Thank You

‘Thank you’
I say to the voice yelling at me to kill myself.

Voices,
I should say.
There’s more than one,
As there always are.

They stand in a circle
And take eager,
Excitedly overlapping turns
Saying the things they say to me.

I used to whisper the ’Thank you’
And,
for a while after that,
I yelled it
In the same tone
They use when they speak to me .

I’d like to tell you
That, at some point,
I learned to soften my tone and speak with compassion
Because
I am selfless and endlessly empathetic.
But, no.

My firm softness
Began as the bravery of the whisper,
Which morphed into an angry defiance,
That faded to exhaustion,
And then to a plea,
But the desperation only made them louder.

It was then, lost in that desperation,
I remembered
That I do not want to die.
And that will to live taught me to be gentle with myself,
To give myself grace
When I have Loud Voice days.

There is no grand reason
That I developed compassion for the voices.
I simply want to live,
And, much as I don’t like it,
Those voices are me,
So I will keep thanking them

Until they, too,
Learn that they want to live.