about me

May: Mental Health Awareness Month

Trigger Warning: I describe mental illness and suicidal ideation as well as suicide and suicide attempts. A link to a variety of resources is provided.

Normally, my website is a place for my poetry or my fiction, but after a conversation with a colleague last week, I felt a renewed sense of why I advocate for mental health and talk about how important it is to reach out if you are struggling.

My co-worker talked about how his nephew committed suicide, and I personally have lost a few friends to suicide as well, but their stories are not mine to tell. However, I can tell you about the aftermath. The hole that the loss of their lives ripped through my heart.

I, too, have tried to kill myself, whether it was from an overdose of pills or because of a psychotic-fuelled nightmarish episode where I ran into traffic in a fit of a hallucination.

I know there is a lot of stigma surrounding mental illness, but I am now willing to be vulnerable about my bipolar and my complex posttraumatic stress disorder. If by being honest about these illnesses can help save lives, I’d share my story as many times as it takes.

Of course it’s scary to share it, but what’s scarier are those who are dying undiagnosed or living with mental illness, struggling each day.

If I can do anything to ease your pain, know I would do it. I am just one person, but I am one person who cares.

Please reach out to a person you trust if you need support or if you can’t find anyone, try the list I have here if you’re feeling suicidal.

But please don’t wait until you feel that hopeless. Get help soon. People do love you and care about you. We want you here and we want the demons to be silenced, too, but there’s a way to silence them without ending your beautiful life.

The world needs you in it.

Isabelle Palerma

Unmoored: a Poem

A prompt from Maureen Thorson.

“Write your own poem in which you recount a childhood memory. Try to incorporate a sense of how that experience indicated to you, even then, something about the person you’d grow up to be.”

A date etched into my heart as though
carved into glass.
My eyes were stained with tears, and
I turned to a notebook,
searching for answers about
why God robbed the world of ordinary men
who did their best to love.
I bled ink onto the page as I struggled
for truth
the night no one remembered as
a young lost princess became unmoored.

Isabelle Palerma

Unlike You: a Poem

“Unlike you . . .” a prompt from Kay A.

In less than a month,
unlike you to care about the wreckage of the Titanic that is my heart.
I have witnessed you stampede on
and trample me barefoot.
Yet,
the teeth you bared is what
I have come to expect.

Family taught me
(for better or worse)
to murder with mercy.
When you were flashing your baby teeth,
sharpening like knives,
I was practicing my smiles
in polished glass.

Unlike you to offer condolences
or express empathy,
and yet, the past few days,
while Lazarus has been in the tomb,
a different side of you has been exposed.

Unlike you to show warmth,
still a reptilian cold underneath,
but the air is a bit milder now – less frost,
less chill.

Unlike you to offer benevolence and yet,
a crack of a smile,
a beginnings of generosity.

Is it possible you were murdered by my mercy?
Killed by my kindness?

Or did New Year’s resolutions just fall
a few days behind on this calendar?

I’m not one to gaze the gift horse
in the mouth,
but I do have my suspicions
when you were flashing those fangs,
honing them like knives,
and are now sweet as spun sugar.

Just call me Doubting Thomas
if your kindness only lasts as long as
Lazarus was in the tomb.

Isabelle Palerma

Healing: a Poem

I remember a photo I saw of a two-hundred-year-old
cherry blossom tree.
I imagine the events it must have borne witness to:
births, deaths, tsunamis, the rise and fall of empires,
but still its branches spread with pink and red blooms.
I wake up some mornings, an elegy for self
on my cracked lips, gazing upon my scars
and wondering why I’m still here.
But to some, I’m still blooming and they don’t see
the fractures I think define me.
Perhaps I still have some life in me.

If a tree can withstand two-hundred years
of storm and sun,
I, too, can live and love a little longer.

Isabelle Palerma

Update on Catching Dreams

Yesterday morning, I received an email with my edited manuscript. I was all prepared to dive into the edits and see how I could improve my writing before sending it back to the publisher for one more round of final edits.

Then, I read the email. The small press I had to decided to go with is shutting down as of January 1, 2025 and will not be publishing Catching Dreams.