Mental Health Salvation in Poetry

“A Place to Put the Storm”

By Colin Dawson

I’ve spent most of my life trying to make sense of a mind that never quite made peace with itself.

From the time I was a child, I knew something felt different—but I didn’t have the words for it then. What I did have were emotions that ran deeper, hotter, and faster than the people around me seemed to feel. I was diagnosed with ADHD and medicated early on, but the truth is that I was misdiagnosed. Beneath the hyperactivity was something far more complex, more volatile, more quietly devastating: bipolar disorder—manic depression.

I don’t know what “normal” felt like. I wish I did. I think the closest I’ve come to it is hope—hope for peace, for balance, for stillness that doesn’t feel like numbness. And even that hope, at times, has felt like an unreachable dream: something that lifts me up when I can believe in it, and something that crushes me when I can’t.

I’ve lived my life in the push and pull of soaring highs and sinking lows. In the elation of mania, I have felt like a god. Everything is possible. The world glows. My thoughts sprint faster than I can catch them. I don’t sleep. I don’t eat. I don’t slow down. I create. I spiral. I burn. And in the shadows that follow—when depression hits—I vanish. I can lie motionless in a room full of light and still feel like I’m drowning in darkness.

For most of my life, I didn’t know what to do with all that feeling. All that extra. I didn’t have a map. But I found poetry.

Poetry became the place I could go when I had nowhere else to go. It became the one space where I didn’t have to make my emotions smaller, or quieter, or easier to explain. It let me use the storm inside me. It gave me somewhere to put the chaos—and turn it into something beautiful. Something true.

I believe bipolar disorder gave me a heightened sensitivity to life—an overclocked emotional palette. It made the highs higher, the lows lower, the grief more unbearable, the love more vast. And instead of letting it destroy me, I used poetry to translate it. To alchemize it. To make meaning out of it, even when I didn’t fully understand it myself.

And yes—if I’m being honest—I do have a self-destructive side. That comes with the territory. I’ve danced too close to the edge more times than I want to admit. But writing has kept me from going over. It has given me a reason to stay. A place to return to. A mirror. A prayer. A fight.

If you’re reading this, I want you to know that I’m not sharing my story for sympathy. I’m sharing it for truth. For connection. For anyone else who has ever felt like their emotions were too big, too heavy, too dangerous to live with. You’re not alone. I write because I had to. But I share what I write because I want to reach you—wherever you are in your own story.

Thank you for being here. For listening. For seeing me. I hope that in my poetry, you can find echoes of your own experience—and maybe even a bit of peace. A bit of hope.

We are all just trying to find a place to put the storm. There’s salvation in art. Thee’s salvation in poetry.

—Colin Dawson