When change comes, go with it
if you want to create, best get to it, yeah?
Press play to hear me read this post in my own voice.
The skies do it all the time, all day long, all night through, without request, apology, or shame. I’m not saying I’m the sky exactly, but maybe I’m a sky? And as such, as skies are freely, irreverently, inconveniently, unceremoniously allowed (expected, even) to do—I change. I change directions, moods, interests, expectations, and obsessions.
Unexpectedly, and, lately, in the most gorgeous and glorious ways. Which is quite a welcome development, given all I’ve been through to arrive here, wherever and whatever that means.
My whole life, since I first picked up a crayon, then a pencil, then multicolored gel pens (with glitter and fruity scents), then Bic after Bic until finally now, when I can afford the very best black pens (Pilot G-2), I have worshiped the art of writing. I wrote poetry beginning at age nine, in spiral bound notebooks, in perfect Catholic school girl cursive, about mermaids and haunted islands, about tangerine sunsets, and the eye of an eagle awaiting a storm.
Everything, the most beautiful things about life and feeling, for me had to be experienced to the fullest in order to be able to capture them in words. The feel of the pen in my hand was every feeling I ever had, every fantasy and hope and prayer. It was visceral. It still is. No matter what I write about, I pour my heart and soul into it.
My recovery from alcohol addiction found me more than three years ago, at a time when I wasn’t expecting it. Even though, by then, we had lost family members to addictions that consumed them. Somehow, somewhere in my mixed up brain, I identified myself as someone who also needed help. I was lucky. I asked for it. And I came to my own rescue. And here’s the thing about that: when you show up for you, it opens some kind of secret passageway for others to show up for you, too. I don’t know how it works or why, but it does.
You can trust that. Sometimes I cannot believe I trusted that. That I trusted myself enough to stop drinking. My faith at that time was in drinking as much (if not more… okay, maybe probably definitely more) as in myself. It’s a hell of a thing to rip yourself away from. For an alcoholic, booze is religion. Wine is a way to worship, albeit at an altar so dark you blackout in prayer.
The thing about writing is that you have to trust yourself. You have to be willing to put down the goddamn words, and hate them. Without hating yourself.
When I put down drinking, all the ways I hated myself came rushing forward like a tornado. I’ve heard tornadoes make a sound like a freight train as they tear across the landscape. I have never lived through a tornado, but I can tell you this: the ways I hated myself were loud like a freight train bearing down. I was used to drinking myself out of the bind. The impossible bind of not wanting to hate myself, but not believing I could stop the train.
Suffice it to say, I tied myself to the tracks most nights.
But now, I’m here and to be honest with you, you who I adore and cherish, I’m better than ever. Than. Ever! I never blackout. I’m never hungover. And now that I’m mercifully out of the woods recovering from my hysterectomy, I never bleed. I never cramp. I sleep like a goddamn mutherfucking rock. There are no words to describe this kind of freedom. Freedom from my formerly battered self. Freedom from my demons. Freedom from so many of the physical tortures of womanhood.
Freedom to write what I want to write when I want to write it. This is an ecstatic time for me. I have not felt so in love with writing since I was writing my book of poetry and prose, Luminae. I was so immersed then, in that kind of expression. It was a beautiful time, now long since past, when Instagram housed poets and we wrote our tortured souls out loud. And loved on each other. Praised and promoted each other. It was like a dream for me. a person who had never known a college life without motherhood on the other hip all the time. I was on Wordpress everyday, roaming the literary halls, connecting with other strange creatures, who were just as fucked up and driven as me.
This is a free time for me like I’ve never known before, ever, in my life. To be as free as that little kiddo writing her poems in watermelon gel pens, but grown into a full fledged functioning woman.
Perhaps this sounds like a lot of throat clearing, right. Get to the point, the point being I’m alive and all tangled up in the poetry and prose I’ve had a love affair with since forever, but which I was disinclined for whatever reason to touch while I was focusing every bit of my energy on getting better, getting clean, staying sober.
But the thing is, you have been with me all along, even if you are new to my writing now. I’m always, and have always been, writing for you. Morphing and changing and turning from pink sunrise to thunderous charcoal cloud, moods and scars and twilight and dawn, all for you. So that I could bring this moment, these words, for whatever they may be worth, in my little mouth, and lay them at your feet.
Will it be okay to bring poetry here, some parts of the me I used to be here, to my healing space, to this sacred place where I’m more healed than broken now. Where I’m healthy and getting shit together now.
I’m asking you, but I’m telling you, too.
Because I’m afraid we’ve been conditioned to believe that an addict is busted-up and worthless, and sobriety washes us clean. And I’m afraid we’ve been—I’ve been—under the false impression that sickness makes a writer endlessly fascinating, and some kind of fake purity, some amount of tips and listicles about living a certain kind of way, makes her a commodity. Sellable. A poster child, a monolith, a select kind of someone who can be collected, distributed, multiplied, cloned.
But what I envision is a creatively untamed place. A place where one woman can be every side of herself. Can be sick and healthy, young and old, sensual and strong, intimate and expansive.
Where one woman can be every sky.
And take on whatever shade, whatever shape, on whatever day, that means.
Poetry was my greatest love, and I fear it. It sounds innocent enough, a poem, but there are poets and poems that (who) have cut me so deep and wide open that I was revealed to myself as someone I barely knew I was, or had the capacity to hold.
That’s a tall order, yeah? But here’s what I’m doing. I’m writing entirely mediocre, off the cuff, early morning poems every morning. And I am enjoying it so much more than algorithms would like to allow. It’s slow, it’s quiet, it’s honest the way a flower in an empty room in a single slice of fading sunlight, is honest. Bare. Raw. Unkempt and unpolished.
But me.
You can follow along with my morning poems if you would like, here on Substack Notes. (You will need the Substack app if you are not a member of Substack.)
Here is morning poems number six. I’ll give you a little reading, it’s super short. I do not pre-plan or draft them. I wake up, and write. And I always think nothing at all will come, but then something does.
And isn’t this what our whole life is like? is for?
I love a quiet darkened house
bare feet cool on hardwood floors
in the morning
in the spring.
In the huddled hush, in the flowering air
just beginning to stir
nothing but aliveness exists.
A new bird alone on a high rise wire.
Poised, ready.
But not yet, baby love,
not yet.
•
Coffee in one hand, hot, black, and big as your head,
pen in the other—Pilot G-2.
If heaven were a place, a parallel plane in perpetuity,
this is the way in.
This is the golden key:
stillness. breath. submission.
My wild winged Muse
head low, blue
mountain
eyes,
down on
one knee.
Thank you so much for sharing, Josh!
Yup.