Still life paintings which flourished in Holland in the 17th century are visual poems, with a visual symbolism dedicated to depicting the transience of life and the relentless march of time. Images of delight were often juxtaposed beside macabre imagery which included skulls, half-burnt out candles, and sometimes literal animal carcasses. Since then, various artists have taken on the form. Take for instance Edouard Manet’s stunning “Fish (Still Life).”
Edouard Manet. Fish (Still Life). 1864. Public Domain. Art Institute Chicago.
The viewer is at once confronted with the imagery of both death and desire. The fish would be grotesque and corpselike were it not for the inviting lemon bringing the promise of a coming feast. The creatures retain their form as carcasses, even as the coming meal is alluded to by the opened oysters. The bare white tablecloth evokes the blank canvas, the raw canvas in process, which is synchronous with the subject matter–a meal in the process of becoming a meal. The raw materials are laid bare before us. Manet exposes his bold brushstrokes, thus exposing his process as well.
There’s something about all still life art that evokes the process of its creation. After all, to take something unmoving and render it still is itself a commentary on the passage of time. One of the still life paintings I have found myself returning to again and again is Pieter Claesz’s “Still Life with a Writing Quill,” particularly because it evokes writing, which is an act rooted in time, also made timeless by virtue of the fact that it is an art form, like visual art, that can be recorded.
Pieter Claesz. Still Life with a Writing Quill. Public Domain. The Metropolitan Museum of Art.
I have been thinking quite a bit about the secular context in which the vanitas still life was meant to reside. Unlike art of the church, which often depicted overt religious symbology, the vanitas was meant for the home (or perhaps, office). The domesticity of this imagery is disrupted by the evocation of death, lending a spiritual essence to objects that would otherwise be quite mundane.
In our era of climate change and mass extinction, we live on a planet that is changing, fragile, and transient. Scenes of nature that would once have had the essence of permanence and unchangeability about them (19th century paintings of glaciers come to mind), now seem transient and fragile. For something to move glacially once referred to a process that was so slow as to be invisible. Now, glacial change is hardly glacial. Forest landscapes, coral reefs, coastlines all feel like drafts of a possible world, drafts of a possible world in the process of erasure, a world erased I hope I don’t ever have to know.
Is our natural world going the way of cut flowers, candles, and cheese, in the Dutch still lifes of old?
Rupi Kaur’s Home Body revisits themes readers will find in Kaur’s other poetry books (she returns to her familiar haunts of depression, anxiety, sexual assault, rape, love, masturbation, and hope), and while the book (like her others) could benefit from some judicious editing, I also can’t help but feel the embrace of a writer who holds her teen and young women readers close, perhaps too close, with words that may not be perfectly polished, but may be exactly what they need to hear.
Kaur wrestles with the consequences of her own success in Home Body. At 28 years of age, Kaur has done the impossible. She has sold over 8 million copies of her books of poetry. Can she top herself? Can she grow and maintain her audience? If her audience grows with her, I think she can do both, just not quite in this book.
I had hoped after reading Milk and Honey (which I review here) that Kaur would mature as a writer. In some ways, Home Body does offer us a more mature Kaur. The second poem in the book unfolds with uncharacteristic restraint. By withholding the subject of the poem, Kaur evokes a sense of suspense. It’s a simple tool in the poet’s toolbelt, but it’s promising to see Kaur taking her first steps into exploring the richness of the poet’s rhetorical options.
Kaur isn’t a mature poet, but she’s finally joined the upper divisional poetry workshop. When she writes “i have never known anything more / quietly loud than anxiety,” I couldn’t help but applaud her deployment of the well-timed oxymoron.
There is a hasty feeling to this book, the sense of someone fretfully and fitfully sitting in a room for a few nights, hashing it out. Later in the book, Kaur exhibits some self-awareness on this front, writing “your rushing is/ suffocating the masterpieces.” Many of the poems do feel rushed. The old themes could have been let go, or given more time to mature. The new themes perhaps needed more time to develop. There’s a “work in progress” feel to this book, but perhaps that is its charm.
And perhaps, as a “young adult” book of poetry, there is an appeal to something written more for commiseration than introspection. As a teenager I read Arthur Rimbaud and Mary Karr, and I relished in their depths, in their ability to be indirect at times, in their ability to push the language to its limits. Pushing the language to its limits is not Kaur’s project.
Kaur’s Home Body is more self-help than poetry, and perhaps that’s okay. There’s a list poem “of things to heal your mood.” We are, after all, living in the midst of a global pandemic that has killed 250,000 people. We are all feeling a little isolated and a little beside ourselves, and maybe not always in the mood for Keats, or John Donne. And while I might not be in the mood for Donne’s “Criterion Collection” of “Batter my heart, three personed God,” I do have the space for the “Netflix and Chill” of Kaur’s “i want something to/hold me by the neck/split me down the middle/and make me feel alive again.” We’re all feeling a little (okay, a lot) isolated, and beside ourselves. A “list of things to heal your mood” is not a bad addition to the verbal landscape.
While Kaur’s words lend themselves best to the Instagram format, where they perhaps live their best life, there’s something nice about looking at a physical blank page with only one line on it that says, “our pain is the doorway to our joy.” The bravery of the blankness and the risk of aphorism deserves its applause. Printing shit on paper costs money. It takes courage, girl.
Navel Gazing. Watercolor. Janice Greenwood.
Where the book does more with less, it is best. The short poem, “i’m surprised I got out at all” envisions in three lines a relationship so small and entrapping, the hostage can’t “see the exit.” The claustrophobia of the relationship is echoed in the claustrophobic brevity of the poem. Brava. Like I’ve said about Kaur’s other work, I wish she’d edited herself; I wish she’d separate the wheat from the chaff. Here she does it.
There is something almost Sapphic to the three-line poem “why does everything / become less beautiful / once it belongs to us.” And there’s something beautiful about the fact of the plainly spoken when it has perhaps not been plainly spoken in poetry: “What if the one I want / is someone who touches me and leaves.” Here is a young woman coming to terms with the complexities of romantic love, the paradoxes of being young and a woman in this society that shames women for their sexuality. There is the need we all have for comfort, and the desire we all have for the thrill of the chase, for the untouchable, for the risky, for the dangerous. We should all be 20 and wild and in love and in doubt and chasing what we cannot have, and Kaur captures some of this feeling. She evokes the unspeakable: that there is a kind of thrill in abuse and a kind of boredom in secure love.
But her concept of love is not boy-crazy, which is why I keep coming back to the idea of this book as self-help for teens and young women. Kaur offers her readers possible ways to be a woman in our society, and dammit, our world needs more possibilities that aren’t purely cerebral or theoretical or found in a primer for an undergraduate Women’s Studies course.
She punctuates her section on love with: “masturbation/ is meditation,” reminding her readers “i’m careful about/ who i spend my energy on.” The section of Home Body called “Heart” really should be called “Body.”
Her poem, “Productivity Anxiety” could have been shorter. In fact, I’d cross the whole thing out except for one stanza.
Kaur’s critique of capitalism in this same poem is good, but it belongs in another poem altogether, perhaps in the beautiful poem she writes about her dad’s life as a truck driver. Kaur is wrestling with important ideas here. I hope she gives them time to breathe and grow in her next book. I hope she finds the language to transform them into a deeper art, because we need voices with the reach to convey these ideas clearly to the next generation.
Kaur also takes early inroads into eco-poetry; and it is some of her best work, like the poem on page 101.
Kaur is wrestling with her success in this book, and in the process finds new subject matter. Kaur’s interrogations of capitalism, her deeper explorations of her working-class background, her forays into black lives matter poetry, and her commentary on our culture of self-help and productivity are seeds for future books. She writes: “Even if we managed to/ make all the money in the world/ we’d be left feeling empty for something/ our souls ache for community.”
I still found myself getting my red creative writing M.F.A. pen and doing edits. There are some brilliant poems hiding within some longer movements.
There are too many ideas here competing for airtime. Kaur has lifted her poetic antennae, received the signals of the culture, and taken her notes. I wonder what would happen if she approached her next book in a more organized manner, with a clearer mission; I wonder what would happen if she pushed her work, really challenged it. Kaur writes: “the future/ world of our dreams/ can’t be built on the / corruptions of the past.” If Kaur is to move forward and grow as a poet, I think she needs to let herself change, to risk a transition.
Poetry is all about the art of mastering transitions: verbal transitions, thematic transitions, and the life transitions that often become poetry’s finest subject matter.
In my legal content writing, I often find myself writing for people facing major life transitions, whether it’s the person who has been seriously injured in an accident, the person going through a divorce, the person whose life has been changed by crime, or the person making end-of-life plans. There is a kind of poetry to be found in our moments of greatest uncertainty. Poets have mastered this art. But if Kaur shows us anything it is that there is poetry to be found wherever we write about these transitions. Poetry can be anywhere; everywhere. Kaur reminds me to find the poetry everywhere.
About the Writer
Janice Greenwood is a writer, surfer, and poet. She holds an M.F.A. in poetry and creative writing from Columbia University.
The Boy, the Mole, the Fox, and the Horse by Charlie Mackesy is a book of aphorisms coupled with illustrations. Much of the material in the book comes from content Mackesy posted to Instagram. Like so many things that got their start on Instagram, the transition from one medium to another often involves so little transformation as to leave me wondering whether anything is gained from the process of reading the material in book form. I know that many people will find a harsh assessment in this, but I don’t think this critique eliminates the need for the book.
If you go to Charlie Mackesy’s Instagram feed, you’ll get pretty much the same experience you get from The Boy, the Mole, the Fox, and the Horse in terms of the content you’ll encounter. But the thing about books is that they are not content, whatever the internet would have you believe.
The currency of the internet is content, and far too much content on the internet is filler. As a legal content writer, I’ve seen the same article, rewritten over and over on a dozen different law firms’ websites. Originality is difficult to come by.
The very fact that a book has literal substance makes it a little more difficult to dismiss.
I read the book in under an hour while taking a bath, and found the book charming in the way Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s The Little Prince is charming. But to compare Mackesy to Exupéry would be doing a disservice to both.
The Little Prince is an allegorical interrogation of capitalism, modern life, and adulthood. The Boy, the Mole, the Fox, and the Horse doesn’t have such high ambitions. The beautiful thing about the obvious is that when it is stated outright and simply, it doesn’t feel so obvious anymore. Mackesy’s straightforward aphorisms placed beside the effortless illustrations set within ample white space, gives the book room to breathe.
A book advocating for kindness and friendship should be so open. The book appeals best to children and to the child within. This is a children’s book, of course, but one that is exquisitely created so as to appeal to adults as well. And while I can critique the book for failing to reach far beyond its life on Instagram, I think this may also be the book’s strength. Much like we might buy a singer’s album to experience something tangible and distinct from the experience of a song on the radio (or iPod), we reach for tangible books to give us something quite distinct from the digital, something that scrolling on Instagram or even reading on Kindle can’t provide. Reading a book is a tactile experience, one that involves the senses, possibly all of them except taste. Mackesy’s spare illustrations live best on the page, freed from the limitations of the digital. The aphorisms speak louder on paper than they could on gigabytes. Why this is the case, I do not know, but I think it is something akin to the mystery and mystical experience that comes from seeing a painting in real life in a museum, something truly distinct from seeing a painting in a book or on the internet. It’s why Zoom meetings can’t satisfy our need for connection in the same way that meeting a friend for coffee could.
The tangible object creates a sense of connection. And indeed, Mackesy’s project is all about connection. It is about the connection of the visual to the written word, sound to sight, and about our connections with each other. Mackesy asks us to “imagine how we would be if we were less afraid.” The old mole in the book reminds us that as we get older we wish we had listened less to our “fears and more to…dreams.”
I Have a Hard Outer Shell, But I’m Soft Inside. Watercolor. Janice Greenwood.
Mackesy addresses the fundamental rules of connection. His aphorisms urge readers to forgive themselves. His characters remind readers that asking for help can be our bravest act. Self-forgiveness, forgiveness of others, and asking for help are three traits fundamental to nurturing connection.
Mackesy’s drawings and words have offered solace to so many. The images and words have been praised for their therapeutic effects, with the Washington Post noting that therapists have asked to use some of the illustrations in their practice, and another woman noting that the book has offered solace to those in hospice and those in end of life planning.
The New York Times notes that Mackesy himself turned to drawing to heal his own grief, taking it up after a friend passed away in a car crash. Mackesy’s greatest legacy may not be the book itself but the inspiration his effortless-seeming drawings and aphorisms bring. Because, make no mistake, what he has done here looks easy, but it is not. Try it yourself. You’ll see. Mackesy isn’t in the business of creating content for Instagram. He’s making art. He’s making the world a more empathetic and kind place.
The problem with something of substance is that it can seem effortless. With so much of the content on the internet being spun or re-written, or taken from elsewhere, a true original is hard to find.
When we think of content, we sometimes think of it as an asset that can be bought for a few hundred dollars to serve a commercial purpose. But we need more of the kind of content that isn’t just filler, isn’t just another asset, the kind of content that challenges and interrogates our thinking, the kind of content that has the power to change lives and effect social change. As a legal content writer, I find myself constantly trying to challenge the form. I don’t just write about divorce law, I write about peace work, empathy, negotiation, and the psychology of anger and regret. As a legal content writer, I don’t just write for estate lawyers, I write about the importance of finding meaning in end of life planning. I don’t just write for employment lawyers, I write about fear–fear that makes a women scared to report an abuser or fight back when she faces gender bias and discrimination. There is filler and then there is content that can actually change the world. Mackesy reminds me that such content exists. He reminds me of what my work truly entails. As a legal content writer, my job isn’t just to create legal content for law firms. As a legal content writer, my job is to do the hard work of showing how the law can change lives and effect social change.
About the Writer
Janice Greenwood is a writer, surfer, and poet. She holds an M.F.A. in poetry and creative writing from Columbia University.
Rachel Hollis is a motivational speaker who doesn’t want to motivate you. In her new book, Didn’t See That Coming: Putting Your Life Back Together When Your World Falls Apart, Hollis explains: “Motivation is fleeting. Motivation is situational…what I want is to help you develop a way of living that is so routine for you that you don’t need motivation.” When life gets tough, motivation alone won’t get you out of bed, but good habits will do the trick.
She explains: “Your great habits and positive rituals are the anchor you need in the storm, not just because they are good for you but because your brain isn’t wired to handle intense discomfort and keep making good decisions.”
Motivation doesn’t come from hearing the motivational speaker. It comes from the slow and steady process of building good habits that put you on the path of the life you want to live. In Didn’t See That Coming, Hollis does a pretty good job explaining Paul D. MacLean’s Triune Brain theory. Basically, the brain can be divided into three parts: the reptilian brain, the mammalian brain, and the “human brain” or the part of the brain responsible for governing human reason. The reptilian brain governs flight or fight response, the mammalian brain integrates memories, emotions and habits into the fight or flight response, and the rational brain governs imagination, reason, and language.
Hollis explains that when everything is going as it should, our brains are generally integrated and capable of making decisions that take into account both the moment and our larger goals, dreams, values, and aspirations. But when we are facing stress, grief, loss, or other pain, the reptilian brain takes over. Hollis holds that in times of crisis, we fall into doing the things that don’t involve thought, the easy things. If we have set a foundation of good habits, the easy things will likely be the good things we want in our lives.
Hollis notes: “I’m not obsessed with great-habit creation because those habits make the good days better (though that’s an incredible added bonus). I’m obsessed with great-habit creation because they make the bad days bearable.” She adds: “I have changed my anchors, evolved my habits, and in so doing I have made the good days great and the bad days bearable instead of self-destructive.”
What Hollis fails to address is how habits are formed—and how long they take to form. Maria Popova, in her popular blog Brain Pickings, writes about how Jeremy Dean set out to investigate exactly how long it takes a new behavior to become a habit. While pop culture has claimed that 21 days is all it takes, it turns out habits take a lot longer. Researchers at University College London found that, on average, it took 66 days for people to form a new habit. But some habits took much longer, with some taking as long as a year. When it comes to building a new habit, the most difficult days are the early days. This is why it is so easy to quit daily exercise early on, when the exercise hasn’t become part of our routine, or why it is so easy to not eat healthy when we haven’t been doing it for some time already. Remembering this truth could be helpful for people struggling to build new and healthy habits.
Habits of mind and action are the product of deliberate grit. What might appear effortless for some, is often the product of days, weeks, and months, of deliberate and intentional will power.
A few months ago I set myself the goal to wake up early to go surfing. The first few times I tried, I failed miserably. I would get up and get out a couple of days in a row, and then sleep in the next two. It took several attempts before I managed to get out for a whole week. It took all my will every morning to drag myself out of bed. It was hard, even though I love surfing, even though I wanted to be out there and was happy once I was in the water.
I don’t remember the exact moment something switched, when the inertia of not wanting to get out of bed was replaced by the momentum, joy, and excitement of getting up. I had probably been surfing every morning for a full month when it happened. But I think this is true for all habits: there is a resistance at first that is then replaced with the momentum of doing it.
Now, I won’t say that the habit is automatic yet, but the desire to get up is far greater than the desire I have to stay in bed. Good habits are hard to build.
Neurons. Watercolor. Janice Greenwood.
Hollis writes: “We are only ever in control of ourselves and our actions in the moment.” Habits are one way that we can take control over what we can change.
Habits are the decisions we make when we think we aren’t making decisions.
About the Writer
Janice Greenwood is a writer, surfer, and poet. She holds an M.F.A. in poetry and creative writing from Columbia University.
The last four years have, in many ways, pulled off the bandage that has covered the wounds on which American democracy was built. The sitting president’s overt racism has forced the nation to come to terms with the glossed-over racism on which the nation’s wealth and power are structured. Robin DiAgnelo, the writer of the wildly popular book, White Fragility notes in that book: “the nation began with the attempted genocide of Indigenous people and the theft of their land. American wealth was built on the labor of kidnapped and enslaved Africans and their descendants.” America has had to face a reckoning with itself and its history.
It is an appropriate time for Barack Obama to speak again, given that for so long he was a model of optimism and hope. The Atlantic recently published an updated excerpt from Barack Obama’s memoir, A Promised Land, titled “I’m Not Ready to Abandon the Possibility of America.” The excerpt brings no major surprises. Obama is as measured as ever, as skillful at understatement as he was during his eight years as president. He opens the excerpt with he and Michelle boarding Air Force One sitting with the “unexpected results of an election in which someone diametrically opposed to everything we stood for had been chosen as my successor.”
And while Obama declares openly in the title of his Atlantic article that he’s “not yet ready to abandon the possibility of America,” Obama’s strain of relentless optimism and hope seem to have finally become tempered. Amid all of Obama’s characteristic humility, down-to-earthedness, and optimism, there’s another strain that I haven’t seen in his writing or speaking before—the open acknowledgement that America is indeed facing an unprecedented crisis. It’s not just the global pandemic that has killed more than 230,000 Americans and counting, our economic crisis that has shuttered business and left many out of work, police violence against Black men and women, it’s something deeper than all this and it goes back to our founding; Obama doesn’t mention the fact that our sitting president won’t concede given the fair results of a democratic election.
He frames the problem we are facing by looking down into the foundation on which the nation was built. A building built on rotting earth cannot stand, or at least, its standing is questionable.
Obama writes about the contradiction present in America’s very founding, a crisis “embedded in the founding documents that could simultaneously proclaim all men equal and yet count a slave as three-fifths of a man. It finds expression in our earliest court opinions, as when the Chief Justice of the United States bluntly explains to Native Americans that their tribe’s rights to convey property aren’t enforceable, because the court of the conqueror has no capacity to recognize the just claims of the conquered.”
Obama wonders aloud whether he has been “too tempered in speaking the truth as I saw it.” I wondered this, too. But for him to have done so over the past four years would have been to break the norms all American presidents have honored once they left office—one of non-interference.
And yet, the Trump presidency, in its constancy in breaking all norms, puts everyone committed to the democratic and Constitutional project at a loss. Should they break the norms too and stoop to his level, shattering an unspoken system of norms that took centuries to build, or should they remain silent, uphold the norms, but also fail to speak out at absurdity when it stares us in the face? It’s a catch-22. Obama choose to uphold the norms. “When they go low, we go high.” I respect his decision, but it came at a cost.
Obama notes that many think it’s time to “discard the myth—that an examination of America’s past and an even cursory glance at today’s headlines show that this nation’s ideals have always been secondary to conquest and subjugation, a racial caste system and rapacious capitalism, and that to pretend otherwise is to be complicit in a game that was rigged from the start.”
Waipi’o Valley. Watercolor. Janice Greenwood.
Obama who was once measured in all things, except for his faith that “the better angels of our nature” would prevail has now extended that measured restraint to his hope in America’s future. We should all be a little scared.
His essay in the Atlantic is remarkable because it reveals a side of Obama that we seldom saw. Obama asks the tough questions, salts the answers with his characteristic optimism, but peppers them as well with something I’m not accustomed to seeing—concern, deep concern. Is the social compact salvageable in the wake of the Trump presidency, in the wake of so much economic and human devastation? Is it salvageable now that America is coming to a reckoning about the foundations of racism and theft on which the nation has been built? Do we need a new social compact?
“I don’t know,” writes Obama. And yet, we just witnessed an election with the highest turnout in history. Black men and women turned out to vote in Detroit and Philadelphia and Georgia and they made their voices heard as a powerful demographic that cannot be ignored. Obama says his hope in the future lies with young people. He says he wrote A Promised Land for young people as an invitation to “once again remake the world, and to bring about, through hard work, determination, and a big dose of imagination, an America that truly aligns with all that is best in us.” I look forward to reading Obama’s book, which Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie reviews in the New York Times, writing that it is “is nearly always pleasurable to read, sentence by sentence, the prose gorgeous in places.”
I take Obama’s invitation seriously. It won’t be easy. It will require writers, teachers, and artists, willing to try to create a world not beholden to “rapacious capitalism.” It will require those with the creativity to seek out new models of connection, community, growth, and living. It may require a reinvention of America itself.
So, I leave this essay with this thought: I have an artist friend on Instagram: @kahea.mana.hina. She lives on the island of Hawai’i. She recently posted a sketch she drew of Iolani Palace. Above the palace, she wrote the words of Queen Liliuokalani, who was removed from power and later imprisoned in the palace by a minority uprising that ultimately resulted in Hawai’i being annexed to the United States. Above the drawing of the palace, my friend writes the words Queen Liliuokalani wrote to President William McKinley in 1897: “I, LILIUOKALANI OF HAWAII, by the Will of God named heir-apparent on the tenth day of April, A.D. 1877, and by the grace of God Queen of the Hawaiian Islands on the seventeenth day of January, A.D. 1893…. I declare such a treaty to be an act of wrong toward the native and part-native people of Hawaii, an invasion of the rights of the ruling chiefs, in violation of international rights both toward my people and toward friendly nations with whom they have made treaties, the perpetuation of the fraud whereby the constitutional government was overthrown, and, finally, an act of gross injustice to me.”
We live in a nation built and enriched by injustice. How do we reckon with it? It is not an easy nor comfortable question.
We stand at the precipice. The wounds are open and must be tended to. Let’s come together and make art with meaning, teach with heart, write the truth, speak with honesty and bravery, and imagine a future with tempered hope. As the case numbers for the coronavirus grow, as the current sitting president continues to refuse to concede, and as we face what I believe will be a dark couple of months in our nation’s history, we will need to come together as we have never come together before and ask ourselves what the new character of our nation will be.
About the Writer
Janice Greenwood is a writer, surfer, and poet. She holds an M.F.A. in poetry and creative writing from Columbia University.
In order to ask for help, you need to feel that other people can help you, and you need to know what you want. Traumatized children (and adults, for that matter) struggle with asking for help, but more importantly, we struggle with knowing what we want. Bessel Van Der Kolk is a professor of psychiatry at the Boston University School of Medicine. In his nonfiction book, The Body Keeps the Score, he explores why childhood trauma survivors so often struggle as adults, particularly with social connection.
Children who grow up in stable homes, “learn what makes them feel good; they discover what makes them (and others) feel bad, and they acquire a sense of agency: that their actions can change how they feel and how others respond. Securely attached kids learn the difference between situations they can control and situations where they need help.”
In other words, stable children and stable adults know what they want and they know how to get it. They know when they can get something for themselves and when they need the help of others to reach their goals. More importantly, they believe they deserve what they want. To feel that you deserve what you want makes it far more likely that you’ll be willing to vocalize that desire. You’ll be more willing to ask for help, more willing to ask for what you want.
The irony is that those who most need help, are often least likely to ask for it. To ask for help and to ask for anything at all requires vulnerability. Risking vulnerability often requires that one come from some kind of stable background. Those who are most likely to ask for help often have a secure enough family and social structure that allows them to be vulnerable and to take risks.
And those who are least socially connected may also be least likely to ask for help. The radically vulnerability required of the asking, also invites others into your life.
“In contrast, children with histories of abuse and neglect learn that their terror, pleading, and crying do not register with their caregiver. Nothing they can do or say stops the beating or brings attention and help. In effect they’re being conditioned to give up when they face challenges later in life.”
Traumatized children and adults don’t always know what they want, but they often learn early on that asking for help doesn’t bring them the help they need and want, and often asking for help creates more problems than it solves. They give up on all people because of the formative experiences they had with just a few.
Artists and creators often use their artistic medium as a means for social connection. Moving your vulnerability to the medium of music or words on paper or art on a page can serve as a kind of buffer, especially when the art of asking feels like it’s just too much. The art itself is a form of vulnerability. The artistic act is itself a kind of asking. Unfortunately, our society doesn’t necessarily foster the kind of community that allows the artistic act itself to be the asking. (Though, my boyfriend Sergio has shown me how powerful and how connecting it can be to sit in a public place with a sketchbook. We have been invited into homes, been given rides up mountains, and have met people we would have never met were it not for the sketchbook. And so, perhaps, in some contexts, the art itself can be the asking. )
Yet, by and large, the old patronage systems are dead. Amanda Palmer, in her beautiful Ted Talk, “The Art of Asking,” notes: “For much of human history, musicians, artists, they’ve been part of the community. Connectors and openers, not untouchable stars.”
She defines celebrity as many people loving you from afar. But Palmer’s model of artistic patronage is less about the nameless masses and anonymous adoration of celebrity, and more about a return to community. It’s not about random people loving you from a distance, but “it’s about a few people loving you up close and about those people being enough.”
How do we let the people in our lives be enough?
Purification by Sea. Watercolor. Janice Greenwood.
How do we learn to ask for help when we do not know what we need and when we don’t always trust that asking will bring the response we desire? For those of us who struggle with asking for help, a denial can feel like a kind of prophesy fulfilled—we knew all along we could never get what we asked for, and denial feels almost inevitable. To make matters worse, children and adults who suffer from trauma may not have developed the social skills that teach them how to ask for help. Stable parents teach children how to ask for help.
The denials become the proof that we cannot ask, which serves to make it less likely we’ll ask in the future. Worse, because we don’t practice the important skill of asking for help, we don’t learn from our mistakes. We don’t develop frustration tolerance. Van Der Kolk, in his nonfiction book, explains:
“Infants who live in secure relationships learn to communicate not only their frustrations and distress, but also their emerging selves—their interests, preferences and goals… But if your caregivers ignores your needs, or resent your very existence, you learn to anticipate rejection and withdrawal.”
This can create confusion in the child and adult about what is safe or dangerous. “If you feel chronically numbed out, potentially dangerous situations may make you feel alive. If you conclude that you must be a terrible person… you start expecting other people to treat you horribly.”
Trauma can obliterate our “inner maps” leaving us charting terra incognita our whole lives.
So, how do we learn how to identify what we want? How do we learn how to ask for help?
Van Der Kolk explains, we must learn how to tolerate feeling what we feel; knowing what we know. The process of sitting with rejection, humiliation, loneliness, despair, sadness, grief, and other difficult emotions can be painful and challenging, but if we don’t do it, we are doomed to remain ignorant to our own inner states.
“In order to know who we are—to have an identity—we must know (or at least feel that we know) what is and what was “real.” We must observe what we see around us and label it correctly; we must also be able to trust our memories and be able to tell them apart from our imagination… Erasing awareness and cultivating denial are often essential to survival, but the price is that you lose track of who you are, of what you are feeling, and of what and whom you can trust.”
Instead of asking for help, we might seek help in other things: self-harm, high-risk behaviors, drinking, drug use, sexual promiscuity. These tools might be used instead of seeking help and connection with others. And when they are used in this manner, they can become harmful and damaging, not the problem itself but a symptom of the underlying problem.
The consequences of failing to ask for help are severe. When we ask for help, we form social connection, the bonds that make us human. When we fail to ask for help we become reactionary rather than proactive.
Van Der Kolk notes that “Humans are social animals…everything about us—our brains, our minds, and our bodies—is geared toward collaboration in social systems. This is our most powerful survival strategy, the key to our success as a species, and it is precisely this that breaks down in most forms of mental suffering.”
How do we ask for help? We can start by treating it like a practice, by making a point to make small requests for things that aren’t of great significance, and working our way up to asking for bigger things. One person I know said that she made a point to start asking for everything she wanted, every time. By practicing, we can learn boundaries, learn how to ask, how to accept rejection, and how to create lasting bonds with other people.
Amanda Palmer’s beautiful Ted Talk, “The Art of Asking” is a brilliant comment on the power of asking and the social connections it creates. When Amanda Palmer was touring with her band, she made it a practice to ask her fans for help—for a place to spend the night, for food before the show, and even a neti pot. In the process, Palmer formed stronger social connections with strangers, and with her fans.
Capitalism has conditioned us that any exchange must be commercial, must involve money, and must involve a kind of perfect material reciprocity. The truth is that some people’s gifts are not material. For example, written words and poetry, though they can be put in a book, can also be ephemeral and ethereal—the whispered encouragement overhead on the street corner, wisdom from a friend, the exchange of conversation whose only commitment and investment is time. Music, now that it can be downloaded, doesn’t always need to come in the form of a physical album. Palmer’s genius is that she tapped into modes of exchange that don’t involve the capitalistic social contract. She saw her ethereal gifts and gave them freely, but asked for what she needed in exchange.
Perhaps the true secret of learning how to ask is learning how to tap into our ethereal gifts, the ones that can’t always be so easily commodified in a culture predicated on so much brute exchange. Palmer reminds us all, “asking makes you vulnerable.” But the rewards of vulnerability are worth it.
About the Writer
Janice Greenwood is a writer, surfer, and poet. She holds an M.F.A. in poetry and creative writing from Columbia University.
I didn’t expect to actually find any good advice in Rachel Hollis’s new book, Didn’t See That Coming: Putting Your Life Back Together When Your World Falls Apart, especially after Hollis admits in her introduction that most of her book about resilience was written before she actually had to put her resilience advice to the test. Hollis opens her prologue with the following sentence: “Three days into editing this book, my marriage ended.” I expected the divorce to figure more heavily into the book, but the prologue is an afterthought. The book is less about divorce than about the little habits and modes of thought Hollis has used to help her get through the dark times.
I don’t know much about Hollis (or rather, I didn’t know much about Hollis before reading this book)—the brand and the personality—other than that she maintains an incredibly popular blog, has a ton of followers, and has written a bestselling book called “Girl Wash Your Face,” which I haven’t read but plan to read if I ever finally get around to having enough time to actually wash my face. My mental image of Hollis largely comes from a profile of her written by Allie Jones for the New York Times. From the profile, Hollis is portrayed as a mommy-blogger extraordinaire. If the profile is correct, Hollis does more shit by noon than I get done all week—if I’m lucky. In the profile, we are informed that Hollis “works out, feeds her four children… and writes in her gratitude journal” all before airing her daily morning podcast, working on her highly successful blog, and planning her “personal growth conferences.” She also has staff and a team of nannies, which probably helps.
In Didn’t See That Coming: Putting Your Life Back Together When Your World Falls Apart Hollis explains that she lives by a plan. She is a person who has “imagined in detail the next two decades” of her life. I was skeptical. Anyone who thinks they can imagine in detail the next two decades of their life is either a teenager who hasn’t had anything real happen to them or someone who has lived in a bubble of pure unchecked privilege. I immediately created a mental image of Hollis as another one of those stay-at-home-mom-turned-mommy-blogger types; another housewife who burned the lasagna one too many times and decided to write about it.
I was wrong; I was right.
It turns out Hollis has experienced incredible tragedy—you just wouldn’t know it from looking at her carefully curated Instagram feed. The best writing in the whole book comes in the last chapter. It literally took my breath away. When Hollis was a freshman in high school she found her brother’s body after he had committed suicide. She writes about the 911 call, and the aftermath that left her family broken, left her parents emotionally absent. Hollis writes about the process of rebuilding her life afterward.
In a world where social media privileges the glossy view of things, Hollis encourages her readers to confront their pain. And while none of the advice in I Didn’t See That Coming is novel, when you’re in the middle of a shit storm, sometimes wisdom bears repeating.
The feminist heart of the book is the call to own your truth—whatever it is. Hollis writes: “…the grief and the pain that come from staying put in order to keep those around you comfortable are not an indication of a life well lived.” She encourages her readers to ask themselves: “What are the areas in your life where you’ve dissolved boundaries to be present for others at the loss of yourself?” She urges her readers to speak their truth daily, to create boundaries, and to acknowledge that their identities will change over time.
Hollis provides words of wisdom from her therapist: “whenever someone in my life consistently did something that upset me but I didn’t comment on it because I thought I was being selfish to admit that it was hurting me, that was where I needed a boundary.”
Readers who will pick up Hollis’s book are probably more likely than others to be in a lot of pain. Who else picks up a book with “When Your World Falls Apart” in the title? While, the book tries to be too many things at once—there’s a chapter on perspective, a chapter on mindset, and a chapter on managing your finances, there’s a wisdom to throwing everything and the kitchen sink at your troubles. Rock bottom isn’t a time to be picky about your resources. If you think of Hollis as taking the best self-help advice books, distilling their wisdom, and presenting it in her distinctive voice, this is basically what you’re getting. You’d probably get more from reading her sources (which she does often credit), but that would take far longer and, for many, probably be less relatable and feasible.
The simple and obvious advice to take things one day at a time is at once the most difficult and easiest to follow. And when one day at a time seems to be too much, she tells her readers to “focus on the next hour and how to care for yourself for those sixty minutes inside of it.” I wish I could create a digital alert on my phone that could text me those exact words whenever I’ve been triggered or overwhelmed.
Hollis has created a lifestyle brand out of her lifestyle. In a world of Instagram-ready lives, polished for the envy of the masses, Hollis sells a lifestyle more polished than yours, more put together, more beautiful, more fun, more inspiring. She is the ideal for the women trying to raise three kids, have a career, and maintain a happy “traditional” marriage while also occasionally drinking a margarita.
I could sit here and judge her feed, but I fall prey to these illusions myself. We all do. Maybe I’m not trying to be the perfect homemaker and female business professional extraordinaire, but I often find myself looking at pictures of women surfing big waves, climbing wild mountains, or I read the accomplishments of women writers I admire, and the wanderlust hits me; I find myself falling short. Instagram offers a curated feed for every last one of us. I don’t want Hollis’s life, but I also understand that she has harnessed the power of the medium to connect with her audience.
And connection is the focus of Didn’t See That Coming. Hollis advocates for connection with oneself and connection with others.
“If you want to move forward, be honest about what’s going on even if it’s only to yourself.” Admitting the problem is the first step in solving the problem, but I worry that in our culture of curated selves on social media, admitting the problem to oneself is only half the battle. Authenticity, openness, honesty, and connection with others from a place of vulnerability are just as important. In a world that increasingly encourages each person to be their own lifestyle brand, authenticity increasingly becomes the rarity.
Hollis posits that grief and loss are ultimately just identity crises. I tend to stand with Buddha and Shakespeare in believing that identity is performative and illusory and merely the surface social gloss. But Hollis resides deeply in the glossy veneer. To Hollis, grief, loss, and pain come from four main issues: (1) an identity a person had was taken away (you’re no longer a wife because you got divorced; you’re no longer a CEO because you lost your job), (2) you can’t get an identity you want (I can’t get pregnant, so I’ll never be a mom); (3) you don’t want the identity you have (I don’t want to be married anymore); (4) or someone else put you in a role you don’t want (you’re told by someone you love you’re something you know you’re not; this can be the most painful). Hollis’s solution is that we get to choose our identity, reinvent it, and can continue to have whatever identity we want. The solution sounds too flippant, too easy. Tell that advice to the former felon who still can’t vote in this election, the immigrant children still separated from their families, and the men and women killed at the hands of police. Do they get to choose the identities foisted upon them? Choosing your identity is a privilege, and it’s an illusion straight white men and women will most often claim.
Hollis writes: “I truly believe it’s possible to achieve anything you want, with hard work, but you don’t get to control the variables that will make it so or the time frame in which is appears.” But in the wake of the national awakening that has followed the murder of George Floyd and the gut-wrenching reckoning our nation has had to face about institutional racism, Hollis’s words come across as tone-deaf.
Mountain. Watercolor. Janice Greenwood.
I think the source of Hollis’s confusion lies in the conflation of identity and perspective-making. Identity is socially constructed and therefore is collectively constructed. Perspective, however, is chosen. Hollis notes: “your perspective on any and every given subject isn’t necessarily based on the truth, but instead is based almost entirely on your past experiences and what they’ve taught you to think about the subject up for review…you are in control of your perspective.”
Yes, hard work can get us far, but I think this fails to take into account the concept of reality and the reality that outside forces shape us, the reality that we aren’t in control of every outcome. To claim that we have complete control over our identities puts us once again in the digital Instagram-worthy realm of anything is possible with an airbrush, rather than in the flesh and bone, tooth and claw world of institutional racism, structural bias, and Donald Trump.
That said, Hollis’s no-excuses approach to perspective-building is only fair in a world that isn’t fair. And I do agree that the perspective we choose to take can shape our lives. I didn’t have the advantages my trust-funded (and more economically-stable) peers had. My parents didn’t pay for my education, I worked through college, I’m still sitting on an Olympus of student loan debt, my mom is a mentally-ill first-generation immigrant, my dad a traumatized Vietnam Vet, I’m not good at making connections and therefore never really got an editor to champion my work, I’m Hispanic, I’m white, I was born poor, but got a world-class education; I spent half a decade angry and lost, and that got me nowhere. Shit gets done when you get to work, despite whatever disadvantages (and advantages) you’ve been dealt. Shit got done when I changed my perspective and got to work, and understood that my success and failure was a factor of both my hard work and the obstacles and benefits I’d been dealt. By differentiating between perspective (what I could change) and the hand I’d been dealt (what I couldn’t change), I could better gauge my own success and failure when I compared my progress to others.
You wouldn’t know that Hollis is going through a divorce by looking at her social media account, though there is one photo of Hollis on her Instagram account where she has taken a selfie of herself and there is deep sadness in her eyes, the kind of sadness I recognized in pictures of myself in the weeks and months after my own divorce. In between the model-perfect hair, the perfectly styled “Good Housekeeping” type imagery, there’s a moment of honesty that is highly relatable. Her gems of wisdom for navigating tragedy are often buried in the rough of her memoir-style prose. I only wished she’d polished them, shaped them, and set them apart for the jewels they are. I wish she couched her book within the larger narrative of her life. What exactly happened to get her where she is. The specificity of her success and her grief was far more interesting than the generalities and self-help truisms.
As a writer I who creates legal content writing for divorce lawyers, I understand that Hollis’s choice to avoid discussion of her divorce on social media is not very shocking. Most divorce lawyers will warn you about posting anything about your marriage or divorce on social media while going through a divorce.
I think that a true reckoning with grief comes from the ego-crushing humbling process whereby the ego and identity gets completely annihilated. We get divorced, we suffer catastrophic injury, we lose everything. And in that obliterated place, where the ego is turned to cinders and everything we thought we were is drawn into question, we can finally look at ourselves as we truly are, look at our pure essence of love and pain and hurt and hope directly, and build more authentic lives, not structured on false foundations, but built from the unseen connections that bind us together. Identity keeps us separate. All life on this planet is woven together with love and dependency and yes, pain.
About the Writer
Janice Greenwood is a writer, surfer, and poet. She holds an M.F.A. in poetry and creative writing from Columbia University.
Poetry on change is perhaps so consoling because it helps us observe change in other minds or change in nature from a safe distance. The only constant in life is change. But when we are in the midst of it, it is all to easy to feel like the experience is unique and that we are alone. Change can be frightening (like death, or loss) or it can be inviting and welcomed (like a vacation or a new thrilling move). Perhaps the secret to welcoming change is to find the adventure within each shift. The Hawaiian word for change is huli, to turn. The turn can be a dance, like the hula, or a shift in perspective.
Poetry is a paradox of change and stillness. The art form depicts change–someone changing their own mind through the act of observation, or the individual reflecting on the passage of time. Poetry, at the same time, is a static object. The written poem is unchanging, fixed, but the psychological experience of reading a poem is transitory and exists within time, in motion. Poetry offers a vehicle through which we can embrace change, while also taking delight in the fixed nature of that which is already written. There is a great deal of comfort in facing uncertainty when filtered through the lens of the certain. The poem’s certainty lies in its writteness.
Nature’s unfolding is written in change. The Grand Canyon is the product of five million years of change, the slow process of a river’s erosion. Mountains rise slowly. Some are still rising. Volcanoes sometimes cause rapid change. Mount St. Helens erupted in Washington and half a mountain disappeared. In Hawai’i, magma creeps to the sea, and overnight a new beach is formed. Seasons change. Time passes. Nature’s change is slow but relentless.
The most difficult changes involve death and loss, but these changes can sometimes open new ways of being. We die so as to make room for the next generation. In order for new redwoods to grow, the redwood forest must burn. When the National Park Service relentlessly protected the forest from fires, no new trees sprouted. Fire opens the cones. When fire were permitted to burn freely, a new generation was seeded.
This is a metaphor for life. Change opens the human mind to new experiences and opportunities.
COVID-19 has changed our lives–perhaps permanently, but many of these changes are good. In O’ahu, where I live, Hanauma Bay, the coral reef state park is healing. Rare monk seals are swimming closer to shore. The corals are brighter. Bigger fish are once again venturing into the bay. People are changing too. May it be for the best and for the better.
About the Writer
Janice Greenwood is a writer, surfer, and poet. She holds an M.F.A. in poetry and creative writing from Columbia University.
Joan Didion is one of the great nonfiction writers of our time, not only for her incisive meditations on grief in The Year of Magical Thinking and Blue Nights, but for her years of magazine writing and reporting in which she produced pitch-perfect essays, one of my favorites of which is “On Self Respect.” Vogue magazine notes that “On Self Respect” was written not to meet a word count, but to meet “an exact character count.” Didion was asked to write the piece to fill in the space left by another writer who hadn’t met a deadline.
“On Self Respect” is a meditation on what it means to define success for oneself, what success really means.
Didion writes: “Most of our platitudes notwithstanding, self-deception remains the most difficult deception.”
Self-respect doesn’t derive from the approval of others who are “deceived easily enough,” but instead derives from an internal reckoning. “However long we postpone it, we eventually lie down alone in that notoriously uncomfortable bed, the one we make ourselves.” Here, we are forced to face “the sins of commission and omission, the trusts betrayed, the promises subtly broken, the gifts irrevocably wasted through sloth or cowardice or carelessness.”
And so success and self-respect depends not on outward validation, on the accolades, the awards, the good reviews, the likes, but instead depends entirely on how we view ourselves.
I think it comes down to having a keen understanding of one’s values, and being able to live up to them. The award will feel empty if it follows from the poem made cynically. The good review can be heartbreaking if it follows from a book written to pander to the crowd. The likes, the validation, the followers, they won’t mean a thing if we cannot sit alone with ourselves in the plain white room.
How do we sit alone with ourselves in that plain white room?
I don’t think we earn self-respect easily. It takes work. It takes risks. It means that we go out into the world, as we are, knowing we will make mistakes, and trusting that we will learn from them. And then we need to return and sit alone in the room, and think about our values, and re-evaluate them, and then evaluate them again. Over and over.
Didion writes: “…people with self-respect have the courage of their mistakes. They know the price of things. If they choose to commit adultery, they do not then go running, in an access of bad conscience, to receive absolution from the wronged parties.”
For Didion, self-respect springs from “the willingness to accept responsibility for one’s own life.”
And yes, we all need to take responsibility for our lives, but also with the understanding that such responsibility is not always easy. Bessel Van Der Kolk, in The Body Keeps the Score, writes, “we…know that, in order to become self-confident and capable adults, it helps enormously to have grown up with steady and predictable parents… A child who has been ignored or chronically humiliated is likely to lack self-respect.”
And so, while self-respect does require what Didion refers to as a kind of “moral nerve,” we need to acknowledge that it is also a pattern of behavior that is learned. Didion herself acknowledges that self-respect “can never be faked but can be developed, trained, coaxed forth.” This creates a paradox. There are those who have been privileged, who have been trained to have self-respect. There are those who know their worth because they had parents who instilled that sense of inner worth in them from the start. Self-respect comes more easily to those who may have had parents who “delighted in you, in your discoveries and explorations; parents who helped you organize your comings and goings; and who served as role models for self-care and getting along with other people” (Van Der Kolk). And so, while I love Didion’s essay for its “moral nerve,” I read it with a sense of having lost something. Character is learned. And when you grow up without stable role models, your construction of character will take much longer, will involve more mistakes, and will rarely come with ready guides and mentors able to help you.
I’ve had a couple of good writing mentors in my life; but I’ve only recently encountered people I would consider my moral mentors. I had to travel halfway across the world to Hawaii to find them. I find them in my friends Denny and Hye who take in injured birds and who are trying to help Hawaii farmers; in my boyfriend artist, Sergio Garzon, who could sell his art for thousands but often sells it for ten bucks because he believes art should be available to everyone.
Self-respect comes when we “put fears and doubts to one side,” when we weigh “immediate comforts against the possibility of larger, even intangible, comforts.” Didion goes on to note that self-respect “is a question of recognizing that anything worth having has its price…” The project may fail, the new house by the sea might get washed away, the marriage might not work out. And yet, those with self-respect, “are willing to invest something of themselves; they may not play at all, but when they do play, they know the odds.”
Self-respect comes when we understand our inner worth. Didion explains that when we have self-respect we have “the ability to discriminate, to love and to remain indifferent.” We are not “in thrall to everyone we see” because we understand what we value. We value our connections because we do not “despise those who have so few resources as to consort with us.” We don’t give in to the demands of others, but make demands of ourselves, and we don’t play roles in our lives, but play ourselves and ourselves alone. We create our own value and pursue things of worth to us.
Rare Bird. Watercolor. Janice Greenwood.
The power of self-respect is the power to “assign unanswered letters their proper weight, to free ourselves from the expectations of others.”
Success is therefore self-defined based on the values and goals we set for ourselves, based upon our inner moral compass.
Self-respect comes when we figure out what we want and when we work hard, sometimes late into the night, and into the weekend to get it. It’s when we don’t give up. It’s when we come home to the white room, alone, having failed or having succeeded, but able to look in the mirror and recognize who we see there.
