Hosts Luke Morgan and Molly Twomey makes a welcome return to this year's First Fortnight Mental Health Art & Culture Festival with a special edition of the popular Cork-based poetry event Ó Bhéal.

Below, poet Molly Twomey explores how the Ó Bhéal sessions helped her to get her own voice back.

I'm meant to get my degree in Galway, become a teacher and write as a hobby. I’m supposed to stay friends with the girls in my student apartment and we’ll meet in our thirties for brunch and discuss our kids, mortgages, the gravity that drags on our skin.

Except I’m at a GP’s in Dublin with a doctor who places electrodes on my chest, drains blood from my arm and asks what it’s really like in the Eating Disorder centre, do we eat at specific times, am I followed into the bathroom?

I don't know how I find myself at Ó Bhéal in the Long Valley Bar but I sit in the corner, in an unusual stillness for an Irish pub, and watch strangers write.

Later, I write a mean poem about that doctor and show it to another patient, she laughs and rolls me a cigarette. I write during treatment every day for 16 weeks; trying to figure out how I got there, to distract myself from the next meal.

I drop out of NUIG, convince UCC to accept me into second year of English. College is different this time. I live alone. I weigh every dish of butterbeans and rice and sit at the front of each lecture, learn about Chaucer, Shakespeare, and in small seminars, Boland, Meehan, Wingfield. I stop writing. Academia takes over, fills the gap my eating disorder left— stones, miles, calories, become deadlines, essays, results.

I don’t know how I find myself at Ó Bhéal in the Long Valley Bar but I sit in the corner, in an unusual stillness for an Irish pub, and watch strangers write. Slowly they go one by one to the mic to read a poem and everyone claps, some gently squeeze their arm as they return to their seat and you can just about catch the slight smile they try to hide in a pint or behind a collar, that moment of belonging, of being heard and seen.

Going there week after week, I start to write again and it is such a relief to write outside of academia, to ask myself what I really feel, not what sounds intelligent. It takes a while for me to read at Ó Bhéal but when I do, it feels euphoric, as if people genuinely care about my voice and experiences. I pocket that feeling and take it out when I lie awake at night, thinking everyone around me is normal and fits in and I am sick and weird. It’s true, I am sick and weird but Ó Bhéal teaches me that I deserve to be included and listened to.

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Watch: Molly Twomey reads her poem The Citizen's Wife, for the Ulysses 2.2 project

I am so different now to the girl who went up those stairs in the Long Valley with gnawed nails and frayed nerves. Since then, I have published my debut collection, fallen in love, eaten KitKats and fried chicken, danced all night during Cork’s Jazz Weekend. I still struggle now and then but Ó Bhéal helped me get my voice back, it gave me a community and a sense of worth outside of numbers and results.

Ó Bhéal means 'from the mouth' but a lot happens before a poem reaches the throat; there are blockages, hesitancies to overcome - but once you do, it is always worth it.

Ó Bhéal with Luke Morgan and Moll Twomey is at the Long Valley Bar, Cork and online on Monday January 9th at 8.30pm - it will be streamed live via Ó Bhéal's Facebook page.

The First Fortnight Mental Health Art & Culture Festival run from January 6th - 15th - find out more about this year's programme here.