry+From+A+Wandering+Soul
The Paperback format can be purchased for $7.99, https://www.amazon.com/dp/197676887X
It is also free with Kindle Unlimited!

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