Writing used to be my way of working through things in order to discover beauty, complexity, and meaning, as well as what escapes meaning, to feel those textures and colors the body and mind together send to the surface like koi in a pond waiting to be fed. All those little mouths mouthing at once. All those fat bodies and watery fins. So much movement but not without pattern, like music.

Writing used to be my music, its notes distributed like lilypads the bodymind somehow reads through touch, for that’s what language is. Something we touch, not something we see. Something we touch and hear.

I worked hard to learn how to write despite my dyslexia. To write, to read, to understand. I wanted into that world because of what poems could do.

              The fog comes
              on little cat feet.

If fog could be a cat, I could be anything in language, not what I was in my home. I didn’t have to be that child or a child at all. I could be something that made sense or was so far beyond sense that sense wouldn’t matter anymore. I wanted to do that with language, to unlock its magic. It took decades, but I did. I think I did.

I’ve come to identify with being a poet and writer, with sitting down at my desk and writing every day. I told people poetry was everywhere, always, like a faucet you can just open up and there it is.

I don’t feel like that anymore. I open the tap and there’s nothing. People are cruel. I’ve encountered more cruelty in the past three years, which is when I started writing again, than in the other twenty years of writing combined, with the exception of some awful things that went down in the poetry community in 2015. I’ve been personally threatened, accused of appropriating the term CPTSD (as if my trauma isn’t real), attacked both for not really being neuroatypical (based on how I appear) and for using the neurotype framework, told nobody should listen to me because I have bipolar, that I’m morally unclean, that my writing is doing harm, and more.

That’s on top of the more general comments people have made in response to my writing: things like everyone who has a mental-health label should be round up and forcibly removed from Utah or queer people are evil and satanic.

               It sits looking
              over harbor and city

These comments are like gargoyles draining the life from my writing and from me as a person. They go well beyond discourse. They’re attacks. They’re erasures. They’re discriminatory. They’re scary.

They’re what passes for engagement these days. We’re all seeing comments like this day in and day out, especially on social media. Some of us are participating in it in our own ways. Most if not all of us are negatively affected by it. Even outlets that are designed to give us a voice can end up sending us to slaughter with every piece of ours they publish. For civil discourse? For freedom of speech? Or for clicks, shares, page views, and increased reach? If an outlet wants to keep you angry at those who also trying to speak to the larger issues in our culture, our country, and our communities rather than catalyzing you to also speak and act in response to those larger issues in your own way, ask yourself what that outlet’s motives are and what effect the infighting it generates has on anyone’s ability to advocate for anything—or even to survive what’s become increasingly difficult to survive.

How is a writer who, for years, wrote for some of the largest medical organizations and research universities in the country, as well as an esteemed consortium comprised of the top medical and research centers, in this position? Who’s routinely had work in competitive literary journals and with well-regarded indy presses? Some of this is coming from social media and website comment threads and is in response to my essays and opinion pieces. Some of it’s happening with friends on Facebook, namely people who read my work and then project things onto me so that, when I am not what they think I am or what they want me to be to them, they can and sometimes do become irate, belittling me and my poetry.

This is how things are now. And they’re going to get worse. But I don’t have to keep saying OK to it. I’ve already started saying none of this is OK. Now, I’m grieving on many levels—what poetry and writing can and can’t be, what kinds of audiences it can and can’t have, what the writing community and our communities in general are and aren’t—and I’m waiting for the faucet to flow again. That may be the only faith I have left in me. I believe I can find my way back to poetry, and poetry can find its way back to me. I have to believe this to survive.

              on silent haunches
              and then moves on.

May the fog that obscures poetry move on. May the fog that keeps us from seeing each other move on. May the fog that blankets our entire country move on. Let it move on. Let it move on.

—

I appreciate my friends on Facebook who feel their way through the world using language and take the time to communicate thoughtfully. You are the antithesis to much of what passes for communication these days.

The poem used in this essay is “The Fog,” by Carl Sandburg. It is in the public domain.