Considering Another Mountain

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This week, I found myself staring into the past—and it stared right back. After pouring out fresh words during the NAPOWRIMO challenge in April, I shifted gears to revisit something old: a tattered notebook filled with poems I wrote over twenty years ago.

As I work through the pages of that ancient text, I am surprised to find how my voice has changed. The themes and subjects are unchanged, but I feel that the voice of my poems has evolved. My early poems are raw, bursting with unfiltered emotion—sometimes chaotic, sometimes clumsy. Today’s voice feels different: more deliberate, like a stew that’s had time to simmer. Seasoned, in more ways than one. Both sets of words are important to me, and they both will be represented in my upcoming collections. 

Even as my voice has matured, the themes remain hauntingly familiar—loneliness, doubt, the sense of never quite belonging. It’s sobering to realize I’ve been carrying these same emotional burdens for decades. That enduring struggle inspired one of my recent poems "Another Mountain".

Another Mountain is about facing another round of a fight that has lasted a long time. Life is going to keep knocking me down, and I am going to have to keep getting back up and keep moving forward. So far I have, every time, so I can get through this too. 

As much as Another Mountain is about facing that endless fight, it is also about all of the fights that I have survived before, all the work I have done to get here, and the will to keep going. 

As we continue through National Mental Health Awareness Month, I want to remind you: you’ve survived 100% of your hardest days. You are stronger than the storm. Keep going—there’s another side to this mountain.

Stay strong! 

If my poetry resonates with your journey—or someone you know—Grey Days in the Green Hills is available on Amazon in both e-book and paperback. It's a collection rooted in the intersection of poetry and mental health, written for days just like this.

Until next week,

DRW

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