Kara Pernicano

Fighting a blessing:

It’s okay to need

your security blanket.

It’s okay to need

a crutch.

It’s okay to embrace

the trust fall.

It’s okay to love

emotional support 

animals.

It’s okay 

to handhold.

It’s okay 

to want

childproof gloves.

I won’t claim to be good with words. I am an artist after all. If I am a writer, that doesn’t mean I communicate my feelings and frustrations person to person well. I’ve tried asking therapists if it’s because I don’t have the words to label my experience and they don’t understand. I get told I’m being vague, too abstract, seemingly unable to pinpoint a specific thing they can isolate and tag to a particular label. Meanwhile, maybe I struggle to put labels on my everyday experience, and I don’t actually like the pressure to do so. Often I don’t have the words. One of the greatest traumas of my experience of the mental healthcare system is diagnostic labels or the lack thereof. It affects my access to care. It also affects my sense of belonging and community. I end up stumbling along, until I’m spilling to anyone and everyone what’s truly incommunicable with words. Then talk just feels cheap, words in response empty and shallow. So, I stop talking. I shut down; I shut up. I fall silent. I skirt real talk with a facade. I pretend to be okay because it’s too uncomfortable and mind-boggling to not. I don’t think it’s a problem with vulnerability as one therapist who hardly knew me decided to conclude, but what then? I lean on my creative practice when all else fails. I express myself visually and vocally on the page and on the stage because that’s often how I come back to myself and see myself. Do you see me? Will you hear my story? Can anyone offer genuine support?

Kara Laurene Pernicano (she/they) is a multidisciplinary artist and poet-critic, routinely working in collage, erasure, poetic monologue, comic art and photography.  Through hybrid arts, she seeks to awaken an interpersonal approach to trauma, grief, talk therapy, and mental wellness. Kara is pursuing her PhD in Women’s, Gender & Sexuality Studies at Stony Brook University. She has a MFA from Queens College and a MA from the University of Cincinnati. Her creative work has appeared in or forthcoming in Snapdragon, Waccamaw, The Humanities in Transition, Full Stop, the winnow magazine, ang(st), Passengers Journal and Newtown Literary. Her art has been on view in the Whitney Staff Art Show, LIC Artists’ Plaxall Gallery and King Manor Museum. She has performed for New York Theatre Workshop, Poetic Theater Productions and the Poetry Society of New York. She serves as a Voice Actor for Passengers Journal.