Advocate and now author Belan Tsagaye hopes her personal poetry will help others facing struggles like hers
Regina mental health advocate Belan Tsagaye is hoping that a reflective, self-published book about her life will help strike action to better support young adults in Saskatchewan struggling with their mental health.
The book, titled The More You Know, launched on March 21. In its pages, 19-year-old Tsagaye lays bare her experience as a teen navigating a complicated family life and the serious impacts of losing two friends to suicide.
“Throughout those years, I chose to turn my pain into strength,” she said, in an interview Friday. “It’s not just about my losses, but about my life. Those losses are part of my life, but it’s more than just that.”
Her book is really a window into her lived experience, she explained in a sunny coffee shop in Regina, the week after launching the debut work. It is her “raw voice,” exploring the complicated tangle of day-to-day emotion through poetry.
“The main concept of this book is like, really connecting within myself, challenging my inner thoughts and really speaking my truth,” she said. “Poetry is my way that I can speak my truth and I can’t be told what to say or what not to say.”
Tsagaye has been an advocate for better mental health supports for teens for several years already, and feels her personal experience could be a wake-up call about what many young adults are dealing with.
Currently finishing her second year as a sociology student at the University of Saskatchewan, Tsagaye said moving to a new city — being an extra step away from loved ones — sparked a flurry of pressure last year.
Poetry was her outlet, one that she has long enjoyed but rarely shared, and she challenged herself to a marathon of expression.
It culminated in a collection of several dozen poems and a desire, for the first time, to publish them in a book — “just for the fun of it,” said Tsagaye.
“There are outrageous rates of teen suicide and teen depression, yet there is no type of visible change happening within schools,” she said. “It is an underlying issue, but it is a growing issue.”
Tsagaye has spoken on the need for more comprehensive education on suicide and depression for Saskatchewan students and outside-the-classroom clubs or groups to make sure students have safe, informative spaces to talk about mental health.
“We need to make a change, and it needs to be as fast change,” she said.
Tsagaye hopes that the personal outpouring of her own experience will help teens facing struggles like hers.
“I think back to my younger self and the person I needed when I was younger, and the information that I wish I had,” she said.
“I want to do that for others. I want to be the proof that no matter what happens, you keep going even though adversity is an everyday challenge.”
Tsagaye said she hopes readers — teens and adults alike — who leaf through her book’s pages will find something relatable. She also hopes it inspires systematic change.
“I hope one day that my words help someone, in some type of way,” she said. “I want them to have some type of impact on someone’s life, just to help them keep going, to help them believe that you’re not alone.”
Tsageye has a limited run of copies of The More You Know in her possession, and plans to see the ocean-blue paperback at The Hampton Hub in Regina soon.
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