Woman as Riot: Alana Hayes is a 27-year-old poet and singer-songwriter living in Arizona. Alana has been published with multiple online publications including Indolent Books – What Rough Beast, Night Music Journal, and WriteBitchWrite.

Woman As Riot

She currently runs her website: womanasriot.com where she shares thought pieces, poetry, and short stories. She is also currently working on her first album. Alana runs a depop shop, which she named after her zodiac sign: Angry Aries Vintage @angryariesvintage you can find it on depop and Instagram.

Alana aspired to be a singer when she was little. But when got older, she found interest in literature, cultural work, and writing. You can find her work on https://womanasriot.com/2021/01/17/woman-as-riot/. Singing was her first passion but writing is her real devotion.

Alana Hayes: Hardest Phase of Life

2019 was one of the hardest times of Alana’s life. It was post-college and she had just moved back home after living on her own abroad for about a year. Alana Hayes was struggling with finding a job and dealing with mental health. She was diagnosed with depression that year. It took a serious toll on her. It was probably one of the lowest and most stressful times of her life. However, luckily Alana had a great support system in her family and friends. Whenever she had a bad breakdown, she had someone she could reach out to, who could help Alana through it.

Alana Hayes’s Mantra of Living Life

2019 was one of the hardest times of Alana’s life. It was post-college and she had just moved back home after living on her own abroad for about a year. Alana Hayes was struggling with finding a job and dealing with mental health. She was diagnosed with depression that year. It was probably one of the lowest times of her life. However, luckily Alana had a great support system in her family and friends. Whenever she had a bad breakdown, she had someone she could reach out to, who could help Alana through it.

Responding to the question of ‘Lesson learnt in life’ Alana Hayes said

What lessons haven’t I learned?

1) Patience is really hard.

“I’ve never been known for being patient and the last few years have really put my patience to the ultimate test and some days it was frustrating like to the point where I wanted to pull out my hair, but like it or not I’ve not only learned patience, but also learned what a necessary life skill it is to have.”

2) Give yourself a break.

“I think this is probably the most difficult thing to learn especially in todays world and in American culture where it’s all about go go go, achieve achieve achieve, work work work all the time. Everything is a rat race and when we can’t keep up we have a tendency to beat ourselves up over it. I think this is made even harder when we’re dealing with personal issues like depression. Somedays I had such a difficult time getting out of bed and thinking about all the things I should be doing only made it harder and I had to learn how to give myself a break and accept that I was in a place where some days I needed to stay in bed and let myself have a break from the chaos going on inside me.

I’m a very ambitious person which I think is a good thing but sometimes when you mentally can’t deal with things thinking about all the things you need and want to do makes it impossible to do them. In the long run giving myself a break and telling myself it was okay to feel shitty sometimes and to need to stay in bed ultimately made it so much easier to get back out into the world and do all the things I want and need to do. Long story short: if you need a break give yourself one. We’re all only human and sometimes we need to put our most immediate needs first. My most immediate need was to work on mental health in order to have a healthy, functioning life and thats what I did.”

3) You get where you need to be when you need to be there.

“This kind of goes with being patient. Sometimes we feel like things should just happen for us so much faster than they do or that they should happen differently. I genuinely had my whole post college life mapped out for myself and my current life looks nothing like that plan. It was really terrifying and upsetting at first – honestly, sometimes it still is – but for the most part it’s okay. I’m nowhere near where I want to be but I’m getting there and I’ve learned so much about myself and what I’m capable of. If my life looked the way I planned for it to post college then I never would have started a website and I wouldn’t be working on an album right now.

I’ve discovered so many surprising things about myself. I’m not anything like the person I thought I’d be, but I think I’m on my way to something better than what I imagined for myself then and it’s taken me a lot longer than I would have liked but we get where we need to be when we need to be there. I stand by that statement completely.”

Moreover, you can find her on Instagram, TikTok, Pinterest, Twitter and Tumblr all under @womanasriot
You can find her at: https://womanasriot.com/about/
In case, if you want to help fund her album, you can via: https://www.gofundme.com/f/help-alana-create-an-album