✨ Navigating Life’s Challenges with Sound, Poems, and Affirmations

Life does not move in straight lines. It spirals. It rises and recedes, some waves crashing, others only whispering across the shore. There are days full of clarity and momentum, and others steeped in silence, when even breathing feels heavy. In those quiet, invisible moments when mental health feels fragile and identity feels blurred, I reach. Not for something extravagant or loud, but for something steady. Something sacred.

For me, that has always been language and sound.

Not just words on a page, but rhythm. Vibration. Ancestral resonance. The steady pulse of sound, especially drums, has always grounded me. The drum is more than music; it is memory. It is resistance. It is a heartbeat older than silence. Language shapes thought. Sound gives it breath. In moments of anxiety or despair, I return to rhythm. To the vibration in my chest. To the inner drumbeat that reminds me: I am still here.

Mental health is not a destination. It is not a place we arrive, whole and untouched by storms. It is a landscape we learn to move through. Some days are wide and open; others are trapped in a fog. And when I walk through that fog, uncertain, overwhelmed, I return to language and sound. Not just any words or melodies, but the kind that carry weight. The kind that remembers. Voices in many forms: poems. Affirmations. Drums. Songs. These are my lifelines back to myself.

I was born and raised in Grenada, where the sea hums like an old gospel hymn and the rain plays rhythms on zinc roofs like steelpan players warming up before sunrise. The wind moves through the hills like breath. And always, the radio hummed in the background, voices, music filling the house like prayer.

During post-revolutionary Grenada, when the island was still steadying itself after invasion and grief, I heard Dr. Merle Collins’s voice on the radio. Her tone was unshakable. Through the air, clear and certain, she said: “I am a Grenadian woman.”

She did not whisper it. She claimed it. In a time when so much had been fractured, nationhood, identity, trust, those five words landed like a drumbeat in silence. Not just a statement. A reckoning. A refusal to disappear.

Even as a child, I knew it was sacred. I did not need to understand the politics, I felt it in my chest. I knew it in my bones. That moment planted something inside me. A seed of strength. A memory of who I am. And over the years, those words have grown roots. Every time I speak to them, they rise in me like a tide.

Only later did I understand the full power of that moment. Because post-revolution Grenada was not only rebuilding roads and schools, it was rebuilding its soul. The trauma of political upheaval left silences everywhere. Vulnerability was hidden. Grief was swallowed. Emotional expression was often treated as a weakness. In that silence, voices like Dr. Collins’s were thunder. She reminded us that language could be survival. To speak the truth, especially as a Caribbean woman, was a form of power.

So when I have felt anxious, disconnected, or unseen, I have returned to language and rhythm. Not to escape but to remember. To root. To rise. Poetry has always held that remembering for me. It says what we sometimes cannot. It holds sorrow and joy, pain and pride, brokenness and beauty. When I first read Dr. Maya Angelou’s “Still I Rise,” something deep in me stirred. It was not just a poem. It was a message passed down, a rhythm older than the page:

“You may trod me in the very dirt, But still, like dust, I’ll rise.”

Those lines echoed a history I carry in my body—an African and Caribbean legacy of survival and strength. They reminded me that we do not rise despite what we have lived through. We rise because of it. Pain and power can live in the same breath. Dignity is not given. It is kept.

Poetry becomes both a mirror and a medicine. It helps us feel seen when we are invisible. In Caribbean communities shaped by colonial wounds, silence, and revolution, poetry becomes a sacred tongue. A quiet rebellion. A way to speak what we were taught to suppress. It carries the same energy I first heard in Dr. Collins’s voice. She did not ask for permission. She insisted on being heard. She reminded me that I could claim space. That I could speak.

And yet, poetry is not my only lifeline. Affirmations hold quiet power, too. But sometimes, that power is not silent. It arrives like the conch shell at dawn. Like the echo of Congo drums carried on the wind. These are affirmations, too unwritten, but remembered. They do not rhyme. They do not shout. But they stay. Like a heartbeat. Like a drum. Repeating “I am enough” or “This moment will pass” is not about pretending life is easy. It is about gently interrupting the voice of self-doubt. It is about choosing compassion, especially when it feels hardest.

When practiced daily, affirmations soften the edges of pain. They do not erase it. But they create space. They help us rewrite what the world has tried to make us forget. They remind us that healing is not a finish line—it is a choice we return to again and again.

Mental health support does not always come in grand forms. Sometimes, it is a ritual. A whispered line. A breath before the day begins. For me, it is always this: “I am a Grenadian woman.”

Five words. But they carry an island. A revolution. A history. They hold the sound of conch shells and hand drums, the weight of protest and rebuilding, the memory of rain and fire. They remind me that survival is not shameful. It is sacred.

Language and sound hold power. Whether it is Dr. Angelou’s rising or Dr. Collins’s unwavering voice through static airwaves, words and rhythm have helped me keep going. They do not erase the shadows, but they offer light. They remind me I am not alone.

We are not alone. We are still here. We are still rising. That line—still rising—is no longer just a poem to me. It is an affirmation. A rhythm. A memory. A prayer. It ties me to ancestors, to culture, to myself. It reminds me that I am not fragile. I am forged. That my voice carries the weight of women who refused to be silenced. That I do not have to disappear.

So when I speak of navigating mental health with poems and affirmations, I am not speaking of soft comforts. I am speaking of tools. Of anchors. Of survival. Of sacred ritual. Of words that held me when nothing else could. Whether it is Dr. Angelou’s rise, Dr. Collins’s declaration, or the sacred drumbeat pulsing beneath it all—those voices live in me now. And in my way, I speak too. I rise too. And if you are reading this, I hope you will rise as well.