There have been moments in my life of sheer desperation where emotions come pouring out in the messiest of manners. “Distressed” is a description of one of those moments and it is narrated through a series of lines that describe my appearance throughout that moment. As teenagers, we go through a lot of stress naturally, but sometimes we tend to overstress ourselves over things that aren’t actually that important. The poem ends with the girl realizing that whatever is wrong is not as bad as it seems, which prompts a laugh of relief.

In terms of how the poem came to be, it all started when I thought of a line, “dried tears stick like glue to my face.”