Young Writers Society

Hello!

This made me cry, you can actually see hoy the narrator is desperate for help and to be able to escape their own reality. And also the repetition of the question can make you feel the pressure of saying "I'm okay". It's like they feel trapped in their own mind because they are haunted by "past mistakes" but they still can't escape. I truly believe this is wonderful.

Hi there!

The question "Are you okay?" just feels very nice. Especially when a loved one asks you that question. The narrator is having a hard time mentally becuase of missing their dad's wedding and they're longing for their brother who died 5 years ago. Well, some people who had the sickness of Covid-19, tell me that when they get it, they just don't feel sick physically but it can also effect you mentally. Although, whoever is asking the question is just weird. It repeats the same question not definitely helping and comforting the person telling these stories. The lines:

"I want to escape,
I want freedom
I'm trapped
I can't escape"

They just feel desperate for freedom to escape from sadness or even their house to just have freedom to do things they want. Or maybe even comfort from a someone who will actually comfort them. But the line: "Thank you for your participation in this forum" makes me rethink. Like, the person telling stories about their dad and brother is actually talking to a robot or just a site where it asks "Are you okay?" Pretty cool. Over all, it is good. Keep up on writing! Merry Christmas!

Hi QueenMadrose!

I really enjoyed reading this poem! It was raw and heart-felt and I liked how expressive it was despite the speaker answering indirectly every time when asked if they were okay. I liked the repetition of the question, especially in the last line as it reflects the uselessness of people's half-hearted enquiries into our well-being. Despite, everything going on in one's life (like the speaker's), the conventional answer is always affirmative as it is what society expects.

Overall, this was a really good poem and it perfectly captures the speaker's mental state.

Thank you for sharing it with us!

Ok so first of all wow. You just did an absolutely amazing job of putting a ton of hard-to-describe feelings into words. I really like the way you kept asking the same question (and the way you wrote it, it was very clear that someone separate was asking).

I only have a few suggestions, and I'm a complete grammar freak so please ignore if you feel like it. First of all, COVID I believe is all caps. Also, there are a few points when I think a comma would be helpful, just in the way you read it. For example:
"If I was more careful I wouldn't have caught covid" I would put a comma between "careful" and "I". The same thing for "well (,) physically." and "I was careless (,) I should've been more careful". One last grammatical note: I feel like there are definitely places you can add punctuation at the end of lines. You have a few lines where you have that and a few lines where you don't, so I would recommend choosing one and sticking with it. Otherwise, as a reader, I'd be "holding my breath" so to speak, waiting for the next punctuation to help with the flow.

I love the way the phrases evolve. As someone who struggle with depression for years before being put on meds, I like how it feels like traveling down that rabbit-hole. First, you're talking about missing your dad's wedding, next thing you know you're talking about feeling trapped and not being able to escape. It just feels very relatable to me.

Also, the line "I miss my old depression / when I was still able to feel" makes me curious, because when most people I hear talk about missing being depressed, they mean they miss not feeling anything. I've heard people talk about (and I use it in this context sometimes as well) depression being almost a relief in some instances because you don't have to worry about the influx or overwhelmingness of emotions. It's just blank, which can definitely be comforting as long as you don't think too much about the mental illness part of it. However, you talk about it as if it's almost mutated into something past normal depression? I'm not giving critiques here, I just think it's a very different and interesting way of looking at it.

Hopefully something in there was able to help! I hope everything works out for you, I'm sure if you keep pushing through it will get better. All I can say is this: please keep writing and posting. This was absolutely amazing and definitely took my breath away at its relatability. I know quite a few people that this poem reminded me of.

Hi there!

Gosh, i haven't reviewed anything in ages, so sorry if I come across a little rusty! I just was intrigued by your poem and wanted to offer some thoughts and criticisms!

First of all, I like the choice of title. A question is a great way to pull a reader like myself into a poem because it gets me thinking about whether I'm okay and gets me in the right mind to read such an emotional poem.

I really enjoyed the format of this poem, with each stanza of five lines being broken up by the repeating "Are you okay?" question. It breaks up the poem, making it easy to understand and it also creates a good flow.

The last "Are you okay?" being answered with "I'm okay" is really impactful. We know the narrator/voice in the poem is not okay, as we've just read about the sad death of a brother and not being able to attend the wedding due to having covid. It makes an impactful statement about how we can be experiencing the worst heartbreaks but say "I'm okay" and pretend that we are so we don't feel so hurt all the time, or because we don't want others to know we're hurting.

I only have a few critiques, which are that it doesn't quite feel like a poem to me, but more like a monologue from a play or a story. Some lines in stanzas vary in length to the next and this disrupts the flow. Adding a rhyme to each stanza could help, but that's only my personal advice and not everyone likes rhyming poetry!

There's a lot of repetition of the words "physically" and "mentally" which Seirre picked up on, so I won't go into any more detail as their review was very thorough!

You wrote a very impactful and emotional poem and it's helped me get back into reviewing again so thank you!

-4revgreen

Hi there Madrose! I saw this poem of yours in the Green Room and thought I'd drop by with a review!

I'm going to be structuring this review after the The YWS Critique Sandwich, with positives, criticisms, and a conclusion. So let's dive right in~

Top Bun: Compliments
This poem does a great job of showing what it's like to gaslight yourself - feeling like something's wrong, but telling yourself over and over that your problems or feelings are bad enough to count. So instead of acknowledging that there are varying levels of "bad", and all of them are valid, the narrator ends the poem by claiming they're definitely okay.

Your use of repetition throughout definitely works well! I think it makes the ending all the more compelling, because over and over the narrator is being prodded for an answer to the question "Are you okay?" and over and over they just dodge around it, saying anything but specifically "I'm not okay". Which makes it feel like by the end of poem, they're so tired of being asked this question and dodging it that they just give in to what the interviewer wants to hear and say they're okay. I can almost imagine the narrator thinking sarcastically in their head, "you really haven't caught on yet from everything I've said so far?? fine then, I'm GREAT".

There's also some repetition of "it hurt(s) me" and the words "physically/mentally", which makes it feel a bit like the narrator has turned their problems into a list of symptoms. As if their feelings can be condensed down into a bullet point of clinical description - which the narrator actually calls out pretty clearly

all I'm doing now is making a list

Thank you for your parcaipation in this forum.

I miss my old depression
when I was still able to feel