Essays

Excerpts from My Marginalia in Anne Sexton’s The Complete Poems

Written while hospitalized in KU Medical Center’s psychiatric unit in June 2015. It’s nothing super interesting, but it’s part of my life and my experience. It’s pretty cogent, all things considered. I left out all the parts where I said my father was the devil.

—

A psychopath is simply one who structures the world in such a way that control and containment and order and binaries and easy answers prevail. An empath is simply one who for whom prevailing universal ideas of love dominate.

—

Use words people understand.

—

Explosive and dysfunctional families are the ones in which tension and brilliance come together in such a way that empaths can be created.

—

Take breaks. Hydrate. Move slowly.

—

Names and faces are hard to remember.

—

Every iteration is true but distinct as a dual-state metaphor. Examples: Love is love. Is = Is = Is. People who talk in tongues are actually the ones waking up between these two states.

—

Empaths are everywhere. They get activated in situations by other empaths but also by psychopaths.

—

Use plain language during activated periods.

—

Knowing how to meet someone on their own level is how to keep them safe.

—

Are you infinite? Still, the same journey.

—

Take whatever you can in the process of becoming and you will get what you need. Ask for what you need and you will get something different.

—

Waves of empaths = people get charged up all at once while things are moving in the right direction in the world.

—

False prophets in poetry are not empaths.

—

All speech is code. The erratic voice is the always-seeking voice iterating over a larger sense.

—

You can be an empath and do great harm. Both the empaths who harm and the ones who are harmed are bringing about change.

—

Call-out / call-in culture. Bring all voices in.

—

True speech parts seas.

—

Know your empath legacy.

—

Strife. There will always be lots of it. Talk through it. Write through it. Trust when to stop engaging and when to reengage.

—

Avoid people who call themselves healer or shaman.

—

Poems and where they go are a test of the testimony.

—

You will confuse any traditional workplace.

—

Hate is the false avatar of love.

—

In other cultures, to be means to emerge.

—

A word is a word when a word is needed.

—

The difficulties, all of them, are important to the journey.

—

Do before thinking everything you need to do to get where you are going.

—

What encourages a crisis is part of the path presented.

—

Strong times of need require strong signals.

—

What words emerge from journey, crisis, sojourn?

—

Revelations close to death

—

A condition by any other name is still a condition.

—

Withhold

Crisis of God / of whole

—

We become the core crisis of our family, the tension that wants to resolve.

—

The book of poems is the breath.

—

People will say definitely do something.

—

Pain is necessary for our suffering parts to come into alignment.

—

What leads to love: hard work, dedication, and sacrifice, but also support, forgiveness, and acceptance of impermanence.

—

Even those who harm deserve forgiveness because we all harm each other and heal each other in the same moment. I love Jon even though he harmed me some of the time and healed me other times. I love Jon especially because he loved me through the ways I harmed him. Neither of us wanted to stand beyond good and evil, but we do. I stand at the lips of my maker and breathe and wish him the best in this life and the next. Holy. Holy. I love you, Jon.

—

The world is five times our size.

—

Every life is equal. Everyone, even your greatest enemy, is also an angel. I have already met my enemy and can call him my best friend. I thank him for showing me the beauty of the world. Sacrifices are worth it. I love everyone now equally. I would love to spend the second half of my life inside this love, with the friends I have never known as well as I know them today.

The Devolution Will Not Be Televised

Oh, wait. The devolution. Yeah. The devolution will totally be televised. The devolution willl be all over the socials. The devolution will be on your phones and watches and all up in your earbuds.

There will be pictures of ICE cubes knocking down your fellow humans on a seven-second loop.

There will be stories of brain-dead women carrying their babies to term in respected hospitals.

There will be slow-mos of fists pumping the air, of Confederate flags entering the U.S. Capitol.

There will be queerfolk being stripped of their humanity daily, hourly, by the minute, by the second, by the millisecond, by the microsecond, by the nanosecond, by the picosecond, by the femtosecond, by the attosecond.

There will be rooms packed with people nobody wants to see as people. Also hospitals. Also boats, planes, trucks, camps, tents, cages, jails, places of torture, places of death, places of death, places of death.

Money will flow up and up like single-use plastic bags carried by a strong wind. You’ll think they’re birds. They aren’t birds. They’re bills, and they’re yours, and there goes another one, into the sky, into the white, white sky that somehow has white hands, that somehow has white eyes and a white mouth and a white mind.

Brother, the revolution has already been televised and streamed and downloaded and bootlegged and AI’d and exported and framed and staged and played and played all the way out. It went down like a sport, a sport that required sacrifice.

Brother, it started long ago. In our home state. In our hometown. In our family. In our ancestry. In our lack of reckoning. In the balls of time click-clacking away on the desk while we’re in another room pretending today is yesterday and tomorrow will be another yesterday.

Brother, the devolution was live. You missed it. We’re already living inside it.

Brother, the devolution was live. We are already the living dead.

—

In homage to Gil Scott-Heron, who wrote the song “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised.”

Plagiarus

I’m not making a case for plagiarism, but I am about to say it’s socially constructed and, like anything else, doesn’t exist outside of a specific context or suite of contexts. It wasn’t a concept until it was a concept, and then it took 1600 years or so to not only become a fully formed concept with a label attached to it but also to be addressed, though indirectly, through newly created copyright laws.

In other cultures and in other periods during Western culture, plagiarism didn’t exist, either as a word or as a concept. Writing something original meant writing something steeped in origins. Poets and writers shared lines and themes routinely, though too much imitation could lead to criticism. In one early case in Rome, in which a poet (Fidentinus) recited another poet’s work (Martial) as if it were his own, Martial wasn’t upset about his work being used without attribution. He was concerned about not being paid. He wanted the poet to buy the poems if he was going to perform them as if they were his. That’s not a bad idea. If I could sell my poems to another poet for a profit—well, of course I wouldn’t. (Or would I?)

What did Martial do in response to Fidentinus? He wrote a bunch of unflattering poems about the guy, in which he characterized him as a kidnapper—a plagiarus (ah!)—which Ben Johnson picked up on about 1500 years later in 1601 when he coined the term plagiary to denote someone who was guilty of literary theft. Copyright laws followed in England and the United States in the 1700s, which accompanied a shift in the concept of originality from something with origins to something wholly new, as well as greater distribution of mass-produced books, a larger body of folks who were profiting from creative works, and a desire for academicians to protect their writing.

Again, I’m not making the case for plagiarism, but I am interested in removing it from an ahistorical context and situating it in history because it’s something we came to, collectively, not something that simply exists and has always existed—just as mental-health diagnostic labels are something we’ve come to, collectively and often with great harm as a result, as opposed to things that exist and have always existed.

Our consciousness about things changes. We will things into being, and we’re sometimes wrong about what we think we see (and perceive as immutable and everlasting). The intersection between plagiarism and the assumption that someone who plagiarized must be mentally ill, particularly with one or more personality disorders, interests me because both the concept of plagiarism and the concept of personality disorders are socially constructed, have come into existence at different points in our history, and will continue to shift over time.

In the case of plagiarism, AI is causing such a shift right now. We’re coming into consciousness about that intersection and what it means for writing and writers. In the case of personality disorders, there are shifts as well, as there should be. They were almost removed from the DSM-5 because of the ongoing debate about whether they’re even mental illnesses. Borderline personality disorder in particular has come under much deserved scrutiny because it’s so broadly defined as to be unhelpful as a diagnostic framework, it’s fettered with gender-based bias, it’s dismissive of trauma, and it disregards the fact that borderline traits appear to be a form of delayed social development, not a personality disorder or form of mental illness.

Someone can plagiarize without being mentally ill. Someone can be a piece of shit without being mentally ill. We can talk about beliefs, attitudes, and behaviors without adding a diagnostic label, especially one we’re not qualified to use because we’re not licensed mental-health professionals. The DSM-5 has innumerable flaws and has always been the product of a colonized mindset, one that situates issues solely within individuals while ignoring larger factors such as institutionalized discrimination. It’s also led a not insignificant number of lay folks to label anyone whose behavior they don’t like with clinical terms they themselves don’t understand and outside of their historical and contemporary contexts, which in turn ends up harming everyone who embraces, lives with, or has had those diagnostic labels foisted on them, as well as perpetuating ignorance, fear, and stigma at all levels in our society.

Said another way, some things about being human are a feature, not a bug. We are kind of pieces of shit who do piece of shit stuff all the time. It’s not all Buddha nature up inside us. There’s some of that, but it’s not the whole thing. We are dark, and that darkness extends beyond mental illness. Bless our collective hearts.

Another Poet Mindfuck

Someone just left this comment on one of my pieces on Facebook:

This kind of writing has poetry and genius and many legit things to say but, I have to say, that while it may be therapeutic for you, it’s deeply disturbing for me and I don’t need that at this point in my life. Maybe you should think about that. If you see your writing as a struggle against emotional/ mental issues, maybe you should keep in mind our struggles as well and what you’re saying to us. Some kinds of therapy should be gone through with a professional trained to deal with personal hells. Rather than FB. It’s not too late to find a way of writing that’s healthier for all of us. I hope you will take this for what it is and not take it the wrong way. I feel it has to be said.

Well, he said it.

I’ve blocked him, since he doesn’t have the agency to stop reading what he states he doesn’t want to be reading.

The odd thing is, he recently solicited my work for a chapbook. He said my writing was lyrical and eloquent, and he’d love to showcase excellent work like mine in a collection he curated. What a mindfuck.

The piece he was responding to in his comment above wasn’t about death or dying. It was about life and living, and it was based on a dream, which is where a lot of my creative work originates. The piece wasn’t therapy, nor is any of my writing. It wasn’t me foisting anything on anyone or trying to make anyone uncomfortable. But I do talk about things in my poetry and prose, even in my discussion of political issues that are important to me, that aren’t always easy.

Nobody has to friend me or follow me or read me. This is my writing space, my discovery space, and a space that’s important because it allows me to connect with other people who are creative, insightful, compassionate, complicated, interesting, delightful, and more.

I don’t need anyone telling me what I should think about, write about, say, or do in this world, certainly not someone I don’t know who appears to be projecting his own issues onto me, my writing, and whatever dynamic he thinks exists between us. (There is none.)

And the mandate that I find a way of writing that’s healthier FOR ALL OF US? Please. That would be a misguided, Sisyphean task, and that’s assuming there’s an all of us who’s reading my work. (There isn’t, and he doesn’t speak for the few who do.)

T4 Centers

Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s language about people with autism in some ways parallels what Nazis said about Germans with physical disabilities and mental-health issues in 1939. Useless eaters was how the Nazis referred to this group. More than 70,000 asylum patients were killed in gas chambers called T4 centers before the death camps were in operation. These centers served as a model for the camps that were built later. Though the T4 program, as it was known, formally ended in 1941, the murders directed at this group didn’t stop. By the end of the war, 230,000 people with physical disabilities and mental-health issues had been killed between the T4 centers and the death camps.

Their gold teeth were extracted. Their brains were removed and sent to German physicians to study their “congenital idiocy.” Their ashes were sent to family members without regard for whose ashes were whose, along with notes that covered up what had happened. Murder was never the cause of death. Being gassed, often by one’s own doctor, was never the cause of death. Families were told the cause of death was something physical, unavoidable, like pneumonia or pulmonary tuberculosis. Some families weren’t notified at all and continued sending money to pay for their loved one’s expenses.

One of the main factors in deciding who lived and who died was how many hours a patient was capable of working each week. Think about that as you consider Kennedy’s comments about those with autism never holding a job or paying taxes. Think about that when you consider the implications of a database that’s tracking those with autism and potentially using information those patients and their families haven’t provided consent to use. Think about that when you decide if he’s really trying to help those who have autism or if he has darker motives, not just misguided ones.

The Nazis kept a record called The Hartheim Statistics as part of their T4 program. It was an account of the money saved by killing those 70,000 patients as opposed to maintaining their lives for one decade.

Think about that. Think about how much money this country would save if people like me didn’t exist and how little concern some people would have about our no longer existing.

Am I saying that’s where we’re headed today in America? Extermination? No. But I am saying we’re seeing the same dangerous collective mindset now, here in the United States, that we saw in the 1930s and 1940s in Germany.

People are not worthless if they don’t work or work enough or do the right work in this world. (I would argue that much of the right work to be done in this world is unpaid, and that those with physical disabilities and mental-health issues do that work in spades every day. The healing work. The loving work. The accepting work. The teaching work. The work of helping people see what it means to be human, which allows everyone to be more humane.)

People are not entries on a balance sheet or a way of saving money. We should not have treatment forced on us or be refused treatments we need. We are not things to be catalogued and monitored and followed and corralled into health camps (i.e., institutions we may never emerge from) or whatever else Kennedy conceives of. We are not participants in one big experiment that we didn’t even ask to be part of.

Kenney’s language is dangerous. His ideas are dangerous. His actions are dangerous. His power is dangerous.

The first people killed in the T4 centers were children. A father wrote to Hitler asking him to kill his deformed infant. That’s what inspired Hitler to start T4. I’ll repeat: He started with children.

We must protect our children. We must protect our adolescents. We must protect our adults. We must protect our seniors.

We must all protect each other. We must not look away.

Dana for Mayor

My day hasn’t gone as planned. I went to get lab work done early this morning only to find out the orders were never placed, which means I won’t have results in time for my appointment with the specialist who (should have) ordered them. This is the doctor who, in part, is following my cancer status, so the labs are important.

I came home to an attempted identity-theft scam that Jon and I both had to deal with immediately. Things like this are happening more frequently, and they’re harder to identify. Someone tried to hack one of my online shopping accounts just three days ago.

I commented on a story in The Salt Lake Tribune in support of a gay mayor in one of Utah’s cities. Someone else in the queer community, another Utahn, saw my comment and thought I was saying the opposite of what I was saying. Their response was to tell me that I’m attacking the mayor based on his sexuality, that I’m not being Christlike, and that I’m so ugly-looking that they’d never live in a city where I was the mayor. Humph. I have many grumpies around that set of assertions.

My Fitbit died. I have no data whatsoever, and I rely on that data for my health and mental health.

I drove half an hour each way to see my therapist, where I hoped to talk about the parts involved in my strong feelings about the SLT commenter calling me an unattractive, unkind homophobe, but the therapist forgot my appointment, which means I drove for an hour for no reason and have three exiles I need to deal with on my own now rather than in therapy. (Exiles are a type of part in the Internal Family Systems framework. It’s not ideal to be exploring them alone.)

These are all small problems in the larger scheme of things, and they’re counterbalanced by an incredible conversation and connection I had with a fellow poet today. We talked about organization, one of my favorite topics, and poetry and community and dogs and mountains. I mean, it was good stuff.

Also on the plus side, there’s my sweet dog. And my relative ability to handle all these relatively small problems. And my view of the laccolith, which I can see now that the clouds have started to dissipate or move on or whatever clouds do.

Oh, and someone ran over a raccoon in our neighborhood, so there’s also that sad occurrence. That’s another item for the negative side of today’s +/- list. I wouldn’t have known if I hadn’t been making that fruitless round-trip drive to see the therapist.

You can file this under grumpy with a lower-case g or grumpy with a capital g or dumpy if you also think I’m so unattractive you would never live in a city where I’m the mayor. The last part of that sentence was written by one of the exiles. She was called ugly by her classmates almost every day of her life from preschool until she was well into puberty. We’re working through it.

Fundamentally Defective

I got a notification from Ancestry that information about my brother had been added to the site. Of course, I followed the trail to the information because that’s what I’ve always done where my brother is concerned, even now that we’re not in contact (see Marie Howe’s poem “The Boy” for an explanation of what I’m talking about).

What I found about my brother wasn’t interesting, but there were dozens of new pieces of information linking numerous relatives on my father’s side of the family to the Civil War, where they fought for the Confederate States of America. One of them was a prisoner of war and died inside the camp where he was held.

My lips are numb. I don’t know how to process all of this. This awful history is in my family, in my epigenetics. It’s been handed down and down and down to me. This is only four generations from me.

It didn’t stop with the war. My grandparents on my father’s side were racist, as was my father. One of my most traumatizing and painful moments occurred when I was very young and witnessed my grandmother and my great aunt treating a Black woman with extreme disrespect before turning away from her and calling her a racial slur. They didn’t know I was in the room where it happened and that I saw everything they said and did to the woman.

I think that experience was more painful than the sexual abuse that occurred later. There’s an exiled part of me who’s still in that room feeling shock and terror and sadness all at once. That’s when the feeling of being part of an evil family started, of being from a family that was more monster than human. It started that day, not the day my father began abusing me. What he did only reified those feelings, setting them like grout in tile that’s already been laid.

Those are the feelings I would eventually turn inward on myself, believing that I was a monster, that I was evil. Or, put a more sanitized way, that I was fundamentally defective. Fundamentally meaning essentially, systemically, absolutely, irreparably flawed.

It wasn’t just my father who made me feel that way. It was his whole side of the family. I was of them. I was of all of them. Who they were and what they did ripped through me like lead bullets, like death, like the only thing worse than death, which is pure hatred.

Family can bite me. That half of my family can bite me.

Selves and Others

Richard Schwartz, creator of the Internal Family Systems model, says some people are more easily activated in their relationships because they’re more dependent on those relationships to heal the most wounded parts of themselves. One of the goals of IFS is for folks to focus more on themselves for healing and less on others—that is, cultivating secure attachment with our internal parts.

I would add that this goes back to attachment traumas early in life. In my case, I have insecure attachment, which means I had my needs met some of the time but not consistently. There’s a lot more to it than that, but this brief explanation suffices for the purpose of this post. Having folks around me who have secure attachment is helpful. Having folks around me with insecure, avoidant, or disorganized attachment isn’t helpful. That’s because I haven’t developed secure attachment yet. IFS is one way to address that internally so I can bring my own secure attachment to my relationships with others.

Outside of IFS, being around those with secure attachment is the best way to learn secure attachment. This can happen over the course of about five years, for example, if someone with insecure attachment is in a relationship with someone who has secure attachment. The problem is only a subset of adults have secure attachment, and those with attachment trauma are often in relationships with partners who have attachment trauma. Pairings between those with insecure attachment and those with avoidant attachment are common, as is the case in my marriage. (My husband has avoidant attachment.)

The pandemic and moving to a rural area have made it even more difficult to interact with those who have secure attachment. I no longer work in a workplace, and I’m not around people on a regular basis. I spend more time with horses, cows, and birds than with human beings.

I need to work out how all of this maps onto the way I navigate and experience poetry spaces both real and virtual. Coupled with traumas I’ve experienced in poetry, the prevalence of insecure attachment styles among poets concerns me, especially when it’s not examined and when certain behaviors occur as a result, including those I witness that are directed at others and those that are specifically directed at me.

Questions I’m going to be asking myself as I work on IFS with a therapist and attempt to be less activated in my relationships with poetry and poets include: how can the behavior of a poet or group of poets have less of an emotional effect on me, how can I more effectively address issues I see in the poetry community in ways that feel less emotional, how do I cultivate relationships with poets who are aware of their own attachment styles and are also working toward or already have secure attachment, how do I measure progress to assess whether my efforts are working, and what decisions do I make if I don’t make progress (e.g., where else can I practice relating to others in ways that are less activating, how can I limit my exposure to interactions that aren’t helping me heal)?

I’m also not a fan of endogenous social networks, which I’m certain stems from my early traumas. I’ve always felt safer in exogenous networks where most of my friends and connections don’t know one another. You can’t get much more endogenous than the poetry community, where everyone seems to know everyone else and gossip runs rampant, especially in the social-media age. That’s a different issue in some ways, but developing greater security in my attachment style should help me navigate tighter social networks.

If things work out with this therapist, we’ll also be doing IFS-informed EMDR work. Or maybe it’s EMDR-informed IFS work. Either way, the work will address complex trauma as well as parts and attachment style. All of this matters: these intersections of self and self, of self and other, of self and community.

On Poetry and Healing

I don’t approach poems as therapy. I just come to them as myself.

Poems allow us to reclaim our stories, understand trauma and survival, realize that growth and healing are possible, lessen shame and embarrassment, and give us a sense of belonging.

The hippocampus, which situates our memories in time, doesn’t function properly under stress or during trauma. My poems are an external mechanism for placing traumatic events in time, which keeps them from feeling never-ending and ever-present. I think of it as a kind of assistive technology, like a keyboard for my dyslexia or glasses for my farsightedness.

Poets use the beauty intrinsic to poetry to shape their experiences and change the way they live in the mind and body. What’s made is more than noise. It’s a way of singing through pain or, as Orr says, allows us to order the disorder that’s in and around us, that’s intrinsic to the world we live in.

I see great value in dreams and writing about them, not only because dreams are where we do unfiltered processing of our experiences without the imposition of an artificial sense of time or an enforced rigid inner governance but also because we can more freely make leaps when talking about dreams, since that’s exactly what dreams do. Injecting a bit of the surreal into the poem can help us bring our dream wisdom into our waking lives—and therein lies not just surviving, but the ongoing work of healing.

Poetry’s concision and beauty allow me, as a writer and reader, to enter into myriad experiences—some like mine and some unlike mine—and to see common human impulses at work. A collective psyche emerges—a collective conscience and collective unconscious—as a backdrop to the individual experience. Poetry has taught me a great deal about my own psyche, my own mind, my own impulses, and my own needs. But it’s also contextualized all of that within a larger environment and larger swaths of time than a single human timespan. Poetry approaches the archetypal, the mythical, the things that lie deep in our ancestry: things we can’t, and shouldn’t, ignore if we’re going to survive on this planet and help this planet survive.

Stephan Torre says that, for him “… writing comes when it must, when it’s too hard to hold in the joy or grief without blurting it out.” I love that way of approaching poetry, but I personally don’t wait until the point of bursting. I try to do the work every day of cultivating making music out of noise, as Kim Addonizio writes in her poem “Therapy.”

Gregory Orr talks about something similar, which is that the act of writing a poem gives the poet more control than they had at the time of the traumatic event they’re writing about, which in itself is empowering and healing.

And then there’s all this beauty intrinsic to poetry, which the poet uses to shape the experience and move it into a different part of the mind and body. What’s made is more than noise. It’s a way of singing through pain or, as Orr says, allowing us to order the disorder that’s in and around us, that’s intrinsic to the world we live in.

Poems as Time-Stamps

During Saturday’s Utah Poetry Festival panel discussion on Poetry As Survival, if there’s time, I’d like to talk about why trauma is a wound of the present and how poetry (and other forms of art) can help with processing those wounds.

One of the reasons trauma from the past plays such a role in the present is because our brains don’t time-stamp traumatic events properly. The hippocampus, which is responsible for encoding and storing dates for our memories, can’t do so when levels of arousal or stress are too high. Instead, memories are recorded in great detail but without a time-stamp associated with them. That’s why there’s an always-ness to traumatic memories, an endlessness, a nowness.

The first way poetry addresses this issue is by allowing us to move time around as we write. As Gregory Orr says, this gives us more control over a situation we may have had little or no control over when it was happening, which in itself is empowering. The very act of writing about the experience is an act of survival. But the act of writing also gives us a past, a present, and a future—that is, the sense of time and its passing that’s missing in our encoded memories about what happened.

Even if we write about an experience in the present tense, the act of putting that experience in writing, moving it from the body to the page, from feeling to language, helps us do the time-stamping necessary to process what we’ve lived through. That’s what I believe anyway, as a poet who lives with trauma but who’s not a psychologist or neuroscientist.

The second way I believe poetry is helpful is that it serves as a creative historical record that we can revisit anytime we want and reinforce what we’re learning as we heal. I realized this last fall when I was looking through my older poems. Together, they serve as a network of external time-stamps that reinforce an “I am here” as opposed to “I am still there” message. I can read my poems and situate them in time in a way that helps me make sense of my past and my life as a whole. This thing happened. Here is when it happened. Here is when I wrote about it. A year ago. A decade ago. A week ago. Not now.

And that’s the point of time-stamping: to know what was then and what is now, as well as what isn’t now.

I’ve had similar experiences when I look at photos I’ve taken, but the time-stamping isn’t as strong for me as it is with poetry, probably because I just point at things and click. I don’t put artful effort into my photos the way I do with my poems. I’m also not stepping into parts of my life or into the world itself in photos the way I do—or the way I hope to—when I write a poem.

I love language in ways I can’t properly articulate. I’m dyslexic and had extreme difficulty with reading and writing when I was young. It was poetry that allowed me to enter into language, not dull language but magical language that gave me access to worlds outside my family, my home, my town, and what happened there. I have a strong time-stamp associated with the first real poem I read. It was in a children’s book tucked on a shelf in what was once my sister’s room, but it wasn’t a nursery rhyme. I found it, and I loved it, and it was mine. I know where I stood when I read it, how the paper felt, what it did in six lines, and how I came alive reading it. Fully alive. Fully present. I had no idea at the time what a gift the poem would be or how it would shape my life and my healing.

For me, healing is a process and there will always be an ongoing-ness to it. But the poems I write are essential parts of my mind at this point, externalizations of what my hippocampus can’t do as readily as someone who hasn’t experienced trauma. I hope I also create beauty, at least sometimes, in and through my writing.

I’ll close by saying that I’m not talking about poetry as therapy. I approach poetry as an art, and I also recognize its healing powers, which for me are rooted in psychology, neuroscience, philosophy, and spirituality.