Introductions pt. 1
Lilly reads an Audre Lorde essay, dives into the idea that there may not be any new ideas, and (what else?) writes about her grandmother.
I have likely spent cumulative months of my life thinking about the moment that I am going to elevate, somehow, out of this every day that I had dreamed of when I was younger. This is a cycle I am more than familiar with: waking up and figuring out lunch and putting away the dishes and going for an afternoon walk and waiting for a promotion in the job in my field. The thing that will propel me past the vague feeling of ambivalence I have about my successes. (Did I fail? Am I aspirational?)
In her essay “Poetry Is Not a Luxury,” Audre Lorde wrote, “Sometimes we drug ourselves with dreams of new ideas.”
Sometimes, so much so, that we decide it’s okay if someone else gets hurt as long as we can get ahead. Maybe not to the extent of the now-infamous Anna Delvey or Elizabeth Holmes or Adam Neumann, but in our own quiet way. We resent what we think is holding us back, as if, in many cases, the answer isn’t ourselves. We commit our minds further to the future, the possibility, and ignore what’s in front of us.
I fall into this cycle most when I have nothing to do with my hands, so to keep my mind quiet, I scroll. I save crochet and sewing and knitting videos because this is the year I will finally start making my own clothes, I put products in my virtual shopping cart and then feel proud when I remove them, I send a tweet or a memory to the group chat. I relish the thought of The Idea when all of this gets old, when my mind slows to the point of zombieness or becomes overwhelmed with all of the reminders of what I don’t have. The Idea that will change everything and make it interesting again. Should I quit my job to become a niche cooking influencer? A small business owner? A budget-traveling backpacker?
Of course, this is all a myth. I will not be saved by some magical thing hiding in the recesses of my mind that will change everything and make it all so easy or exciting or new. There will always be an every day I’ll sometimes wish I didn’t have to commit to.
I think about my grandmother, constantly, who kept her mind quiet by working in a hospital every day until the pandemic began, hardly seduced by a consuming desire to come up with The Idea, the leapfrog of the hard parts of life. I think of the joy with which she approached the job and the life that she had dreamt up so tirelessly, she who saw her first surgery and called it poetry.
Lorde continues: “For women, then, poetry is not a luxury. It is a vital necessity of our existence.” It is how we breathe life into the steady heartbeat of the humdrum, like my grandmother did.
Every writing class I’ve ever taken has taught me to look for the reward that lies beneath the pulled teeth. So, I write—to stay close to a younger version of myself who had yet to come up against the wall of existing ideas and back down, and who wrote poems next to Melinda in creative writing class and again in our dorm room and again during 6 to 10 pm classes and again in the uncertain hours of new entry-level jobs and again now. I write, in part, because now we are far away from each other and this is what binds us together, and I love that about us.
Thank you for joining us on this journey <3 more to come!