She's using poetry to accept her bipolar disorder
AFTER TAKING A WRITING COURSE, LAUREN BE DEAR FOUND HER VOICE AND IS SHARING HER EXPERIENCE WITH THE WORLD
(Photo by Michael Marques / Hair & Wardrobe Styling by Alyssa Haley)
Lauren Be Dear was 19 and had just started college when she had her first manic episode.
She was diagnosed with bipolar disorder, a diagnosis that she was already too familiar with. "My father has it, my brother has it, and I had grown up seeing my dad struggle with it, in particular. I had grown to resent the illness. So when I was diagnosed, it was my worst nightmare coming true. It took me a long time to finally accept that I do in fact have bipolar disorder.”
In 2018, she joined the Write On! course, a writing and advocacy program through Mental Health Connecticut. “Once I started writing, it just flew out of me. I didn't consider myself a writer by any means before I started WriteOn!,” she said. “Throughout the course we were all sharing our stories and they were all vastly different, but they all had this underlying theme of wanting to understand ourselves and wanting others to understand us too. It was just this really beautiful healing experience.”
At the end of the nine-week course, she presented her final poem, Trinity. The poem is about her father’s bipolar disorder and the anger and difficult emotions that came with accepting her own diagnosis.
The WriteOn! course wasn’t the end of Lauren’s writing. “Trinity was the first poem that I wrote, and my writing took off from there. It’s become this amazing release for me,” she said. “It’s been empowering and really allowed me to step into myself as a person.”
What started as just one poem, has now led Lauren to use her writing talent and create an entire spoken word album entitled Com•mit•tal. “The definition of committal is actually a burial, like when you commit a body to the ground. And it's really not about burying things and sweeping it under the rug. Instead, I’m actually allowing these emotions, these feelings, these experiences and my trauma to rest. I’m releasing it, and it’s now out in the world.”
The album is broken up into four sections covering pivotal moments in Lauren’s mental health journey. The first section revolves around bipolar disorder and her experience with hospitalization. The middle section is broken up into two poems. “The first poem is a statement that I had actually spoken directly to my rapist when I took him to court. The poem directly after that is my perspective of that experience.” The third part is about her letting go of a painful, romantic entanglement.
And the fourth section is her release of all of it. Her committal of those painful moments.
What’s next for Lauren? She’s in the process of writing a book with her dad. It will feature poems and short stories written by the two of them — mostly focused on their bipolar disorder and their relationship together. They’ve been writing letters back and forth to each other, which will be the main narrative of the book.
Her hope is that it will bring them even closer together and that it will help other families struggling with bipolar disorder.
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Lauren Be Dear is an interdisciplinary artist from Hartford, Connecticut whose work focuses on spoken word poetry and video art. Last year, she released a spoken word album called Com•mit•tal. Lauren lives with bipolar disorder and is a survivor of sexual assault, both of which she writes about as a way to heal, advocate and inform. She is also a proud cat lady and plant mom. Com•mit•tal can be purchased on her website or streamed on iTunes, Spotify, Bandcamp, and Youtube.
Are you ready to share your story? You can now apply to be a part of the IDONTMIND Writing Workshop. Find more information on how to apply here.