The debut book “Depression & Other Magic Tricks” by Canadian slam poet, writer, and performance artist, Sabrina Benaim, explores themes of one’s mental health amid love and family. Her book fosters a sense of friendship among her readers, allowing those who deal with similar struggles to feel understood, and how to find themselves again. Sabrina’s poem “what i told the doctor” describes how depression can alter one’s sense of reality and sense of self. 

“the eyes are not reliable. 

not windows. not mirrors.”

In this poem Sabrina illustrates how her depression has changed her view of the world. The outside is not the outside she once knew, the face she sees in the mirror, though hers, no longer feels that way. Moreover, she knows she can no longer trust her own eyes, adding to her pain. She ends the poem with a beautifully sorrowful line that truly explains the core of what it can mean to live with depression.

“& my heart has developed a kind of amnesia,

where it remembers everything but itself.”

These ending lines showcase how depression can allow you to remember the world as it once felt, yet prevents you from living in it as the one thing beyond remembering is who you used to be. Through her poems in this book, it has allowed many to survive through their depression, and allowed others to understand what it can mean to live with it.

Image credits: Aung Soe Min on Unsplash.