SABRINA BENAIM // We’re Not Alone

Mental illness is real and it has adverse effects on our lives. Depression doesn’t care about work deadlines, anxiety doesn’t care your friends haven’t seen you in weeks.

A morbid mindset can envelope you without warning and without reason. Canadian slam poet Sabrina Benaim knows these feelings all too well, but she’s doing something about it–she’s putting feelings into words and giving people a voice where they haven’t been able to find their own.

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In 2014 Benaim made a mark at Toronto’s National Poetry Slam with her unabashedly real poem Explaining My Depression To My Mother. She reached thousands, if not millions, of like-minded people who thought they were alone. Since that video went viral, Benaim has been touring the world, set for Australian shows this month, with a slew of topics set to poetry from love, to life, to those brain meat demons. Having so many people on a global scale relating to her poetry, the thing that began as a personal method of coping, blows Benaim’s mind. “At first it was very overwhelming to me to get so many messages–when I wrote that poem I genuinely thought I was the only person that felt that way and had to find the words to explain this to my mom so that she would understand.

“To have the response that I’ve gotten has really been humbling but also amazing for the connection is has brought. I really like to meet people after the show and connect with people, because as much as people tell me how important the poem has been for them, it’s really been important to me, for my understanding and my own healing, to know that I’m really far from alone in those feelings.”

I found also that being with people after and before the show has made it more comfortable to me to perform such vulnerable work.
[ Sabrina Benaim ]

Exposing herself to not only her own emotions when she performs but those of hundreds of others, Benaim naturally looks for some down time to reconnect with herself, something she says is important for anyone who is struggling. “The magic of this whole thing [is] I’m engaging for the first time. Being on tour for a month, it’s finding I thought it would be a lot easier to be with people all the time, and I’m learning, I do need more down time, I need to read more so at least I’m a little bit disengaged from the real world, I can go into a book and find some calm there.

“I found also that being with people after and before the show has made it more comfortable to me to perform such vulnerable work. I feel like I’m having a conversation with the room and not just talking to strangers. I feel like I am connecting with people and not just leaving the connections afterwards, not just leave the stage or the room or the city and leave it all behind. It’s nice to stay connected.”

Benaim does nothing if not engage with people. To watch one of her performance’s online and understand the nature of this style of art, it’s easy to feel like Benaim isn’t giving a performance, that her words are a retelling, a flashback. “I think the more I do my work, the more I wanna get away from it feeling like a performance, and I do want it to very much feel like a conversation between friends,” she says.

What Benaim discusses loneliness it’s like a dichotomy of experience – I want to be around people because I’m lonely, I am around more people but I don’t want to be around people–a confusing state of being many of us can relate to. “That’s something that, when you talk about mental illness, that doesn’t really go away,” says Benaim. “’I wanna be surrounded by people–no, no I don’t. Now I feel like I’m surrounded by people but I’m drowned in that surrounding.’ It’s important I think to discover those boundaries and keep them, when you know where they are, knowing this where I draw the line.”

I think the way I describe to people, more recently, it may seem like I’m happier now but in truth, I’m not pretending to be fine anymore
[ Sabrina Benaim ]

Social media commentary praises Benaim for how much happier she seems through her recent performances compared to four years ago. A lot of her poetry deals with the falsehood of happiness but is she genuinely happy or is that cloud of depression a constant companion? “I think the way I describe to people, more recently, it may seem like I’m happier now but in truth, I’m not pretending to be fine anymore,” she says. When I’m not in a good mood or I’m not happy, I don’t have to pretend to be fine which makes me a lot less tired because it’s quite exhausting to pretend to be fine when you’re not. I have this freedom of being myself on this whole spectrum of emotions and that in itself means I’m much more comfortable in myself which ultimately translates to happiness.”

Despite much of the western world being alert to the stigmas and issues behind mental illness, certainly in the generation ahead of us, our parents, don’t understand, they can’t understand, and are very quick to brush any uncomfortable feelings or conversations under the rug. Benaim’s live poetry will likely impact a change in people’s way of thinking–but there’s a lot of work to be done. “I think part of the work is to subject them to that discomfort, you know, ‘This is how it is.’ If it makes you uncomfortable, it makes us uncomfortable to say it as well, but someone has to.

“Saying, ‘Yeah this is uncomfortable let’s work through that discomfort together so we can ultimately find some empathy, some understanding, and a means to go forward, because so much of that is you don’t have to agree or relate to what I’m saying, you just need to understand and accept that it’s real. And that’s what I hope my work will get across.”

When you’re younger, especially through the teen years and you don’t understand why you are the way you are, when people say how can I help? You don’t know, you don’t know how to communicate, and that’s where the creative arts become useful, like what Benaim is doing. “Writing for me started as a means for expressing myself without judgement, because nobody can read my journal. I can just say anything I wanted to say in there and work through it myself.

“I think when people say you’re good at it, I don’t know that, as much as we talk about talent or innateness of talent, I think I spent so much time studying literature that it’s going to seep in at some point, because I love words—I love language, I love poetry, I love fiction, I really do love the written word quite a bit!”