Something's coming

CWs: suicide, mental health

It isn’t that I believe our new administration’s got angelic superpowers, or anything (here, read this, by Claude McKay. This feels pretty accurate to my America-feelings right now)– though it’s lovely to feel even a twinge of that old uncomplicated pride again. But still, something about today. The fresh, light snow on the ground and rare Chicago winter sun blazing it up. Or that we’re entering the final 10 days of January, which is the turning point into February, which is the turning point into March, into spring. 

Something about the conversation my husband and I finally had this weekend, and how after it, my daily headaches have just stopped. Or about the Tarot spread from last night. Death, Tower, 10 of wands. Change, upheaval, and nearing completion. Something’s coming. (Edited to add: it feels like this Clifton poem. That is what it feels like!!)

This sparkly sense of incipient arrival brought me back here to this page, after months away. Summer was hard. Fall was hard. Winter has been hard. Finally in fall, I started finding the thread of poetry again, and tugging at it, and following it, to where now I’m almost fully in poetry’s meadow, and it’s almost fully shining its light on me. And now it’s all a little less hard.

Can I explain why it was hard, though? For many of the same reasons as you, I’m sure; and perhaps for some different reasons too. Getting furloughed. Becoming a sudden stay-at-home mom who really had to stay at home. Drinking more. Quitting drinking. Covid not quitting at all. Getting un-furloughed after deciding to help my parents with their business, and ending up with 2 half-time jobs, neither of which have anything to do with the other.

Fall came. Cold came. I turned 40. We decided almost certainly that we aren’t having a second child. I got Henry into daycare, which is incredible for him, and for me – but the pressure of less time together means his tantrums and 2-year-old stubbornness can be even tougher. We skipped holidays with my family. I thought of suicide on Christmas this year. Not for anything specific. Not because I missed my family, not exactly. Just, the hole that is never filled was not covered in its usual branches of distraction– neither by wine and cider, nor by the business of time with my family—and I fell in. I was lonely. I was sad. I felt old. I have no book. I have chronic migraine. I also discovered that part of that unfillable hole might be that I have undiagnosed ADHD, and I’ve begun to see the extent of my executive dysfunction in a cool, clinical light. It can be exhausting, to feel so lit up, to see old things about myself as new, over and over.

And I don’t take this sentence lightly: mostly, it was hard because I’d forgotten that poetry overarches. That it can become the meadow and the sky. 

I decided to remember. I have taken more one-off poetry workshops & joined more generative groups than I can count, this month. I’ve read more poetry than I have in a long time. I’ve written more poems than I have for years. I’m joining essay workshops, too, to finally write the poetry-adjacent nonfiction prose I’ve wanted to write for so long.

Can we say this is one unequivocal good given us during the time of Covid? The zoom writing workshop, letting us work and play no matter how bereft our own towns are of literary culture (and even when we have young children, disabilities, or other realities that mean it’s difficult to leave home to partake in said culture)?

My intention this new year, which in some ways, for so many of us, begins today, is to bathe myself in process. So much of my halting way forward in my writing life is due to my battling with the success paradigm. 

Would be easy to have that paradigm become invisible if I fit into it better. But since I don’t (for whatever reason, no one has wanted to publish Live oak nearly on fire, no matter how many times it’s come close), it just squats over my psyche and makes me feel like shit. I’ve got to duck out from under it. Go wander in the meadow where the sky is instead made of poetry. 

I would like it if I could show you the results of this new intention to bathe myself in process, because I want to share my writing. But I hope that how the sharing happens – through which channels, with which letterheads -- doesn’t become too fraught, or too important. I will have 3 poems published soon, one in Saw Palm and two in Flyway, and I will be sure to let you know when they’re released.

As a closing gift, here is what sustained me this morning. Reading this essay, on that pesky success paradigm and what literature is for, healed small parts of my achievement-wound, my impostor-wound, my not-enough wound. I hope it heals you too.