The verdict arrives in the first line: "I am no good." Everything after it is the speaker trying, and failing, to appeal against that sentence. Lisa varen's untitled poem, marked only by three asterisks, is a short, painful spiral in which a person grades herself on her own suffering and fails every time. Underneath the self-criticism sits a simpler need, stated plainly halfway through: "I want to be seen."
The form is as unpolished as the feeling. There is no rhyme, no regular rhythm and no stanza break, only a single block of lines that reads like a diary entry or a message typed late at night. Some lines are blunt and short ("I am no good."), while others run on, loaded with clauses. That mix mimics a mind going round in circles, adding one more reason to the pile. The spelling slips ("fullfill," "wat") and the odd grammar ("Can't lay in bed") make the text feel unedited, as if nothing has been smoothed between the thought and the page. Whatever their cause, they stop the poem from sounding like a performance.
The most striking choice is the vocabulary. The speaker talks about illness in the language of school and work: being "good at" things, being "good enough," managing to "fullfill" something. Depression, an eating disorder, self-harm and suicide are all treated like tasks to be completed well. "Can't lay in bed all day even with depression" makes depression sound like an activity with a proper way of doing it. Wanting to be hospitalized "even though I want to" turns a medical emergency into a target the speaker keeps missing. The logic is cruel and also oddly familiar, since it is perfectionism turned on the self, so relentless that it follows the speaker even into her pain.
Words of sight hold the poem together: "seen," "see how bad it is going," "finally see the broken me." Each act of harm is imagined as a kind of message, a way to make something invisible visible. The "always smiling face" is the counterweight. The speaker suggests the face has done its job too well, since the smile is convincing enough that no one looks behind it. The poem hints that the one thing she does consistently is hide, and that this has become part of the problem.
Then there is the word "maybe," which appears three times. "Maybe people will care," "maybe that is wat I am good at," "maybe people will finally see." It is a small word, but it carries the poem's fragile hope, because someone who says "maybe" still imagines other people responding. Death is softened into "go to sleep and never wake up again," a gentle, almost childlike phrase that sits uneasily beside the harsher verb "cut." The ellipses after "either" and "at it" let the voice trail away mid-thought, as though the speaker has run out of energy to finish the argument.
The ending is the poem's turning point. "But I know for sure" promises certainty, yet the only thing known is failure, even "if it is a case of life and death." Then the register changes. After a poem of flat statements, the last line is a question: "Will I ever be good enough??" The phrase shifts from "no good," an absolute, to "good enough," a threshold, and it quietly exposes the real issue. The speaker's measuring stick has no fixed height. The double question mark reads like a plea, aimed at a reader and not at herself.
That is where the poem's significance lies. It shows a damaging belief from the inside: that pain has to be proven, or be severe enough, before it deserves care. The reader can see what the speaker cannot, that no one has to be "good" at suffering to deserve help. The poem also contradicts itself in a hopeful way. By writing down what hides behind the smile, the speaker has already made the hidden visible. If any of this feels familiar, telling a trusted adult, a friend or a helpline is not a competition about how sick someone is. It is simply what being seen looks like.