Poetry as self-expression and a coping strategy

Poetry as self-expression and a coping strategy develops from Gideon’s preference for the written word into a way of speaking publicly about depression, self-harm, and grief. Writing lets him revise what feels difficult to say in conversation, while performing makes that private language available to other people. The change is not simply from silence to confidence: even when he steps onto a stage, awkwardness and fear remain, but poetry gives him a form in which he can act despite them.

A form of expression with room to revise

Gideon identifies himself as someone who writes poems, and later specifies that he writes slam poems. Saying so is difficult for him. He worries that announcing his interest will make him sound like a show-off, and explaining slam poetry can leave him rambling about spoken-word poetry’s history. His self-consciousness is not incidental to the role poetry plays: it helps explain why writing feels safer than ordinary conversation. In a written piece, he can correct mistakes, delete passages, and shape how he comes across. Public speech, by contrast, happens before an audience and cannot be edited in the same way.

That preference makes writing a practical alternative to conversational pressure, not merely an artistic identity. Gideon describes choosing silence in many public situations and writing instead. On an occasion when he is preparing for an interview, anxiety gathers around the questions he expects to face; he tries to steady himself by focusing on his breathing, his toes, and an advertisement on a cubicle door. The scene sets the difficulty of speaking plainly against the greater control he experiences on the page. Poetry gives language a place where he can approach an experience at his own pace.

Learning poetry and finding an audience

Robbie, Gideon’s therapist, is the person he credits with getting him into poetry. Their relationship begins after Gideon’s family moves, and Robbie is the fourth therapist he has seen. Gideon values that Robbie does not make assumptions about him, including assumptions based on his sexuality, his mothers, or his scars. In their early sessions, Robbie makes conversation through ordinary interests and jokes rather than immediately pressing him about depression or self-harm. The atmosphere of acceptance matters to the development of Gideon’s writing: poetry enters a relationship in which he is not required to present himself through someone else’s expectations.

Gideon also has practice taking creative risks before an audience. Ria has given him improvisation games and freestyle-writing prompts over the years. When four boys invite him to freestyle, he feels watched and physically charged with adrenaline, but he draws on that practice and begins. His improvised verse jokes about the boys’ rapping about their mothers and ends with a deliberately outrageous sexual boast. The boys cheer and laugh, and one lifts him up while the others pat his head. The response turns a moment of exposure into a shared performance: Gideon has not found a way to eliminate embarrassment, but he has found a way to answer it with language.

Making private pain tangible

In Broken, Gideon connects two kinds of break. At nine, he broke his ankle in a scooter accident and received a cast; at fourteen, he experienced depression as a break in his mind that no doctor could simply mend. The poem contrasts the visible injury and its twelve weeks of messages from schoolmates with an inward suffering that is difficult to see and burdened by stigma. Its movement from the remembered cast to the effort of living with an unseen break gives bodily injury and mental illness distinct circumstances rather than treating them as interchangeable.

Gideon wrote Broken about a year before performing it, and this is the first time he has shown it to anyone. He explains that writing changes the status of what is in his head: the thought becomes a tangible thing he can look at, examine, and grow accustomed to. At first, even putting the word depressed on the page felt like an admission. With time, repeated reading changes his relation to the poem; it becomes something he made, rather than only a confession or a piece of himself. When he performs it, he can experience it as a poem.

That change is visible in the audience’s response. Norma and Andy cheer, while Gideon’s mother and Susan cry; his mother hugs him and asks why he did not warn them he had a new poem. The piece receives an honourable mention and a ten-dollar coffee-shop voucher. Gideon treats the modest prize with wry humour, but the more consequential change has already occurred: a text he kept private has been heard by people close to him. The performance lets them encounter his account of depression and survival in the form he has made for it.

Performance as a risk, not a cure

Gideon’s public performances do not imply that his anxiety has disappeared. Before performing Head of State, he worries that an audience might judge the poem and, by extension, him. He introduces himself, names the piece, catches Ava’s eye, takes a deep breath, and closes his eyes before beginning. Those gestures register both the strain of being seen and his decision to continue. Poetry makes the act possible without converting him into a suddenly assured performer.

In the section of Head of State presented in the narrative, Gideon addresses the discovery of his self-harm and the pain of having hurt his mother. The poem describes his inability to ask her directly for help, and the marks on his skin become a way of communicating what he cannot yet say in words. This is not the same movement as Broken: there, the poem revisits the speaker’s depression and the work of continuing to live; here, the focus includes the shock and sorrow of another person recognizing his suffering. Across both performances, the poem gives shape to experiences that have been difficult to speak about face to face.

Poetry as witness and shared memory

At graduation, Gideon performs an untitled poem that Ava wrote about Kelly. Ava has given it to him months earlier and told him to read it if he was confused. When he walks to the microphone, she initially expects a public announcement and worries about the attention he will receive. Then she recognizes her own poem in his performance. Gideon has memorized it, and the poem’s words pass from private writing into a large auditorium.

The poem remembers Kelly’s liveliness and her struggle, refusing to reduce her life to her death. It insists that she wanted the pain to end, rather than her life, and rejects explanations that make her death seem justified or trivial. In performing it, Gideon gives Ava’s words a public voice while keeping their authorship and history legible to her. The audience falls silent; Ava realizes she has been holding her breath. When the performance ends, applause rises, and she sees Kelly’s parents holding hands and crying. The scene extends poetry’s work beyond individual coping: a poem can help mourners hear and hold a difficult account together. Gideon still looks awkward and nervous to Ava, but his willingness to perform marks a change in how he inhabits that vulnerability. Poetry has not removed the pain or made speech effortless; it has made a way for him to speak, and for others to listen.