This piece is the closest I’ve come to writing the truth of my internal war without softening it. Between Worlds is about self-violence—the way the mind learns your weak spots, remembers the old wounds, and knows exactly where to cut. It’s a poem about relapse, about memory, about survival, and about the strange loneliness that follows healing.
It speaks to the years where I wasn’t sure I’d make it. The hospital walls. The padded quiet. The fluorescent lights humming through the silence. It speaks to dissociation, to identity, to queerness, and to the mythic distance I’ve always felt between who I am and the world I live in.
This poem isn’t a cry for help—it’s a record of survival. It isn’t tragedy for tragedy’s sake—it’s truth. It’s the reality that healing isn’t linear, that progress has shadows, and that sometimes the loudest battles are fought in the mind no one else can see.
If you know this feeling—of standing in your own skin like it never quite fits, of fighting thoughts with thoughts, of loving your existence even when you question your place in it—then I hope you feel seen here.
Because none of us are alone in the in-between.
— Rowan Evans
Between Worlds — artwork representing Rowan Evans’ poem about surviving mental illness, dissociation, and identity beyond binaries.
Between Worlds Poetry by Rowan Evans
Why do I always try to pick a fight with me?
You’d think I’d know, by now, just how quick I’ll slip an insult under the ribs.
I’ll hit every single fear, twist them like a knife— until I’m on my knees, gasping, spitting blood.
I don’t fight fair. I target old wounds, tear at what’s already healed. I’ll fuck around and send myself back ten years— back to hospital walls and quiet rooms, where the only sound was the fluorescent hum.
Where time dissolved… where clocks stopped ticking.
But I walked out of those halls— didn’t I?
Didn’t I?
But what if I didn’t? What if I’m still locked inside, in a padded room with the jacket strapped tight? Thoughts confined, so the words won’t escape.
Writing poems in my head, just to pass the time.
I’ve been alive, but dead inside. And I’ll be honest: I’ve died inside my mind more than a dozen times.
I just wanted escape.
Escape from pain, from feeling misplaced— I just wanted to belong.
But it’s like— something is wrong here. Why don’t I feel like I belong here?
Why does everything feel a half inch to the left— like I’m living inside the echo of myself?
Like I’m watching my life from behind fogged glass, palms against the surface, screaming— but no sound passes through.
Sometimes I swear the world forgets I’m here, and sometimes I do too.
Maybe it’s because every room I walk into, I’m half a ghost already— too queer, too quiet, too soft, too strange. Too fucking much for everyone but me.
Maybe that’s why the fight never ends— because I’m still trying to prove I deserve the space I take up, even in my own skin.
So maybe I don’t belong here because I was born between worlds— not alive, not dead, not human, not myth, not safe, not ruined.
Maybe my bones remember a home I never had, and every heartbeat since has been an attempt to map my way back.
Poetry by Rowan Evans 