Beyond - Shannon Shell

What happens when you return to school
and there's no way to express the feelings you feel inside?
When you don't even know the words to describe what you think, what you feel.

I'll tell you what I learnt, I taught myself to turn my feelings into fists.
'Cos when you don't understand what you're feeling, you begin to fight it, thrush at it.
You turn the things you feel into violence.
And so the powers that be react...
They push you further out, they don't stop to listen, they don't stop to ask.
They stop to fight you. They stop to shout.
They put you in groups with others like you that don't understand what they think, and feel and fight about.

What do you do when you look in the mirror
and all you see is something you don't understand? You don't recognise...

I waited and waited for something to tell me to do
other than being violent.
I waited and waited for someone to look beyond the burning inside.
Something beyond what I felt was me, beyond what I felt was true.

It only took 3 years for someone to look beyond the fire,
Beyond the petty violence, beyond the pissed off attitude and turn into something else.
Something beyond the surface that was losing.

No-one saw me feel things that have definitions - Words.
And when I talked - Someone listened.
Someone to find what it was I was feeling.
I learnt to live through words.
What they meant, how they define what was happening inside.

I wish I had someone back then to tell me what I know now,
That it's ok to be sad, to feel down.
That it's ok to stop and listen to the sound of your heart beating...
and you don't have to forget everything to remember you're still breathing...

Shannon Shell