Weird Wednesday Love Poem No. 3

The prompt this week was ‘spoon’. I’m actually pretty happy with this one. But then, I love both all things weird and also love poems. I have multiple books of love poetry scattered throughout my little library. (And one book of ‘erotic poems’! *gasp*) Next week’s prompt is ‘someone singing off key’…

Weird Wednesday Love Poem No. 2

Prompt this week was ‘I need a bicycle’.

My doubts are traitors…

So on Monday I got my second-ever tattoo. It was, and is, kind of a glorious mistake. Can you read it? I bet you can guess which word the tattooist MISSPELLED, right? Thank goodness I glanced down at around that point and noticed the issue on the first pass, but you can still totally tell. I haven’t decided how upset I am about that or not. The tattoo is supposed to be a note I’ve scribbled to myself, a super important one, one that’s so important I got it, literally, permanently etched into my skin. So, permanent? I would prefer it be perfect. But, scribbled note? Maybe it’s just more authentic that it looks like I messed up a letter and had to go back and run over it again with my pen to get it right. Whatever. No one out and about in my daily life will be able to read it anyway. It’s written upside-down for everyone else. It’s not for them. It’s for me.

The really raw-to-the-bone truth is that I’ve been feeling very adrift, and alone, and scared lately and I’ve had some bad habits trying to creep back into my life. I needed a daily, visible reminder of, well, a few things really. I’m trying to work out how best to express it. Which is a bit funny because I’ve recently rededicated my entire life to writing… and thus expressing myself through words, choosing the right words, scrambling them up in sentences, ordering my thoughts and my paragraphs. It’s not a very auspicious beginning if I can’t even express why I need to write at all…

So let’s put this in order:

I have been feeling like my life is slipping past me, these past few years. I feel like I’m Dorian Grey except instead of a painting rotting away I can literally see my own face rotting every time I look in the mirror. There are new grey hairs. There are new lines on my forehead and at the corners of my eyes. My body is softer, weaker. I am marching inexorably towards my grave and there is nothing I can do to stop it. On one hand, that inevitability makes it easier. I don’t dread death on every morrow because there’s no point. If there was any way at all to escape it, I probably would dread it; every moment of every day I would be consumed with ever more intricate plans to escape. But there is no escape. So I accept that fate. It’s fine. What is not fine is the feeling that I am missing everything beautiful I should be seeing, and feeling, and doing along the path. That I am just marching with my eyes fixed forward and there are miracles happening alongside me every day and I live apart from them, unaware of them, denying them when I catch the slightest glimpse.

Some of these miracles are personal things apart from the main focus of this discussion. I’ve built my entire life so as to never be sunk by heartache. I have no essential relationships, no one I ‘can’t live without’ because I learned through a very traumatic experience in my youth that ‘without’ is always a possibility; any second the person you ‘can’t live without’ can be turned to dust, literally dust, or in my case ashes, and… you just have to keep on living anyway. You don’t get to ‘ can’t ’. So, anyway, I should really work on my ability to build interpersonal relationships. That would almost certainly improve my life. I’m going to have to work up to the bravery for a bit though. Perhaps with professional assistance.

But the other BIG miracle I’m missing is following my intellectual passion. Putting my physical and emotional existence aside for a moment, my intellect is a huge component of my sense of self and my sense of well being and I’ve been suffocating it slowly, day by day, in a profession that doesn’t stretch me and grow me in the intellectual areas that excite me the most. I have a good job with really excellent coworkers in a profession that I feel contributes positively to the world and I have no complaints about any of it. I frequently include my professional life in my gratitude moments first thing in the morning. But, for all that, it is not my burning, tearing, edge-of-my-sanity passion. It’s just not. And my very first realization when I faced my mounting existential dread head-on was: I want to build my life, my whole life, majority of my waking hours of every day, around my insane, insatiable passion.

I haven’t, thus far. I have focused my efforts on building a life that meets mostly my physical necessities. In that sphere, I’ve done well. I quite enjoy my carefully hewn environment. I’m not living in a posh flat in London, so it could always be better, but I have a nice little house with a nice little yard. I can’t really afford ANY kind of food I like - I have a real penchant for black truffles, for instance, and expensive cheeses - but I can feed myself certainly enough to fill my stomach. I have a schedule that allows for sleep and even regular exercise. My physical self is as fine as she can be in her mid-thirties.

But I’ve neglected my emotions and my intellect. The emotions part I plan to work on with a mental health professional. The intellect… Well, that one’s just up to me. That one’s just a matter of whether or not I’m willing to crawl into the trenches and fight to the last breath, eat hardtack crawling with weevils for a few years, take a dozen bullets from agents who send back form rejections, to readers who give me bad reviews, to my critique circle never recognizing my inherent genius… It’s just a lot of feelings of rejection in the writing world. And it’s this crazy roller coaster because no matter how many times you tell yourself not to get your hopes up, you do. Every time you send out a query letter you think… maybe this time. Every time you enter a writing contest you think… maybe I’ll win. Every time you enter critique circle you think… this was a good one, and then no one likes it as much as you did. But that’s the only way to get where I want to go. There’s no way out but through.

So. My tattoo. To remind me every single day, to try.

The quote is a combination of two fragments. The first ‘Our doubts are traitors’ is from Shakespeare’s Measure For Measure, which, I’m not going to lie, I’ve never actually read. The full quote is usually given as: “Our doubts are traitors, And make us lose the good we oft might win, By fearing to attempt.” So quite simply that part is to remind me that one of the reasons none of my intellectual dreams have come true so far is because I’ve been too scared to try. I didn’t think my writing was good enough and, honestly, there’s always the fallback comfort of telling yourself your dreams didn’t come true because you didn’t try. It keeps alive the illusion that if you really did try, they might come true. Rather than facing the truly terrifying prospect of realizing, at the end of years of absolute commitment, that your dreams aren’t coming true not because you’re not trying, but because maybe you really aren’t good enough. But I’m ready to face that fear. I’m finally more scared of the possibility that my dreams could have come true if I tried, but I never did. I will hate myself if I go to my deathbed wondering IF I could have had the life I dreamed of, IF I’d only tried.

I don’t want to wonder. I’d rather know. Either way.

The second fragment ‘…we must find words or burn’ is from an Olga Broumas poem called “Artemis” and the full quote is: “like amnesiacs in a ward on fire, we must find words or burn”. That part is just referring to what particular ‘good’ I want to ‘win’. My dream is about finding words. And that was actually a big, long, scary internal debate for me too. I really had to sit down and decide, after fifteen years of no recognition and no money for it, do I really want to continue to devote three to four hours of every single day of my life to finding words. Am I that intrinsically motivated to do this? If I reach my deathbed and no one has ever recognized my writing, or ever paid me for it, will I still think that was time well spent? But the answer is still… yes. I thought the answer was ‘yes’ five years ago, and ten years ago, and it’s still ‘yes’. So this isn’t a goal I need to achieve in a certain time frame. It’s a goal I need to weave into my life and plan for it to be a part of me forever. (Which might mean that I try to find a way to weave it a bit more into my current professional life too. It’s possible. I’m working on that bit.)

So that’s the story behind my messy tattoo. I need it to remind me that even when I feel hopeless and I want to turn back to my unhealthy coping mechanisms, I need to cope by chasing the dream. The cure for what ails me is words. The cure for what ails me is being brave enough to keep trying, even when I don’t think I can do it, even when I get a hundred form rejections that very kindly say ‘oh, it’s just subjective’ but you know that really means… They don’t like you. They don’t like your work. They don’t think you’re any good. Maybe you aren’t any good. Maybe you will never be any good.

My doubts have betrayed me, and I am burning. Right now.

The way out of the ward, is to find words.