I Got The Swings

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Thoughts and poems around the Elizabeth Stefanidi's personal experience of living with bipolar disorder, of living without it, as she tries to live like so many others do, and function almost like others do, and sometimes succeed. I Got The Swings is an attempt to imprint with words her need to carry her minds peace for her son and her ‘suns’ and her ‘thunders’. Like anyone, like everyone, like someone, like her.

Born in Liverpool and raised in Athens, Greece, Elizabeth's need to express her thoughts has always been easier through writing. To imprint moments, that sometimes were difficult to deal in real life yet were always made easier through written words. After studying in London and being diagnosed at the age of 24 with bipolar disorder Elizabeth's main theme changed to one of a struggle with an illness considered a social stigma.

Her need to confront an illness she never knew she would learn to love. She grew through music, through life itself, her loving family, through anything and anyone. She had always found her refuge on a piece of paper and later on on a pc screen, and on almost anything. On and off, off and on life itself. When she keeps trying to find beginnings in every end and beginnings in every line of any circumstance, of looking through her child and learning to love life, when she sometimes believed it could never happen.

Eliza’s unconventional and penetrating look of life and its’ realities, along with her eloquent way in imprinting it, makes her body of work so unique and interesting, that you want to follow her all around, through her poems. They take you to short and long journeys, to places she sees everyday through her heart, with her offbeat glance. As her words seem to be playing among themselves, they carry you with their meaning to different and new places every time, with every poem. Her twists and turns of words take you to unexpected realities, not realizing they were there all along. Sometimes joyfully, other times heavily, but every time honestly, effortlessly and delicately; compelling you to shift and see the most vulnerable of your moments, giving you the space to let them sink in and be acknowledged. While casting light into darkness and highlighting shadows, she captures the echoes of the words offering a new picture into an old tableau. Whilst challenging at times, there is no fear in confiding the world as she sees it, taking you with her in finding comfort, there, where there was none before. - Natassa Sarris, painter