Janice Greenwood

Emotional labor is defined as the additional work a person performs when he or she is forced to hide feelings in order to maintain a status quo. Originally, the term was meant to be applied to workplace settings, where the status quo was the professionalism of the workplace. The term has since been expanded to include the ways in which emotional labor protects various kinds of status quo–from gender inequality to racism.

The Atlantic reports that the term was first coined by the sociologist Arlie Hochschild in her book called The Managed Heart. Hochschild examines the work individuals needed to perform when managing their emotions in certain jobs. David Foster Wallace would later refer to this phenomenon as “the professional smile.” During the #metoo movement, feminists examined the toll that emotional labor took on women (who are often forced to manage their emotions in personal as well as professional settings). But emotional labor is not limited to professional settings or to gender dynamics. I think now is an apt time to revisit Claudia Rankine’s Citizen, and to take a look at the way in which Rankine’s poetics reveals the ways in which black emotional labor affects the mind and the body.

As I read Claudia Rankine’s Citizen, I found myself encountering so many moments where Rankine had to make a decision: should she call out a racist remark or action, or should she remain quiet–let it slide. Rankine’s book is a reminder of the burden that black Americans have borne in the face of subtle and not-so-subtle racism. In the words of Michael Eric Dyson in his introduction to Robin Diangelo’s White Fragility, “For much of American history, race has been black culture’s issue; racism, a black person’s burden.” The brilliance of Rankine’s hybrid poetry, prose-poem, essay, and meditation on race is the ways in which it subtlety shifts the burden upon the white reader to hold herself accountable for her participation in white supremacy, and to understand the ways in which the burden of race has been placed upon black Americans’ shoulders. Those who are black so often bear the burden of holding racism to account. It is this exhausting emotional labor that Rankine explores in Citizen.

There were two kinds of moments Rankine describes in Citizen. One moment was one in which the white person acting in a racist manner did not realize he or she was being racist. The other moment was the one in which the white person caught their mistake, but refused to openly acknowledge it or apologize for it, thus placing the burden upon the speaker to address the racist remark.

Rankine describes the latter: “Certain moments send adrenaline to the heart, dry out the tongue, and clog the lungs…After it happened I was at a loss for words. Haven’t you said this yourself? Haven’t you said this to a close friend who early in your friendship, when distracted, would call you by the name of her black housekeeper… Eventually she stopped doing this, though she never acknowledged her slippage. And you never called her on it (why not?) and yet, you don’t forget.” There’s emotional labor involved in calling out this kind of racist slip. And the obligation to acknowledge it should fall upon the person who did the wrong.

Rankine describes the disassociation this creates: “You are in the dark, in the car, watching the black-tarred street being swallowed by speed; he tells you his dean is making him hire a person of color when there are so many great writers out there. You think this is maybe an experiment and you are being tested or retroactively insulted or you have done something that communicates this is an okay conversation to be having.”

A study published in the journal Social Science & Medicine found links between racism and negative health outcomes. Those in the study who experienced racism were more likely to smoke, engage in hazardous drinking, experience poorer cardiovascular health, poorer mental health, and psychological distress. Another study published in 2015 in the American Journal of Public Health surveyed Black New York City residents who lived in Black New York City neighborhoods. The survey asked respondents questions about instances of racism. Those who experienced racism were more likely to experience “poor mental health days” and those who denied thinking about race experienced the worse effects. The denial of racism, namely, the silence surrounding it, has the greatest physiological and psychological impact. It is this impact that Rankine deftly addresses head on when she describes the “adrenaline to the heart” the dried “tongue” the clogged “lungs.” Rankine’s description of the physiological experience of racism is like a punch to the gut. She explains it eloquently: “the body has memory. The physical carnage hauls more than its weight.”

The reasonable response to all of this is trauma. But when the speaker in Citizen shows up for her appointment with the trauma therapist, “the woman standing there yells, at the top of her lungs, Get away from my house!” And then there’s the moment of recognition, when the speaker tells the therapist she has an appointment, when the therapist realizes that the black person at her door is her patient, not a trespasser.

And then there’s that beautiful essay in the middle of the book about tennis that puts David Foster Wallace’s essays about tennis, Roger Federer, and free will to shame, because all I can see now is Serena Williams’s incredible self-control (does she have freedom to act or respond dynamically and authentically within a system where her every response will be judged through racist eyes, where her every choice is circumscribed by the color of her skin, where her very job is contingent upon her ability to perform black emotional labor and maintain a professional smile?) in the face of racist commentators and racist referees and racist opponents and that image of Dane Caroline Wozniacki with the stuffed bra and panties…
Later, in her “World Cup” “Script for Situation video created in collaboration with John Lucas, Rankine will write: “No one is free.”

And then there’s the “Script for Situation video comprised of quotes collected from CNN, created in collaboration with John Lucas” about Hurricane Katrina, and I can only ask you to read it because I can’t fully put into words the awfulness of it all, and the awfulness of “it’s awful, she said, to go back home to find your own dead child. It’s really sad. / And so many of the people in the arena here, you know, she said, were underprivileged anyway, so this is working very well for them.” And yet. And yet. “the fiction of the facts assumes randomness and indeterminacy.”

And the “Script for Situation video created in collaboration with John Lucas where “The pickup truck is human in this predictable way,” because the pickup truck represents the white man, who murdered James Craig Anderson in a hate crime. Rankine interrogates the ways in which language forgives the white murderer while shifting the burden upon the murdered.

But the brute fact is repeated, as if it needs to be repeated, and isn’t that the point–the fact that it needs to be repeated–how many times does it need to be said that “James Craig Anderson is dead.”

And the “Script for Situation video created in collaboration with John Lucas” on Stop-and-Frisk, where Rankine writes: “You can’t drive yourself sane” after being pulled over because “you fit the description because there is only one guy who is always the guy fitting the description.” And the repetition of the line, the recursion itself is mimetic of the experience because “you fit the description because there is only one guy who is always the guy fitting the description.”

Kate Kellaway, writing for the Guardian notes: “And there is nothing slight about the slights described here.”

What is the antidote to racism? “How to care for the injured body,/ the kind of body that can’t hold/ the content it is living?”

In Citizen, Rankine calls for an open acknowledgement of it– a calling to account. The emotional labor can no longer be put upon those who are Black.

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 her new non-fiction book Untamed (which I’ve recommended here), Glennon Doyle writes: “In America, there are not two kinds of people, racists and non-racists. There are three kinds of people: those poisoned by racism and actively choosing to spread it; those poisoned by racism and actively trying to detox; and those poisoned by racism who deny its very existence inside them.”

As we find ourselves as a nation taking stock of the ways in which systemic racism has denied black and brown and indigenous people their freedom, their land, their rights, their safety, and their very lives, it is important that each of us takes stock of ourselves, the ways in which we tacitly comply with systems of power and oppression, and the ways in which we benefit from these systems. This is a time that calls for deep reflection.

As a legal content writer, I’ve explored the many ways racism persists in our institutions and in the law. I’ve read about AI and racial bias in sentencing, police brutality, and how unconscious bias can impact minority applicants during the hiring process. Racially biased algorithms are artificial intelligence programs used by judges that send black and brown men and women to jail in higher numbers compared to white men and women. Prosecutors punch in information about the person and crime, including demographic information, and a recommendation about sentence length, probation, and other matters gets churned out. Because the data that has been put into the system is racially biased and influenced by years of racially biased sentencing, the sentences that come out of the system are racially biased as well. Black and brown Americans are more likely to be imprisoned and policed than white Americans. Racial bias in policing forms the foundation of the data. Flawed data leads to further flawed decisions, and the cycle continues. Finally, after all these years, lawyers at the New York Law Review are challenging these algorithms, claiming they violate the equal protection clause; I’m thrilled.

Though I’ve been writing about civil rights issues for years, I’ve found glaring gaps in my own reading. In recent weeks, I’ve been closely reading White Fragility by Robin Diangelo and poets like Claudia Rankine, Reginald Dwayne Betts, and Danez Smith. I realize that now is a time to support writers of color and also to conscientiously make space for new perspectives and ideas.

But as we take stock, we also need to make room for the reality that what we discover may not always reveal our better angels, but require a tougher self-assessment. Glennon Doyle’s Untamed offered an interesting chapter on racism that highlights some of the challenges that white women might face as they learn more about racial disparities and systemic challenges facing people of color. Doyle writes about how she had hoped that the election of Donald Trump might be a moment for the nation to take a moral inventory of itself. How “this nation–founded upon ‘liberty and justice for all’–was built while murdering, enslaving, raping, and subjugating millions.” She hoped that the election of Donald Trump would lead Americans to “admit that liberty and justice for all has always meant liberty for white straight wealthy men.” Doyle had hoped for a reckoning, but she writes, “I’d forgotten that sick systems are made up of sick people. People like me.”Doyle’s story about how she became “racially sober” is an important lesson for us all, especially for those of us white women hoping to show up for Black Lives Matter and to protest police brutality and systemic racism in a way that makes a real difference.

Doyle writes: “In order to get healthy, everybody has to stay in the room and turn themselves inside out. We all need to address our own situation, our own privilege, and the ways in which we have benefitted from systemic racism, but we need to do so in a way that doesn’t harm the movement or interfere with black voices that need to be heard. We enter race conversations far too early and we lead with our feelings and confusion and opinions. When we do this, we are centering ourselves, so we inevitably get put back where we belong, which is far from the center.”

In recent weeks, people in cities across the nation have taken to the streets protesting the murder of George Floyd, calling to defund the police, calling for greater police accountability, and calling for an end to systemic racism. I watched as Instagram blacked out on #blackouttuesday, and thought about how sometimes good intentions can have unintended consequences. Black Lives Matter leaders were concerned that the blackout would drown out the voices of those using the Black Lives Matter hashtag to keep people up to date about the movement.

As a part Puerto Rican, part Cuban woman with my green eyes and light-brown hair that bleaches toward blonde in the Hawaii sun, I have enjoyed my share of white privilege. I have had the benefit of being able to inhabit two worlds–the world in which I grew up–a predominantly Latino and hispanic neighborhood in Miami, where my closest friends and their parents had immigrated from countries across South America and the Caribbean, and as a woman who was able to “pass” as non-Latina and inhabit white spaces when I went off to university (though not quite white enough to fit in everywhere).

The truth is that we all have racial obligations to one another, obligations than extend beyond who we are in the present. The poet Claudia Rankine writes in her book-length mixed-media poem Citizen about this as our “historic selves” and our “self selves” where you “mostly interact as friends with mutual interest and, for the most part, compatible personalities; however, sometimes your historical selves, her white self and your black self, or your white self and her black self, arrive with the full force of your American positioning.” This is where we need to acknowledge that our position in this society is shaped by forces beyond us, and that we benefit or are held back by these forces depending on who we are.

The tragic murder of George Floyd has been an opportunity for me to look inward at the ways I can personally contribute to justice. I have spent time meditating on the ways in which I have contributed to and benefitted from a system that confers rewards upon those who inhabit white bodies, while punishing and disenfranchising those who inhabit black and brown ones.

I think about times when I was younger and had mental health crises. If I looked less white, would the police have been so nice to me during those wellness checks? Or, would they have drawn their guns instead? I was given the benefit of the doubt, when I probably would have been Baker Acted and locked away in a mental health hospital, or worse, shot and killed.

In Untamed, Glennon Doyle writes about how she committed herself to reading every book possible on race in America. Doyle writes: “I felt ashamed as I began to learn all the ways my ignorance and silence had hurt other people. I felt exhausted because there was so much more to unlearn, so many amends to be made, and so much work to do.” The lesson I take from Doyle’s experience is this: read black writers, read those writing on race in America, take the lead from Black leaders, be willing to be humble and guided right now, but speak up when you see injustice.

For the white people confused about what to do right now, I think it’s okay to sit with that discomfort, and to consider that maybe it’s time to do some reading before speaking, more listening before shouting.

As a legal content writer I write for law firms. For the past several years I have been writing about police brutality, systemic racism, and the ways in which people of color can use the civil court system to seek justice when the police are violent. This is not the solution, but for a long time I thought it was a solution that held those in power accountable. I once believed that if the police were sued enough, that they’d get rid of officers who abused Black and brown citizens. But now I see that the man who knelt on George Floyd’s neck for more than eight minutes had a history of complaints against him–18 in fact. And that other officers involved in the murder also had been sued in the past for police brutality. The solution must go deeper than civil courts and laws.

The injustices and flagrant abuse of power we’ve seen in the way law enforcement is run in America is not new. Only now have we reached our reckoning and our breaking point. I think we need to defund the police and put the money into providing a free university eduction for all. We need to invest not in policing, but in community.

Part of the process of becoming “racially sober” means understanding that in the process of being an ally, we might sometimes say or do the wrong thing, and get corrected for it. Doyle writes: “Every white person who shows up and tells the truth–because it’s her duty as a member of our human family–is going to have her racism called out…She will need to learn to withstand people’s anger, knowing that much of it is real and true and necessary. She will need to accept that one of the privileges she’s letting burn is her emotional comfort.”

Showing up means showing up with vulnerability and humility. Doyle writes: “We show up and then, when we are corrected, we keep working…We have fallen into the trap that becoming racially sober is about saying the right thing instead of becoming the right thing.” The conversation must start within. We must show up, but must show up with humility, which means we must yield to the voices of those who know more than we do. For my part, I plan to keep reading, and writing legal content that promotes justice.

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.

Phoebe Bridgers recently released a new album, ‘Punisher’ and I had to stop everything I was doing and listen to it all the way through. We are living in a time where I generally want to cry myself to sleep after hearing the latest news, and Phoebe Bridgers’s ‘Punisher’ is definitely music to listen to as you sob yourself to sleep.

I need to be clear. I know nothing about music. I don’t really know what a mellotron is, and I couldn’t name a minor chord if you put a gun to my head. What I do know is that I’ve been reading and writing poetry for over a decade; I know poetry when I encounter it, and I can say for sure that Bridgers’s music is poetry in the truest sense. So when I approach a Phoebe Bridgers song, I approach it like I approach any song–from a literary perspective.

When I first actually listened to a Phoebe Bridgers song, I was putting the finishing touches on a book of poetry I’d been working on for the past 15 years– my first book of poetry, the one I keep abandoning. Let me clarify. I’d listened to Phoebe Bridgers’s songs before this. I’d had many of her songs in my Spotify playlist for some time and I’d probably heard her songs a few times before, always in the shuffle when driving somewhere or while putting a pot of tea on the hot plate before work in the morning. But the night I finally really listened to Phoebe Bridgers—by which I mean, I listened to her in the way I’d once listened to Connor Oberst of Bright Eyes as a teenager, by which I mean I listened with an open and vulnerable heart, which is the only way one can really listen—I had to stop working on my poetry book and kneel. Before the song ended, I was lying face-down on the living room floor, sobbing. I cried for three hours straight. The song was “Smoke Signals” from Bridgers’s Stranger in the Alps album. The reasons for my emotional breakdown are too personal to go into much depth here. But I think that’s the point of all Bridgers songs. The specifics are so specific as to render the emotion so palpable that one can’t help but relate to the specificity of the emotion and mystery of its source. Nostalgia, memory, and sorrow can rise up out of nowhere: the glimpse of a red wheelbarrow, a mother’s watch, a reference to Elvis or an empty hall where no one responds—each can be devastating in ways so specific and so mysterious they cannot be explained. And yet, each image brings with it an emotional understanding so clear, the brute nature of the thing itself is whispered between the lyrics.  Either way, “Smoke Signals” had me sobbing on the floor because the song was beautiful, because it was sad, because I had been loved and because I was still loved, because I had lost so much, and gained so much in the losing; I sobbed because I was grateful. Bridgers’s new album “Punisher” holds all the mystery of Emily Dickinson’s hymnals, with the surreal but emotive honesty of a Pablo Neruda poem. Bridgers’s “I See You”  is about how desire can be a form of travel. The song is heavy with the mystery of its arrival. Learning about the song’s origin (a breakup with her drummer) unveiled a mystery to the music that I would have preferred remain intact.  Bridgers sings: “I’ve been playing dead my whole life.”  But the song is not about playing dead. The song is about waking up. It’s about finally feeling something after thinking it’s impossible to feel anything at all. It’s about what it means to be a young woman in a world that denies young women the space and time to grow into their desires. It’s a song about finally growing into your desires and finding everything else wrecked around you. Sometimes you can only see the house until you’ve burnt it to the ground. When you’re young you think you’ve figured yourself out. You decide you are the girl who is dead inside. And then, one day, something changes. Or, everything changes all at once. I think that for many women, these realizations come to us older rather than younger. If it happens when you’re older, you’ve had some time to make some serious life decisions, like marriage, or babies, or uprooting your life and moving to another country.

When I was a teenager, my grandmother Rose warned me against getting married too young. She said, “Get married when you’re at least 30, travel, see a little of the world.” I didn’t take her advice, so by the time I was 30, I was going through a divorce. The thing is, for all my ability to interpret poetry and literature, it never occurred to me that in my grandmother’s admonition to travel and see the world, she might not have literally meant a vacation to the Caribbean or Paris.  The thing about Phoebe Bridgers is that the songs are at once general and specific. The emotions are specific, the details are specific, but the general feeling they leave you with is powerful enough to devastate you on a Wednesday night.  

“Cause I don’t know what I want/ Until I fuck it up.”  

If you haven’t already done so, I highly recommend you make your way to the New Yorker website post-haste and read Amanda Petruish’s stunning profile of Phoebe Bridgers. And then, right after, make your way to Nylon and read Lauren McCarthy’s “Why Does Sad Music Make You Happy?”  According to scientific research, listening to sad nostalgic music releases the hormones that console. Phoebe Bridger’s music is indeed a steady I.V. drip of prolactin. I used to think that listening to sad music made me masochistic. I see now that listening to sad music is like having an honest conversation with a good friend. Chemically, maybe it does the same thing. I love everything about Bridgers’s new album, ‘Punisher.’ I love that it features Connor Oberst, one of my favorite musicians of all time. I love how he enters almost like a ghost; is that him, I wondered as I listened.

As a teenager I listened to emo, and was obsessed with Bright Eyes and Connor Oberst. Some of the most transfiguring moments of my life happened in a Connor Oberst concert. Oberst has found something like transcendence in his later years—writing about meditation and the spirals of time. Bridgers’s songs are not quite about transcendence, but they are about transformation, alienation, and a desperate clinging to the self in a world that constantly throws young women off-balance from themselves. I hear echoes of early Bright Eyes in Bridgers’s music, but Bridgers’s self-alienation is so true to the female experience of what it means to exist in a relationship as a young woman that I almost wish I’d had her music around when I was younger.

To grow up as a young woman is to finally take ownership of your fate and your desires. It’s finally understanding what Joan Didion meant when she talked about self-respect in her essay “On Self Respect,” how Didion wrote of it as “the willingness to accept responsibility for one’s own life” and an  honest appraisal of one’s own self betrayals. Bridgers sings about self-betrayals in relationships, how easy it is to lose oneself to the serotonin drip.

In her song “Halloween,” the music fades out with Bridgers singing over and over “I’ll be whatever you want.” But as the album ends, the speaker recaptures herself. In “Graceland Too” we encounter the moment of freedom: “No longer a danger to herself or others/ She made up her mind and laced up her shoes/ Yelled down the hall but nobody answered/ So she walked outside without an excuse…She can do anything she wants to do.” But the freedom is tenuous. The speaker tenebristically looks back toward the other: “I would do anything you want me to…whatever you want me to do I will do.” I don’t think it’s an accident that the album ends with the singer gasping for air, drowning.

I’m so grateful we have Bridgers’s voice amongst us. We need more women singing and writing about real things, writing about what it means to lose yourself and get found again, and then get lost again. I’m still finishing that book of poetry. It’s been 15 years of work. Bridgers sings, “No, I’m not afraid of hard work.” Okay then, I won’t be afraid either, Phoebe. It’s time I got back to working on that damn book. Time to get found. I hope it won’t take me another 15 years. But if it does, Phoebe Bridgers will be playing on the background. On repeat.  

Want more sad songs to cry yourself to sleep? Check out my review of Billie Eilish’s “Everything I Wanted.”

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 am scared about so many things. I’m scared of abandonment and of being alone. I’m scared of small gatherings of strangers (thank goodness, I’ve been released from those for a while). I’m scared that I might choke on my lunch. I’m scared of panic attacks at 3 a.m. I’m scared right now, as I write this, thinking of who might read it and judge me. I’m scared that no one will read it and judge me, and then what’s the point of even trying?

Some days are just hard. I don’t want to get out of bed and if I do, I feel like I’m walking through a thick molasses of the soul. I feel like Ishmael in Moby Dick “deliberately pausing before coffin warehouses.” Then I think about Moby Dick (the book, itself), and how I’ve miserably failed at finishing that novel every time I start reading it. On these kinds of days, I can neither sit still with myself nor bring myself to walk to the beach. I try gratitude. But, a vague pall covers the day.

We all have days like this. Pema Chödrön tells Oprah about one of them. One day, Pema Chödrön was sitting on her front porch drinking tea when her husband of eight years came up to her and told her the marriage was over, that he was having an affair, and wanted a divorce. This revelation, which Chödrön described as “traumatizing” sent her on a journey that brought her to Buddhism and to the spiritual life. Along the way she discovered that her spiritual practice was not to be centered on escaping pain, but on embracing it wholeheartedly. This is the theme of her luminous book, The Wisdom of No Escape. Chödrön calls her second husband one of her best teachers and the book has served as a kind of reminder to me that our greatest source of suffering can often be our greatest teachers.

I carried the book with me in the days before and after my final divorce hearing. I held the book close to me when I was homeless, living in a tent in Kentucky. I took the book with me on the long subway ride out to Far Rockaway on lonely Sunday summer afternoons when I went surfing. When I felt I had no friends in the city, I opened the book and found wisdom and hope. When another relationship fell apart, I opened the dog-eared pages and found solace.

Loving Kindness and Pain

The Wisdom of No Escape is the book Chödrön developed from lectures she gave during a month-long dathun in Gampo Abbey. For those of us who can’t afford to go on a monastic retreat, and for those of us who don’t know when monastic retreats will be permitted during this era of pandemic, Chödrön’s book is a beautiful literary retreat, a book that can be read in the morning before a long meditation session or a long walk.

“There’s a common misunderstanding among all the human beings who have ever been born on the earth that the best way to live is to try to avoid pain and just try to get comfortable,” explains Chödrön in the opening line of her book.

Chödrön believes that if we stop trying to get everything to turn out “on our own terms” and approach the changing tides of life with curiosity and bravery, that we can see that the point of meditation is not “to change ourselves” but that it is “about befriending who we are already.”

The problem is that some days I just don’t like who I am. Maybe these are the days when I just need to look closer and sit longer with the asshole in the mirror. Or maybe those are the days when the asshole needs compassion, or a good talking to, or a good cry. The essence of the book is about finding balance. Chödrön urges her readers to loosen up when they feel tight, and to choose discipline when they feel loose.

Precision, Gentleness, and Openness

Chödrön explains that “the basic point of it all is just to learn to be extremely honest and also wholehearted about what exists in your mind.” We do this through meditation that is precise, gentle, and open.

This practice of ruthless self-honesty is important because Chödrön notes “No one else can really sort out for you what to accept—what opens up your world—and what to reject—what seems to keep you going round and round in some kind of repetitive misery.” Individual uniqueness means that what might be “poison” for one person might be “medicine” for others. No one but me can say what heals me and what hurts me. “My middle way and your middle way are not the same middle way.” For someone who has spent a good portion of her life people pleasing, this sentence is not just a stab in the chest, it is a call to action.

Chödrön believes that we have been given exactly what we need to wake up. The poison can be the medicine. Like Friar Lawrence in Romeo and Juliet, no herb of the earth is so “vile” that it is absent any “special good” and none is “so good but strained from that fair use/ revolts from true birth, stumbling on abuse.” Good things in excess can kill, and poison, when used as medicine, can heal.

Why Am I So Scared?

Life has this habit of constantly pushing us to our limits. But the practice, according to Chödrön is to always say a resounding “yes to whatever is put on your plate, whatever knocks on your door, whatever calls you up on your telephone.” The whole point of life is meeting your fears. “Life is a whole journey of meeting your edge again and again.” The moments when we are most scared bring our most profound lessons. When pain comes, the whole point is to say yes, to let it in, to embrace it and see what sits on the other side. The book’s refrain is to make use of what life gives you: both the pain and the joy.

It’s also a book about hard work, about the hard work of being a human in the world, and the hard work of living an authentic life. The thing about living a full life where you embrace your dreams is that it’s incredibly inconvenient. Chödrön explains: “When you really start to take the warrior’s journey—which is to say, when you start to want to live your life fully… when discovery and exploration and curiosity become your path—then basically, if you follow your heart, you’re going to find that it’s often extremely inconvenient.”

Perhaps fear is the bardo, the in-between place, the place that is neither here nor there. Life is precious and short. Fear is part of its unfolding. Sometimes you can learn more lying in bed than you can getting out of it. But eventually, you’ll still need to get out of bed.

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.

Fame is a hall of mirrors. Authentic talent, subjected to such reproduction, often manifests itself before an audience as a shadow of a shadow, a thousand iterations and reflections away from the source. If you happen to be the subject at the center of this abyss, how do you maintain grasp of who you are? It would be all too easy to mistake one of the many manifestations of yourself for yourself, after all. Who hasn’t stared into the mirror at three a.m. and wondered who was staring back at them? We all struggle with being ourselves. In a world where we perform ourselves on the Internet for all the world to see, where vacations are often pre-packaged photoshoots, Instagram-ready, where one’s appearance in a place is easily repurposed for the ether of cyberspace, where life’s ceremonies are meticulously documented, packaged, and posted, where life itself isn’t real until it has been documented—one question remains: who am I? This is the central question Alicia Keys asks herself in her interesting memoir, More Myself: A Journey (written with Michelle Buford). While the memoir is written through the lens of fame, it raises some interesting questions to which we all can relate.

It is easy to forget that the very concept of a unique and individual self, distinct and whole, didn’t really exist until the 18^th century. The self as myth feels like a uniquely American project. Chaucer’s pilgrims in the Canterbury Tales are types, not individuals and Shakespeare’s kings enter stage left with the royal “we” behind them. The myth of the self and the legend of rugged individuality is such a largely American enterprise, that I can’t think about it without referencing Walt Whitman’s paradoxical search for self when he wrote: “Do I contradict myself? Very well, then I contradict myself. I am large. I contain multitudes.”

Nothing encapsulates the American fascination with the unique individual self quite like the celebrity memoir. Here, the celebrity, in this case, Keys, is able to (through the lens of fame) at once assert her uniqueness while acknowledging her contribution to the culture at large. But when your uniqueness as an individual informs the culture at large, your I can very quickly become someone else.

About the tennis player Michael Joyce, David Foster Wallace wrote: “You are invited to imagine what it would be like to be among the hundred best in the world at something. At anything. I have tried to imagine; it’s hard.” Alicia Keys doesn’t leave us to imagining. Her memoir is a window through which we can enter her world, for just a little while. There are lessons there.

A culture that worships fame (which requires mass appeal) even as it requires rugged individualism, presents its celebrities with a serious conundrum. How do you at once appeal to the masses, while also remaining true to yourself? I hold that this conundrum is not only presented to celebrities like Alicia Keys, but is offered to all of us, given that each of us is now the center of our own little fame universe on Facebook and Instagram. We curate our uniqueness while appealing to the masses to amass likes.

When your “self” is a product (and I hold that it doesn’t matter whether the product is a Grammy-award-winning album, or your curated Facebook page), what are you? And while celebrities are the most commodified among us, any one of us who uses social media is also a product. What changes do we make in our daily lives and self-presentation to make that product more palatable? And what happens to us internally (psychologically), in a world where the curated life is often privileged over life itself? In More Myself we get an answer: “It’s hard to pinpoint the precise moment when we internalize others’ assessments; it’s usually not a single experience but rather a series of moments that bruise the spirit and lead us to distrust ourselves and those around us.” The process by which we externalize our views of ourselves, by which we give in to the easy product that amasses likes over the difficult and authentic, is subtle–it erases the soul so slowly, you don’t see it until you wake up one day, wondering who you are.

But who are these others? Who are the “those around us” who are trustworthy (or untrustworthy)? In a life constantly framed by social media, where the anonymous masses become the audience, where does the self truly arise? In the dark quiet room of the soul, which voice is speaking, when I say, I am here? Is it really me, or is it the likes, the newsreel, the others? And how do we remain true to that inner, quiet voice amongst all the noise?

In this miasma of performance, we find Alicia Keys in More Myself. What shocked me most about Keys’s memoir was how relatable it was. None of us are going to get invited to Prince’s house, and while I dream that one day I’ll write the book that will get me invited to visit Oprah in Maui, I acknowledge that such invitations are sent on Hermetic wings and are designated only for the initiated. And yet, even as Alicia passes through this kaleidoscope of initiation into fame’s rarified dream world, she (mostly, at least in the first 100 or so pages) remains entirely sympathetic.

There’s the still-life of the one-bedroom apartment Keys shared with her mother in Hell’s Kitchen when she was growing up. There’s the vignette of the hard-working mother. There’s Keys herself in the “oversize sweaters, baggy pants, Timberland boots…” because in her neighborhood, “wearing anything formfitting could get you mistaken for a hooker.” I found myself nodding and underlining passages where she described trying to hide her body so that it wouldn’t be noticed by the cat-calling men in the street. As a woman in America you have two choices: to choose to be noticed or to erase yourself. I chose to erase myself and could relate to Keys’s choice. And then there’s the description of the years of hard work at music, the performances in the parks, rec centers, schools and cafés— how hard Keys worked from the start—her insatiable hunger to put herself out there any way she could. Her relentless commitment.

It could be a story about any city girl. But then, her story becomes the fairy tale. She gets the record deal. And the story is all the more beautiful because it doesn’t mean overnight success for her. “A contract with a label is an open doorway. And what no one tells you is that once you step through that door, you’re mostly on your own.” After failing to produce a record with the producers, she writes: “I always made the most progress at home, in the makeshift studio Kerry [her boyfriend at the time] and I had created…the two of us would be up until sunrise, vibing and jamming and just enjoying the music.” She chooses play instead of work, creating “for the love of the process.” And, along with the play, she was diligent and disciplined, working late into the night. She remained authentic even after she got the deal. Some of us don’t get the deal, and still can’t stay authentic.

Keys writes about striving to maintain her artistic integrity throughout the process. There’s a difference between what can be sold and what is real and true. When Columbia calls her record a “demo,” she leaves the label, choosing to own her vision for her first record instead of succumbing to the label’s idea of what she should be. “If I betrayed that girl—if I sold myself out by succumbing to the label’s vision of who I should be—I might have been an extraordinary success. But I would’ve also been utterly miserable. I would’ve been up there on some stage, singing songs I didn’t truly believe in.” 

The book is worth reading for the first 100 pages alone. Keys’s commitment to her creative integrity and her descriptions of grit and determination are inspiring. She had me asking: when was the last time I stayed up all night working on something that mattered to me? Could I create a book that was entirely true, created from a wholly real place? Would I have the courage to walk away from a book deal if the publisher wanted me to change that book? I don’t know.

To commit to a creative project is to commit oneself to an uncertain outcome. And yet, there’s solace in More Myself for those on the journey: “Nothing but uncertainty is certain. Circumstances come together, only to fall apart moments or months later.” Keys’s refrain in these early pages is a reminder of the importance of patience. It takes her years from the signing of her record deal to the date of her record release. And even after her release, the plan was for her to be discovered “one performance at a time.”

Patience. Could I be that patient? Have I been willing to take it one poem at a time, one article at a time? Have I been patient?

Some of us just make it bigger, though. Sometimes “one performance at a time” happens to be a performance on Oprah. But Keys has earned it by then–after the years in the apartment studio, the rec center performances, the park performances, the sleepless nights, the relentless commitment to vision and integrity. When Keys performs on Oprah, the moment is perfectly captured for the true glory it is—the triumph after so much work. No other performance or accolade Keys writes about later resonates as strongly as her description of her transcendent moment on Oprah when she performed “Fallin'” for the first time for a national audience (no, not even her Times Square performance with Jay-Z): “the universe took over. Something supernatural happens when you give in to the energy of a song.” But it’s not supernatural; it’s six years of hard work on the album; it’s the years of training and performing before all that.

The rest of the book doesn’t really hold me after that (with a few notable exceptions, particularly some intimate glimpses into her life as a parent). The rest of the book is just fame and its fruits—the money, the tours, the expensive vacations to Egypt where she reconnects with her spirit and heritage (which really could have been its own book), the time she spends time with gurus, the collaboration with JAY-Z, the friendship with Michelle Obama—it is all well and good—I’m happy for Keys; she deserves it all—but all of that is just the theatre of fame writ large. The more fascinating writing is found in the story that got her there.

Ultimately, we can all be ourselves. It’s a story of hard work, authentic striving, creative honesty in the midst of challenge, and the process of learning how to be a self in the world. It involves listening to the pull of passion that tells you when you are on the right path. Keys puts it perfectly: “When you’ve chosen the right path for yourself, you usually know it immediately. The choice just sits right in your spirit. You’re not second-guessing your decision or thinking about turning back.” May we all learn how to be ourselves.

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.

When the poet Jericho Brown got the flu in 2018 (long before the coronavirus burnt through the world), Brown wrote the following for the Poetry Foundation’s blog: “I was pretty sure I was going to die… I thought I was going to die because the illness puts those who have it in a proximity to mortality that only can be compared to certain kinds of near misses.” When Brown recovered, he didn’t want to go out and find love or go see the Grand Canyon. “I all the more wanted to use the time which now felt more precious to sit my ass down somewhere and write the poems of my life.” And so, in the wake of the flu, Brown set down to write “several of the sonnet subversions that were beginning to make their way into a book which is out now.” The book is The Tradition. It recently won the Pulitzer Prize.

Some of the most remarkable poems in this very good book are Brown’s “duplex” series—the new form Brown created. When I first read a “duplex,” I felt distinctly like I had never encountered a poem quite like this before, but there was an uncanny familiarity to the form despite its newness. What I read wasn’t quite a villanelle but had the relentless repetitiveness of a villanelle; it was like a pantoum, but shorter. It had the length of a sonnet, but was not quite a sonnet. In the Poetry Foundation’s blog, Brown writes: “One such subversion that I had thought through for about 10 years—while washing dishes and cleaning the tub and grading papers and falling asleep next to one form of earthly beauty or another—was a sonnet crown that only included the repeated lines of the sonnet. Yes, I’m so angry I spent years thinking of ways to gut the sonnet.” Beautiful.

The 14-line structure goes: ABBCCDDEEFFGGA, with each paired line being almost a perfect echo of the first line. The opening line closes the poem. The echo is a return to the initial thought, with slight transformations. In the first “Duplex” poem, the opening lines go: “A poem is a gesture toward home./It makes dark demands I call my own./ Memory makes demands darker than my own.” Memory picks up where poetry leaves off, and takes the poem to the abusive father, who “hit hard as a hailstorm.” The father becomes a force of nature, which leads us to the weeping mother, which leads us to the ultimate transformation: “None of the beaten end up how we began./ A poem is a gesture toward home.” The abused suffer transformation. And, when home isn’t safe, the only safe thing to do is to transform home into something else, to lock the father in 14 lines, to lock the father inside a gesture.

The second “duplex” in the book tackles rape as its subject, and the opening line is sharp and pitch-perfect: “The opposite of rape is understanding.” In a field of flowers “Men roam shirtless as if none ever hurt me./ Men roam that myth. In truth, one hurt me.” The wish for a field of harmless men is transformed into the truth that some of the men in the field might not be harmless. And it’s not enough to neutralize the men, the poet wants to obliterate the field, “To obliterate my need for the field.” On the field, the poet imagines the body as a house of prayer. But the temple of the body has been left in “disrepair.” The body becomes the obliterated place where the hope of understanding can begin, but only through transformation, only through turning the flowers to paintbrushes, the body into a temple.

Brown writes about his search for the “duplex” form for the Poetry Foundation. He asked himself: “What does a sonnet have to do with anybody’s content? And if the presumed content of a sonnet is that it’s a love poem, how do I—a believer in love—subvert that.” Maya Phillips, writing for the New York Times, reviewing The Tradition notes: “In ‘The Tradition’ Brown creates poetry that is a catalog of injuries past and present, personal and national…Brown brings a sense of semantic play to blackness, bouncing between different connotations of words to create a racial doublespeak.” Transformation comes at every level in this book. Brown’s transformations are semantic, formal, and syntactical. No aspect of language evades his transformational powers. On the “Duplex” form, the New York Times’s Phillips notes: “the repetition invites us forward only to push us slightly backward.”

So, the third “Duplex” starts with love: “I begin with love, hoping to end there. / I don’t want to leave a messy corpse.” But the poem, doesn’t end with love. The poem cannot transform into love, not yet. It will settle one step back, on hope instead: “In the dream where I am an island/ I grow green with hope. I’d like to end there.” This Duplex is haunted. It is haunted by the black and brown men killed by police. It is haunted by racism, haunted by institutional violence. (“The Tradition,” the title poem of the book, ends with the names of John Crawford, Eric Garner, and Mike Brown.) The speaker dreams he is an island, which is, of course, an allusion to John Donne’s “No Man is an Island” where Donne’s writes: “Any man’s death diminishes me/ because I am involved in mankind.” Donne’s point is harnessed and transformed to Brown’s purposes—and beautifully so. Every death diminishes us all. Every person matters. The tradition will not get the last word: Crawford, Garner, and Brown will.

The fourth “Duplex” starts with the line: “Don’t accuse me of sleeping with your man” and takes the reader through a delicious affair, where “we’d make love on trains and in dressing rooms.” The man was “A bore at home, he transformed in the city. / What’s yours at home is a wolf in my city.” There are many facets to the self. Change in place or circumstance leads to transformation. Sex leads to transformation. Is there a side of the human less than human that is released through such forceful sexuality? The final transformation is away from the human: “You can’t accuse me of sleeping with a man.”

The final, and fifth “duplex,” the poem that closes the book, brings us back to the image of the father, who haunts Brown’s experience of love. “My last love drove a burgundy car” becomes “my tall father/ was my first love. He drove a burgundy car.” And in the middle of the poem, we return to the other duplex poems, the messy corpse: “Any man in love can cause a messy corpse. / But I didn’t want to leave a messy corpse.” Is the messy corpse the beloved or the self? Is the beloved the father or someone else? Does it matter?

In creating these duplexes Brown “wanted to highlight the trouble of a wall between us who live within a single structure. What happens when that wall is up and what happens when we tear it down? How will we live together? Will we kill each other? Can we be more careful?”

In his Poetry Foundation blog, Brown writes: “I should remind everyone who knows me that I do not believe that poems are made of our beliefs. Instead, I believe poems lead us to and tell us what we really believe.” The choices we make when we search for a rhyme, “tell us things about our individual and collective subconscious minds.” What we create, over time, tells us who we are and what we think. I love that idea, of poem and art serving as a teacher, guiding us toward our truest beliefs.

The Tradition is stunning. There is so much here beyond the “duplex” series, though the “duplex” poems are a perfect encapsulation of Brown’s lyrical, formal, and creative powers. This is a poet engaging the tradition and rejecting it, as it must ultimately be rejected. What emerges from the ashes is brilliant. Read The Tradition and take Brown’s advice that works well for this era of pandemic: “…stay alive. Drink water. Read poems. Be good to your friends. Take care of yourself.” And try writing a duplex. It’s fun.

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.

To describe what is absent and to make present what is not there is the work of the English elegy, a form that traces its history back to the Pearl poem, to Milton’s Lycidas, John Donne, and relatively more recently to Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s In Memoriam, and more recent still to the poetry of Dylan Thomas and Elizabeth Bishop. So, when the back sleeve of Victoria Chang’s new poetry book claims that her “one long, skinny rectangle… became a new form with which to study sorrow,” I become immediately interested, then quite skeptical, and finally, disappointed. I’d hardly call poems written in the form of an obituary a new form, but Chang’s Obit delivers in other, more interesting ways. There are diverse ways to grieve. Victoria Chang offers readers a more intellectual grief, a chillier one, but one no less true for the telling.

In Obit the deceased are notably absent. The poet admits defeat and chooses to focus on recapturing the fragments. I am reminded more of Elizabeth Bishop’s “One Art,” where the losses accumulate, but nevertheless remain fragmentary and fragmented.

In Obit, sometimes the fragments are things, sometimes people, sometimes situations. Chang’s Obituaries are dedicated to the fragments: “My Father’s Frontal Lobe—died,” “Language—died,” “The Future—died,” “Civility—died,” “My Mother’s Teeth,” “Appetite—died,” “Oxygen—died,” “Home—died,” “Time—died,” “Control—died,” “Memory—died.” The small elegies that form the totality of the loss each become artifacts, the ephemeral become tangible.

Chang’s losses are substantial. Her father lost the ability to speak after suffering a stroke and her mother died from pulmonary fibrosis. Of all the types of brain damage a person can suffer, brain damage that results in the loss of language is the most heartbreaking. In fact, the late neurosurgeon, Paul Kalanithi notes that neurosurgeons generally won’t perform surgery on individuals with lesions in the language centers of the brain. Language is such an essential capacity of the human experience, and the loss so isolating, so devastating, that many would sooner die than lose the ability. This loss makes Chang’s elegies particularly heartbreaking and Chang plays on the ironies of this loss with skill. The initial shock of the loss evokes Emily Dickinson’s “chill” and “stupor.” “At the hospital, Victoria Chang cried when her father no longer made sense. This was before she understood the cruelty of his disease.”

Chang sets herself the high bar of taking on the form of the elegy itself; it’s not enough to write an elegy, she wants to transform it. While the poetry sometimes echoes Bishop’s “One Art” (“The first of five moves meant the boxes were still optimistic…”) and it sometimes echoes Joan Didion’s beautifully elegiac memoirs, I often found these choices sometimes limited and curious. Rather than feeling personal, the choices seem convenient. Perhaps the author chooses a limited view to prevent overwhelm, but given the bold claims of forging a new form, I expected a deeper engagement with the elegiac tradition.

Still, despite this, I find moments of true luminosity in this work. Chang’s elegies are brute, and brutal, but unflinching in their attempt to capture the brutality of death and dying: her mother’s “panic without oxygen” and descriptions of how her “…mother couldn’t breathe, then took her last breath twenty seconds later” are devastating.

The most beautiful moments are those when the writer loosens into specificity, remembering that “My mother used to collect orange blossoms in a small shallow bowl.” Or when she lets hope creep in: “Scientists now say that a mind still works after the body has died. That there’s a burst of brain energy. Then maybe she heard the geese above disassemble one last time. Then maybe my kiss on her cheek felt like lightning.”

We get the beauty of metaphors detached from the loss—more of Dickinson’s “formal feeling” and “chill” than human and humane comforts. Chang writes: “I put a fish ball in my mouth. My optimism covered the whole ball as if the fish had never died, had never been gutted and rolled into a humiliating shape.”

Chang avoids many direct descriptions of her parents aside from descriptions of their illnesses. Her mother was a mathematician and her father an engineer, but short of a few mentions of mathematics, we don’t really get a clear picture of who these people were in their fullness. Perhaps that’s the point. The loss is total, even in the elegy.

Chang’s imagery and metaphors are seldom drawn from memory, but are detached forms, objects with no ownership. This too is a comment on loss, and a devastatingly beautiful one. The author captures the groundlessness and disassociation of loss with skill.

Chang draws us into the grief, asking that we suffer with her, refusing poetry even as she writes it. She writes: “At the funeral, my brother-in-law kept turning the music down. When he wasn’t looking, I turned the music up. Because I wanted these people to feel what I felt. When I wasn’t looking, he turned it down again. At the end of the day, someone took the monitor and speakers away. But the music was still there. This was my first understanding of grief.” There is the turning away from music and a turning toward it, even when music isn’t wanted. What is wanted is the person lost.

In the end, the poetry is more gothic nightmare than an elegy. There are “dead babies” shaken awake, many instances of darkness descending, ghosts, tombstones, crushed bees.

Ultimately, Chang’s interest in death is intellectual. “Is language the broom or what’s being swept?” Does language create meaning or does meaning create language? “When language leaves, all you have left is tone, all you have left are smoke signals.” Comfort does not come: “How many times have I looked into the sky for some kind of message, only to find content but no form.” At the end of Obit, I feel a bit the same.

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.

Stephen Hawking, in Black Holes and Baby Universes writes, “I was born on January 8, 1942, exactly three hundred years after the death of Galileo. However, I estimate that about two hundred thousand other babies were also born that day.” The passage of time is one of life’s great mysteries. Our presence in one time and one place is at once an assertion of our uniqueness: each of us can only occupy one time and one place. But, time is also a connector: we are unified with each other by virtue of the fact that we exist in one time together. We look back at time past and sometimes the gap between where we were and where we are can feel immense. We live time going forward, but one of the great wonders of art and literature is that we can imagine things being otherwise. We can imagine going back in time, even imagine living time in reverse.

I find it strange to know what I know at times. If you would have told me a year ago that we’d all be quarantined in our homes, the world on lockdown, I wouldn’t have believed you. How stranger still it would be to wake up in the world of yesterday, trying to explain to the past self what the self of today knows. And the self that knows so much now still doesn’t know everything. Life is a constant process of becoming. What we’ll know tomorrow, we cannot know today.

The great Pulitzer-Prize winning poet, Lisel Mueller passed away last week. One of my favorite poems is her poem “Palindrome” (you can read it at the Poetry Foundation website) which imagines an alternate self, one who lives in a universe where time goes backward. What if, instead of growing older, we grew younger?

What if, instead of being born, a woman could emerge from her dying, “the hole which spit her out/ into pain, impossible at first, later easing, going, gone?” What would it mean to forget life’s lessons, and approach the moment of discovery again?

The speaker of the poem experiences a softening, a loosening of the ravages of time. The knees don’t grow weaker, but instead, grow stronger. “Her memory sharpens” “she falls in love easily.” Her husband “has lost his shuffle,” and “their money shrinks,/ but their ardor increases.” Entropy is reversed. Stephen Hawking theorized about this very idea, imagining the Big Bang going backwards–the shattered glass flies upward toward the coffee table, reassembling itself; the body heals instead of decaying.

In Lisel Mueller’s poem, the future brings with it hope and promise, but it’s the hope and promise of youth, not of wisdom. The subject of the poem is “eager, having heard about adolescent love/ and the freedom of children.”   

I love the poem’s complex logic, its offer of an alternative way of viewing time and the world, while simultaneously embracing the mysteries of science and science fiction.

Poetry books have the power to pull apart the emotional facts of the universe, revealing to us their essential parts. The act of writing a poem is a kind of science of the heart, whereby a person can test out hypotheses of the imagination. There is a desire in each of us to undue the work of entropy, to reverse the aging process. Time’s forward motion binds us to new people and possibilities and unties us from others; but time’s backward motion would do the same. What is lost by going back in time? Wisdom is lost. Learning is lost.

But what else is lost? What else is gained? The poem is a Schrödinger’s box in which the cat may or may not be alive, in which realities may or may not be present like Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” where the lovers both kiss and consummate their love and also never kiss, forever frozen in the moment of desire, right before consummation.

Stephen Hawking, in Black Holes and Baby Universes, notes: “I was always very interested in how things operated and used to take them apart to see how they worked, but I was not so good at putting them back together again.”

A good poetry book does this for us. It takes the facts of life apart, asks questions, but doesn’t necessarily put things back together for us. We are left to make sense of the disparate parts.

I wonder sometimes where I am in the course of my life. Have I, like the speaker in the “Palindrome,” crossed lives with the alternate me, the one moving backward through life? If so, I am in middle age, or past it. “Somewhere sometime we must have/passed one another like going and coming trains,/ with both of us looking the other way.” This passage would mark the middle of a person’s life. Have I crossed her, yet?

The poet reshuffles the expected order. That reordering, that reshuffling, is itself a form of knowledge and meaning. A well-written poetry book or poem can do just that. “Palindrome” can be found in Lisel Mueller’s poetry book, Alive Together: New and Selected Poems.

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.

“Scared animals return home, regardless of whether home is safe or frightening,” writes Bessel Van Der Kolk in his book, The Body Keeps the Score. Van Der Kolk’s book is about trauma, but its central question is existential: how do we break free of our self-destructive patterns—how do we experience post-traumatic growth? How do we transcend the habits of comfort and familiarity that can keep us from growing? Trauma can freeze its victims in time and within the traumatized body. Post-traumatic growth occurs when a person utilizes creativity, storytelling, and meaning to transform stasis into motion, to make sense of that which has no sense.

Change is a long and difficult process. Sometimes it is so incremental that it cannot be seen directly. I don’t believe we are doomed to repeat the same self-destructive cycles, but the process of breaking these patterns is a long and difficult one. We don’t need to keep drinking to blackout every weekend and regretting it on Monday morning. We don’t need to keep surrendering our agency to relationships, to the vicissitudes of our desires, to the accidents of time and circumstance. We can take control of the narrative.

In his nonfiction book, Van Der Kolk writes about “attractors.” Attractors are the things that “draw us, motivate us, and make us feel alive. Typically, attractors are meant to make us feel better. But sometimes, we are drawn to the same things that make us feel worse, the same patterns that destroy us.

“…why are so many people attracted to dangerous or painful situations?” Van Der Kolk asks. Researchers found that “strong emotions can block pain.” For example, watching a graphically violent movie can create the same analgesic effect as eight milligrams of morphine, “about the same dose a person would receive in an emergency room.”

For some of us, the dangerous is not only thrilling, but it can sometimes be a kind of self-medication against other types of emotional pain.

Sometimes, the dangerous life choice can give us the jolt of endorphins we need so that we don’t feel depressed, anxious, or sad. 

What is the alternative? Happiness is completely contingent on living authentically, honestly, and in facing reality. Van Der Kolk, writes about his “great teacher” Elvin Semrad who said, “The greatest sources of our suffering are the lies we tell ourselves.”

I have gotten married, moved to another country, jumped into wild oceans in Hawaii, and climbed cliffs without a rope on the premise that I am unlovable, alone, and can’t trust other people. I have sought these situations for the thrill and also because I was scared of the alternative. I have braved waves big enough to drown men, cliffs tall enough to crush them, and tornadoes wild enough to make trucks jackknife, but I still have trouble saying one word: “help.”

Reality will not be denied its course. We can hide from it, drug from it, run from it, deny it, rage at it, eat ourselves away from it, exercise ourselves into a stupor from it, fuck from it, drink from it, but the only way out of it, is through it—through actually experiencing whatever it is we don’t want to experience.

Trauma is the ultimate expression of self-alienation. The very thing that we need to experience can feel like it has the power to kill us. Van Der Kolk writes, “Trauma, whether it is the result of something done to you or something you yourself have done, almost always makes it difficult to engage in intimate relationships. After you have experienced something so unspeakable, how do you learn to trust yourself or anyone else again?” And how can you connect with those closest to you if you can never talk about an experience so core to your being or so formative? Trauma alienates its survivors from themselves but also from everyone else around them.

The tragedy of trauma is that it destroys the free play of communication, of imagination. Trauma can freeze a person in a place where they can neither transform the traumatic event into something meaningful, nor integrate the experience into the larger course of their lives. The key to growth is integration of experience so that the experience becomes one aspect of a larger story of transformation.

Van Der Kolk explains, “Trauma has shut down their inner compass and robbed them of the imagination they need to create something better.”

For me, the key word here is “imagination.” Creativity. Creation. For the bereaved and the grieving, creativity is not a luxury, nor is it a pastime—it is a life and death matter. To create is to take charge of your life. Grief can knock us to our knees, but creativity, art, and writing can give us agency again and help us invent new ground to stand upon. Reality might be difficult right now in this era of massive job losses and global pandemic, but we still have the agency to shape reality. We can respond to life creatively.

Without creativity and imagination, we run the risk of going through life numb and disconnected from ourselves, unable to know what is upsetting us, feeling like something is wrong, but unable to put it into words. To live like this is to be alive and not living.

At the heart of the traumatic situation or challenging experience is the seeming meaninglessness of it all. What meaning can there be in losing a child, a parent, or a friend? What meaning can we find in pandemic? In war? In assault?

The question of trauma is always one of transformation. And transformation requires us to see the larger story, one of transcendence and triumph. This is at the heart of post-traumatic growth. But to tell the story of your life, you need to own the story and have control of the narrative. You need to give yourself permission to be the protagonist of your own life.

For Van Der Kolk the answer lies in agency: “‘agency’ is the technical term for the feeling of being in charge of your life: knowing where you stand, knowing that you have a say in what happens to you, knowing that you have some ability to shape your circumstances.”

Often that means telling an inconvenient story, or an uncomfortable story. It sometimes means disappointing other people.

Tell it anyway. Disappoint other people.Poetry and art, if it is to be good, must be willing to blaspheme, and say that which cannot be said. It must be willing to be ugly. It must be willing to go anywhere the human heart can go, and that is literally anywhere. We must be willing to peer into the abattoir of our souls and make sense of what we find there.

By being honest about ourselves, by attending to our needs, by addressing the unspeakable, we become fully human.

We tell ourselves lies in order to live. And yet the lies we tell ourselves in order to go on living so often prevent us from living. For Van Der Kolk, in The Body Keeps the Score, post-traumatic growth comes through words, images, and creations that allow us to face the unspeakable, the unsayable, and the unknowable.

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.