My name is Rodrigo Tuma and all throughout my 20s my health wasn't great. I had one of those

elongated fatigue conditions and it was fatiguing of course but it was also fatiguing to be fatigued

and the pressure sometimes that people put on me to say you need it really want to get better.

Sometimes I was too tired to want to get better. I just needed to get through the day and for me one

of the things I needed to learn was these twin realities of recognizing that I had to change my

expectations and also that I could find ways that art could help me writing poetry, reading

poetry, having a conversation that felt creative even though my life didn't feel very creative.

My worries have worries by Laura Virel. My worries have worries so I built little

matchstick houses with large ceilings, a garden for them to grow tomatoes, cilantro and carrots

their worry babies will eat but they chew on the hen bit of me anyway, both my past and future

entwined into disasters. I tell them I worry about their health that they're not eating properly.

I mother them the way I do anyone I love. They ask if I love myself. I tug the sleeves of my sweater

begin thatching a leaking roof water their garden. At night I can hear them dancing around a

bonfire all I've built burned down as such snowfall. Tomorrow they await for me and I'll reconstruct

their home. Anyone would do the same.

I love the brilliant imagination behind this poem to let your worries have characters and to turn

them into worry babies with worry houses and worry activities and worry bonfires and little

worry malevolences back as well as little worry wisdoms. Laura Virel here has made an internal

conversation happen through characters all of these are voices in herself of course.

There's a theory in conflict resolution called distanceiation where when you're in the middle

of a conflict you're supposed to step away from it you can ask somebody to talk about their

conflict in the third person to describe it in the future tense. You can ask them to use a

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