Notabilia

Pill Fight

Because Thanksgiving somehow marks the start of the new year for me, I spent part of the day doing what people do as they move from the old year to the new one: creating a schedule for the thirty-three vitamins and supplements and five medications I take.

Half of what I take interacts with one or more of the other things I take, so putting this schedule together feels like getting a poetry manuscript in the right order. It’s also like doing calculus, which I vaguely remember. Math was always fun and games for me until the answer invariably came out wrong and I had to start all over.

I have diagrams with things that are crossed out, things I’ve moved multiple times, pictures I’ve drawn of pills fighting with each other, little swords in their little pill hands. My floor, covered in sticky notes, has been transformed into a pink-paper sea of faded, flattened blossoms, each a failed attempt to meet every substance’s needs without compromising any other substance’s needs or my needs, which is the whole point of this undertaking. I have to be careful about how and when and why I introduce new substances to the watery admixture that is me.

I have a bunch of tabs about chemical interactions open on my computer. I have a brand-new Trello board full of notes. I’m very close to writing a raggedy-edged poem ranting about pills and people in the style of Charles Bukowski.

The Trello board has a white-stucco background depicting stairs leading to a colonnade whose immersive columns rise all around me, or so it seems, like bleached bones. I chose the photo for all my boards related to my health. It makes me feel safe somehow, like I’m inside my own body, which is at once dead and also impenetrably strong. It’s almost like one of the liminal spaces in my dreams, but I never futz with pills in my dreams or boluses I empty under my tongue or sticky fluid made from other people’s plasma that I absorb under the skin through needles I jab into my upper arms. I’m too busy running in my dreams or flying or falling. Unless I’m in the grotto. I could stay in the grotto forever, and I will if we get to choose where we go next, once the pills stop working and the cathedral of the body collapses and someone burns me like a banned book, like a bra, or maybe like a flag.

Coerced Treatment

Matthew Yglesias today, on the heels of the July 24 executive order and its implementation in states like Utah: … there is a non-trivial population of chronically homeless people who suffer from addiction and other illnesses who probably should be coerced into treatment.

This is my red line, and it’s one of the areas in which I’m most in alignment with Mad In America: Coercive treatment isn’t treatment. It’s often abuse that takes myriad forms, and that abuse can happen even in something as short as a three-day hold. I know because it’s happened to me, but I’m not using inductive reasoning here. There’s data from studies and accounts from those with lived experience with mental-health issues that backs up my claims about forced treatment being harmful.

There’s also what I saw as a child in the psychiatric hospital where my mother worked as a nurse. And there’s my mother and the treatments that were forced on her and nearly killed her.

I’m not saying Matthew Yglesias is a terrible journalist or human being. I’m saying he doesn’t know what he’s saying. This is privilege at work, the privilege of not knowing and not having to know about these kinds of issues and experiences, which results in his slipping an incredibly dangerous statement into a longer piece about whether prisons have replaced mental hospitals. I’m not talking about the piece as a whole. I’m talking about that statement because it matters. He can’t even commit to it, as evidenced by that probably. Probably should. Probably should be. Probably should be coerced.

Yglesias probably. Probably should. Probably should be coerced away from privilege. Oh, wait. We would never coerce anyone in that way or in any way unless we don’t see them as fully human and therefore entitled to the same human rights as everyone else, would we? Link in comments.

Assertions

I came across a thread today from ten years ago. It’s about the poet who sexually assaulted me. I’d never seen the thread before or the assertions it contains. I want to be very clear about something: I never retracted or changed my story. The essay that was slated to run in VIDA did not run because another poet divulged the name of the poet who sexually assaulted me to one of the publication’s editors, and that compromised me as well as VIDA. The piece did not name or otherwise identify the poet in question, which was a requirement for the essays in that series.

I have since published that essay and made it publicly available. It took me ten years to do so after what happened. I’ll link to it in the comments.

The thread I saw sickens me even now, a decade later. I don’t have words to describe how atrocious it is. It reminds me why I left poetry in the first place. It wasn’t just because of the sexual assault. It was because of how poets, in particular women poets, responded to the situation.

The poetry community terrifies and horrifies me.

Apathy

Last year, I was talking to someone who told me one of their co-workers sexually assaulted their friend. I asked how she could keep working with that individual.

He didn’t do it to me, she replied.

I think about that interaction all the time, what it encapsulates, what it enables. Monsters are only monstrous when we remain silent, when we go along, when we allow them to continue doing what they’re doing.

It’s the apaths who will destroy this country more than the monsters themselves. Too many of us are apaths. Some of it stems from conditioning, from learned helplessness, and from systems that tell us to remain silent (like those in place here in Utah). I think those folks can change.

Some of it’s from emotional indifference and a lack of concern for others’ suffering. I’m not sure those folks can change. They tend to fall in line with whatever’s happening around them, which is why it’s important for those who lead to be ethical and compassionate.

In that same conversation last year, I explained why I was speaking up about an issue that was important to me. The woman suggested I not say anything at all.

Of course she did.

I didn’t listen. Of course I didn’t.

Whole in Your Wholeness

Sometimes, you travel somewhere and leave something behind: the body of your pain, which is taken into so many mouths and carried into the air and consumed and changed and spread until it becomes one with earth, water, air, and fire. Until it transmogrifies, and you think finally, finally, because you’re ready to let it go. You wanted to let it go a long time ago but now you can, so you do, and your doing becomes something done, something you did, have done, as if the past in all its verb forms exists independent of the present, as if you exist now and only now. And right now, you do. That’s exactly what you do. You are here, sometimes, whole and aware of your wholeness. Say hello to who you are.

Called to Serve

When Sandra Cisneros spoke at the Desert Nights, Rising Stars Writing Conference yesterday, I felt like every poet and writer in the audience was being called to do our best and be our best as creators and as human beings. I felt a sense of purpose and responsibility, the way our country’s leaders used to make me feel when I listened to their most inspiring speeches. I haven’t felt that way in a long time, and I’ve never felt that way as a poet: encouraged to live and write thoughtfully, mindfully, with presence, and with clarity.

Doffered

Meanwhile, locals are sharing a hate flag—you know the one—in Facebook comments on a news story about someone here who’s trans, including one made by arranging four pride flags in a particular way. Tell me two poets misgendering Andrea Gibson over and over at a local literary event is no big deal, especially in this larger context. Tell me I need to be more forgiving. To forget. To get over it, all of it. To at least raise my concerns quietly, privately, and with decorum and grace. Tell me I’m the problem. Tell me.

Quiet never got anyone anywhere other than silenced, gone, or dead. What others say openly will never be a secret I carry. I’m done bouldering men’s shames. They won’t go with me to my grave. Hell, I won’t even have a grave. I’ll be the dust my life partner holds to the Southern Utah wind. I’ll be southwesterly then. You can sing a song to the four elements when the time comes. Right now, there’s work to be done. Do it with me or don’t. Draw scars on the face of the world if that’s your thrust. Make hate not peace if you must. Fulfill your flimsy purpose like a lace doily under a dusty candle in an abandoned cabin in some forgotten town. Be dimity. Go forth and doffer. Tell me again why I bother.

Jacks

Two years ago today, I came out of my medication-induced blackout at the inpatient psychiatric unit and began working on an elaborate origami project that involved making the Sydney Opera House with a theater and stage inside it. I used paper placemats and pages from a colorful book for this purpose. I was given a copy of the Book of Mormon by the staff, but I didn’t use its pages in my project. It sat in my room idle as I worked.

I wrote and performed rap songs with another patient named H— to the delight of other manic patients on the unit. Those with severe depression were not moved by our artistry. We were good at the rapping, and our antics provided a counterpoint to the aimlessness, the hall-wandering, and the five-minute interfaces with the psychiatrist each day in which he blamed us for having depression or bipolar.

I used a deck of cards to map out human networks that are responsible for abusing and trafficking others. The kings and jacks were big players in those networks, and they were also stand-ins for my father and his best friend. The networks were very organized and knew how to hide other cards, and themselves, as needed. My father’s name was Jack. He was a jack of all trades, even ones that weren’t legal.

I wrote short poems and made notes about my stay using a tiny pen that only sporadically worked. Pencils, Intermountain. Give patients on B-Ward pencils.

In my chart, the staff noted that I was well-behaved and posed no threat to anyone. I did throw paper at one point, down a long hall, overcome suddenly by how dehumanizing psychiatric care is. Nobody noted that in my chart, but one tech did scream, If you do that again … without completing the threat.

I declare today, September 10, the Day of Origami and Rapping forevermore. Long live folded paper and battled song.

Folding

This is the two-year anniversary of my stay at the local inpatient psychiatric hospital where the psychiatrist described me as being involved in sex trafficking, as if I was trafficking others as an adult as opposed to having been trafficked as a child. The psychiatrist also said my trauma had nothing to do with my mania, told me in so many words to be a better wife when I expressed my concerns to him about my husband’s behavior, refused to help me get services from the local organization that helps people who’ve survived sexual abuse, and wrote in my chart that I had a poor prognosis because I have no insight into having bipolar.

And he was supposed to be one of the better psychiatrists at that hospital.

This is also the day I briefly saw Utah poet laureate Lisa Bickmore and thought she was some kind of healing Earth goddess, which I still think is the case. When I’m manic, I see essences. Lisa is a lot more than a healing Earth goddess, but she also has the essence of a healing Earth goddess.

These are the final days of my hegira, the one I declared over before it was over. Over the next few days, I’ll be sitting with everything that happened two years ago in a process that’s like folding now and then together the way two ingredients are combined in baking. Not that I bake. I prefer folding time to folding things like whipped eggs and melted chocolate. When I need to eat something, I just eat it. I rarely mix it with something else.

Not About You

A poet from Kansas City berated me today after I posted about needing to evaluate whether to continue writing. The post made him angry. He said he’s still upset that I disappeared from poetry in 2015 after he’d been invested in me and my work. He felt I owed him an explanation for that decision and treated my post today as an affront to him, as if my leaving poetry would cause him more pain than it would cause me. As if my leaving poetry is a situation he’s at the center of.

I don’t know this man. I certainly didn’t owe him anything, including telling him that I left poetry because I was sexually assaulted by a poet who was working with me in the role of mentor. That it had happened on the way to my MFA and that it derailed my studies. That the poetry community was sputtering and vitriolic years later about that same poet but also about anyone who said he’d harmed them. That I had just been diagnosed with a rare, life-threatening form of immunodeficiency. That I had thyrotoxicosis. That I had cancer. That my marriage was close to ending and in a scary place. That I ran. That I had nowhere to go. That I had a nervous breakdown. That leaving poetry was the only way I could save myself, so that’s what I did.

Yeah, I didn’t tell someone I’d only met in person once for a few minutes and barely knew at all any of that, just as I kept most of that information from everyone I did know as I tried to sort through the detrital state my life was in.

This is part of the problem with poets and poetry: The way people feel like they can make demands on the poets whose work they even superficially engage with. The way their parasocial relationships with poets make them feel like they know those poets, like those poets owe them something, like there’s intimacy there that doesn’t exist, like it gives them the right, even ten years on, to verbally attack a poet they’ve concocted a relationship with. The way parasocial relationships tend to be directed at female-bodied poets. The way female-bodied poets have to endure this kind of dynamic on top of trying to do the work of writing. The way social spaces become especially unsafe for female-bodied poets because of dynamics like this.

This is not about you, Kansas City poet. I hate to burst your bubble, but it’s not.