For the Birds: Full moon anti-pep talk
swift letters for busy people - #9
Thanks for being here! Let’s try something new.
You remember too much,
my mother said to me recently.
Why hold onto all that? And I said,
Where can I put it down?~Anne Carson, “The Glass Essay”
It did not happen for a reason.
I am not over it.
I am not thankful for what I have.
I may die with this wound.
It could not be worse.
Strength is overrated.
I despise positivity.
It will not be okay.
I will not move on.
I’m as sad as I should be.
It was not for the best.
You will never know how I feel.
Dear reader,
Whatever the thing is: Be shitty about it. Be bad. Bring your poor attitude to the page and let it bleed.
I’m serious.
I felt scared (literally fearful; tiger-stalked) writing those sentences up there, wondering how it would feel to live on the other side of having written them, let alone saying them out loud. (As if something awful might happen as a result.)
I don’t even fully believe all of them. Of course I’ll move on, have.
But some of them? Yes, some of them feel like true sentences to me. Most.
More than truth or fiction, I wanted to see what it would feel like to write certain things down.
To be ungrateful.
To be upset and pointed.
To undrench myself with kindness—to dry that shit up for at least one afternoon.
To give myself unconditional permission to be conditional.
To let the page be a safe place for experimenting with my whole self.
I am a kind, compassionate person.
I work very hard to be this way, especially socially / interpersonally.
I have cultivated nuanced empathy over many years of hard personal & professional work.
All of these things are true about me.
All of these things remain true about me no matter how hostile or immature I feel sometimes.
Are hostility and immaturity ever valuable?
I don’t care what the right answer is. If it’s inside me, some part of it must contain worth.
So, too, the anger. And the rage, and the way fuck off remains poised on my lips, more often than you might guess. More often than my “brand” suggests.
Because I work hard to keep fuck off just this side of the cusp, and to remember that my actions and words have real impact on other people’s days.
I like that about myself—the working and remembering, the attentiveness.
But it makes me tired, too.
And I’m curious about the less behaved stuff.
What if I like misbehavior sometimes?
What if I see value in disrespectfulness?
What if anger, of all the feelings I can identify, is sometimes the most clarifying one for me?
Bless the clarity, wherever it comes from.
(Also, it’s true. My anger is so very, very clear.)
Dear reader,
What does your disrespect have to say?
How does your creativity want to misbehave this season?
What are you terrified to put into words on the page?
What if you put it there anyway?
I hope you’ll let me know. But first of all, I hope you’ll let yourself find out.
Wow. "I like that about myself—the working and remembering, the attentiveness. But it makes me tired, too." Yes. I work so hard at "conscious communication" and then at times, like in my premenstrual week or just when a lot is bubbling up emotionally, the word "fuck" comes out more and I notice how uncomfortable it makes those around me. Fascinating. I love this invitation to explore in our writing. I truly do believe there is worth in all these things. My anger shows me where my boundaries lie.
Wow, that's a powerful and challenging practice, and one I'm going to have to work with over time. But I have some initial reactions, so I'll jot them down now.
I have tended to censor a lot of my more negative emotions (even while being deeply suspicious of the emphasis on positivity/gratitude in pop psychology). There are a few reasons for this. One is that I'm very aware of my privilege: I'm an able-bodied, white, cis-het, English-as-a-first-language man who grew up with middle-class education and opportunities. Apart from being probably neurodivergent and having red hair, I'm about as un-oppressed as it's possible to be--so anything that's wrong in my life must be my own damn fault. And whatever's wrong in my life is trivial compared to what others endure. What right do I have to complain?
But I'm starting to dismantle that way of thinking. First of all, I'm human--which means I have known sickness and injury and loss, and I will know old age and death. I know fatigue--wow, do I know fatigue.
Also, the very social structures that give meaning to the privilege I mentioned above are inherently oppressive--and I'm coming to understand that oppressive systems suck, even for those they privilege. I'm angry and hurt because I can see and empathise with what these systems do to others (especially in the current political climate), and I'm scared because I know that no-one is safe, including me.
Also, I'm starting to realise that some of the stuff that happened in my childhood really sucked. No, I didn't experience horrendous abuse or neglect, but I was repeatedly torn away from people I loved, and places that I considered home. I lost a language (English wasn't my only first language, I learned Malay at the same time).
Anyway, time to put a lid on this; my inner critic is screaming at me that I shouldn't be writing any of this, much less in a comment on someone else's post, it's boring and self-indulgent, and I should delete it! But in the spirit of what you wrote, about how scary it is to write what you shouldn't, I'm going to leave it! (though of course I'm happy to delete at your request)