Please stop trying to save me – a poem

Please stop trying to save me

 

What if I am not wrong, just different?

What if I do not need changing, fixing,

Healing, rescuing, improving, sorting out,

Toughening up?

In just the way that spiderwebs and flower petals

Do not need to be other than they are.

I might be fragile, but it is a quality valued in glassware

And butterflies.

I may be sensitive down to my nerve endings

Like the fine tips of roots and shoots

Or a wolf’s sense of smell.

I have been wounded, my body a fracked landscape

But you don’t mend that by demanding

I learn to better tolerate being fracked.

You don’t make me more well if you tell me

I am not good enough right now, if you

Have to tinker with me, recreate me in the way

You think I should be, over-writing the truth of me

With some story that suits you better.

Some way of being in the world that may

Tidy me into other people’s convenience, but makes me

Less myself, smaller than before so that

The next person can come along to see the damage

And decide what should be cut off now

In order to save me from myself.

What if I would never have been damaged at all

Without the people who wanted to repair me

In the manner of their choosing?

What if all I ever needed was kindness

And the space to live out my own difference?