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Learning to Die: An Interview with Jenny Offill

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You've moved out. You have a nice apartment in the city with a few close friends. You keep your houseplants alive and have mementos and shitty poems on the fridge. You have a cat and he's a bastard but you all love him. There are leftovers in the fridge and a container of new experimental homemade cookies on the counter. It may be a little cramped but you never mind. You go by what you want to go by and no one stops or even questions you. You wear what you want to wear and say what you want to say. You are content and you are happy, maybe not all the time but you are happy enough to wake up and that's what matters.

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Yet another comic about leaving the Mormon church that can be applied to a variety of things.

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chartreuse kitchen / milk shelf

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thinking about how when you experience a lot of shame in your formative years (indirectly, directly, as abuse or just as an extant part of your environment) it becomes really difficult to be perceived by other people in general. the mere concept of someone watching me do anything, whether it's a totally normal activity or something unfamiliar of embarrassing, whether I'm working in an excel spreadsheet or being horny on main, it just makes my skin crawl and my brain turn to static because I cannot convince myself that it's okay to be seen and experienced. because to exist is to be ashamed and embarrassed of myself, whether I'm failing at something or not, because my instinctive reaction to anyone commenting on ANYTHING I'm doing is to crawl into a hole and die. it's such a bizarre and dehumanizing feeling to just not be able to exist without constantly thinking about how you are being Perceived. ceaseless watcher give me a god damn break.

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me. me when a poem says something ive felt before

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Cult

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the marvellous shrew-hog

[text reads: the marvellous shrew-hog is a beast with many uses. please pursue none of them. after use, the shrew-hog ceases to be marvellous and is reduced only to meat.]

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weak.

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i forgot that i had this blog. i forgot that i wrote poetry -- that i write poetry. i have forgotten a lot of things about myself recently. i am trying to remember them.

i am not driven so completely by fear as I used to be. that part of myself is still there, choking out things that want to grow, but it is smaller now. i am afraid of different things, in different ways, though some old fears hang on like a black mold that stretches too deep into the grout to scrub away.

i have always considered writing to be the most vulnerable form of self expression. there is no buffer to hide behind to soften the act of sincerity. as a result i have always kept it very close to my chest, only loosening my hold to show those who i most trust.

but being seen, really seen, no longer terrifies me like it did. i think i will try to post here more often.

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Polina Dzhgamadze (Полина Джгамадзе) Pinned Ya!

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I want to live but not like this. 

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Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

George Sand, in a letter to Gustave Flaubert

Nikki Giovanni, Mirrors

Anne Sexton, A Self-Portrait in Letters

Mary Oliver, Dogfish

on choosing kindness. again and again.

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I don't daydream much these days.

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dug this out of my drafts today -- written late 2020. lord, I'm so much freer now.

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[Image transcript: a poem in white text on a black background. It reads:

"I keep my heart like a creature in its kennel/delicate and full of teeth,/coerced into a quiet until it cannot bear a moment longer/and I let it out to scream itself hoarse.

Even then I've never been so careless as to let it run free/fearless and clumsy/where there are no fences left to hide it.

We stick to the wire pen in the backyard./A taste of movement, a few lungfuls of air/before I drag it, wailing, back through the door."

End ID.]

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looking through the old poetry in my drafts. that huddled, petrified way of living.

I wish I could have been gentler with myself back then. I wish I could have accepted that it isn't such a crime to want, to love without some kind of permission granted in blazing light.

the past is as it is, and I hold it with care, but I do not miss it. lord, I'm so much freer now.

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from This Hour and What Is Dead by LI-YOUNG LEE