The Poetry of Everyone

Embracing life again, a little less selfishly

It’s autumn, and I spent the summer trying to catch up to myself. There are new feelings I’m adapting to, and I was busy separating them, like a toppled box of multicoloured beads. It’s all so foreign to me: love, integrity, adventure, responsibility. The tangling of them all. It’s like navigating a new body, learning to drive a manual car after a lifetime of automatic. It’s an expansion. I’m still here, cowering in a corner amidst the chaos of reorganization, afraid that things will end before they begin.

I’ve become wildly self-critical lately, in a way I haven’t been since high school. My diagnosis blames a newfound stagnancy in my life. Everything stacked suddenly: a relationship, a visa, a stable job. I spent so long searching for this. I wonder: there has to be something else. To find out, I dig, uncovering every insecurity that’s been buried beneath the practical panics. Self-love used to be something I thought I was pretty good at. Now, I’m not so sure.

From “Mayakovsky” by Frank O’Hara:

Now I am quietly waiting for
the catastrophe of my personality
to seem beautiful again,
and interesting, and modern.

The country is grey and
brown and white in trees,
snows and skies of laughter
always diminishing, less funny
not just darker, not just grey.

It may be the coldest day of
the year, what does he think of
that? I mean, what do I? And if I do,
perhaps I am myself again.

I’ve been spending most of my time trying to figure out what being “myself” means to me nowadays. Frank O’ Hara wrote, in another poem: Someday I’ll love Frank O’ Hara. Roger Reeves, in a poem called “Someday I’ll Love Roger Reeves”, opened with Until then, let us have our gods and short prayers. Our obligations. / Our thighbone connected to our knee bone. Ocean Vuong, in his own version, featured the line The most beautiful part of your body / is where it’s headed. What would I write in “Someday I’ll Love Tara Monjazeb”?

I imagine it’d have two stanzas. The first, a “Before”, an ode to solitude: highlighting birdsong and sunlight through leaves and the sudden smell of a lavender bush as I walk past it, poking out of someone’s front garden onto the sidewalk. The second, an “After”, an ode to friendship: two-hour long distance calls with my best friend, the loving blue of my boyfriend’s eyes, and long, whirlwind conversations at cafés with old strangers who have become so foundational to my life. I spent much of my adolescence as an independent person, my intentional solitude developed out of a blend of self-sabotage and a fear of being misunderstood. Rarely did I make time to observe bodies outside my own. This lifestyle, I was soon forced to realise, is completely unsustainable. My pandemic-induced period of isolation made me turn myself inside out: for the first time, in maybe my whole life, I wanted to be a part of something bigger. And I don’t think it’s particularly about loneliness, or wanting friendship or love. I was holding my breath. It took me a while to realize, but I needed to embrace the world. In my version — in this city, which in a way is a world (and mine) — it’s full of people.

“Promise” by Franz Wright:

Long nights, short years. Forgiving 
silence 

When morning comes, and pain--

no one is a stranger, this whole world is your home. 

I returned from seeing my family in the U.S. to the shock of adulthood. I had to return to a routine that I forgot I had, and it was difficult to re-adapt to. The only thing I know how to do in periods of unknowing is isolation, thinking that solo time would help me remember myself. I built a chrysalis and finally put up the thicker curtains from IKEA months ago — the kind that let in a bit of colored sunlight through their fabrics. It turned my whole room orange, and I kept myself there, soaking up the warmth, until I needed to leave. The brightness outside, blinding by comparison, shocked the energy out of me. I walked around in the world exhausted.

Despite living in London for five years, I’ve only recently steadied the bricks of my life here. It’s like I’ve put up a temporary exhibition that’s been extended repeatedly, only to now be granted a space in the permanent gallery. I had gotten so used to protecting myself from the hurt of leaving, borrowing grief from the future to figure out how to best build the armor. Seeing my friends meant relying on them, giving into a make-believe permanence, and settling in so deeply that being ripped from my roots would hurt extra bad. Would it be worth it?

I didn’t need to come up with an answer. People in my life noticed I was distant, and I was surprised by their observation — the one-way mirror I’d always known was suddenly a two-way. I had popped the bubble without realising. One sunny weekend, I made plans to see a friend every day. On the hottest day in summer, I sat in a shaded green space with a close friend and ate bagels. As we talked, the bubble of conversation between us popped over my head and spilt the magic of my existence all over me, like rain after a drought. All my friends hold a version of myself in their hands, and it’s like they hold up a mirror when we see each other. This is who I am, a version of myself I forgot I existed. A friend! That’s who I am, and who I want to be, to everybody. To my partner, to my colleagues, to my housemates, to my parents. I came home and felt more beautiful than I had in ages. I looked in the mirror with a sense of self I had re-gained. The next day, I walked with my chin up to meet another friend for brunch. As I walked home, I bought flowers on the way. This life is beautiful, I thought, and believed it. Whatever pain that realisation might cause, I didn’t care. I’ll deal with it when the time comes.

by Charlotte Ager

From “Everything is Waiting for You” by David Whyte:

Put down the weight of your aloneness and ease into the
 conversation. The kettle is singing
 even as it pours you a drink, the cooking pots
 have left their arrogant aloofness and
 seen the good in you at last. All the birds
 and creatures of the world are unutterably
 themselves. Everything is waiting for you.

I always consider September a time for new beginnings. The air turns crisp and clear like the world is starting over with you. It probably comes from my school days, when summer would end and I’d create a dedication for whatever came next: this year, I’ll make more friends or be less annoying or get straight As. This year, I want to be more open, run to all that’s waiting for me — it is waiting, after all — and embrace it.

It comes with consequences. Paying attention means subjecting yourself to daily terror. I wake up and it breaks my heart., writes Cameron Awkward-Rich. Whether it’s witnessing someone get their phone nicked, or reading the news too closely, I feel like I’m constantly on the edge of chronic sadness. But still, with it comes watching a bee land on a hollyhock petal, or two dogs making friends and sharing a laugh with the owners. These are the things I miss when I dull myself to the world, or, I suppose, when the world dulls me. How to find hope in a place like this? When thousands are dying daily across the world at the hands of people who don’t seem to feel at all? What use is feeling to me, then, anyway?

“Like You” by Roque Dalton (translated from the Spanish by Jack Hirschman):

Like you I 
love love, life, the sweet smell 
of things, the sky-blue 
landscape of January days.
And my blood boils up 
and I laugh through eyes 
that have known the buds of tears. 
I believe the world is beautiful 
and that poetry, like bread, is for everyone. 
And that my veins don't end in me 
but in the unanimous blood 
of those who struggle for life, 
love, 
little things, 
landscape and bread, 
the poetry of everyone. 

I’ve had conversations with friends recently about how sad it is that we can’t trust strangers anymore. It seems odd to strike up conversations with people on the train, to hold the door open for someone you’ll never see again, to say Thank you, driver when you get off the bus. Regarding the latter, I asked a native Londoner months ago if I should be thanking my bus driver. Because you don’t pass them to exit, you have to shout thank you from the second or third door that opens to let you off, bursting the quiet individual bubbles of everyone on the bus. Suddenly, you’re perceived by dozens of people, if just for a moment. Is that a worthy sacrifice? One morning I saw a sticker on the driver’s door that said A #Hello or a #ThankYouDriver can make my day. Still, my Londoner friend said, when I asked: “we just don’t do that here.” It reminds me of this video of a Chapman University class thanking their professor after a remote semester class. He was moved to tears, and it made me wonder how isolating teaching in an era of remote classes can be, where the relief of recognition can be overwhelming. I graduated high school in 2018, and narrowly experienced the pre-COVID era of education — I developed relationships with my teachers, and many of my classes still required hard copies of textbooks and workbooks. Four years later, after my college graduation, I had coffee with my AP Lit teacher. She was discouraged. Kids weren’t reading the books. They struggled to pay attention in class. All she wanted was eye contact. It’s no wonder they’re banning phones in schools. Russell Shaw, in an op-ed for The Atlantic, writes: “So much of the magic of childhood happens in unmediated community. We must not deprive our children of that gift.”

Though I’m now well into my working life, I still struggle to create a balance between life (and career) in the digital sphere and “unmediated community”. I lie in bed with a closed book next to me and scroll TikTok. I avoid eye contact on the train. I imagine it’s harder for those younger than me, who have grown up into this world. With the cool breeze of the impending season, I felt shocked by change. I’m taking little steps to open myself up — mini-interactions with strangers (complimenting their shoes, offering them a seat), making eye contact as I tap my card on the bus, going on walks in the middle of the work day without my headphones. I bought a word search book to do on my commutes if I don’t feel up to reading, I re-started Animal Crossing on my Switch, I listen to short podcasts to wake up my brain. Maybe it’s not what I’ve hoped to do (finish my novel, supercharge Devotions, love everyone in the whole world) but it’s a step.

When I returned to London post-COVID, I did so with the accompaniment of this newsletter. It held my observations, what I found when I looked a little deeper inside myself, and the enthusiasm with which I held my life for that short period. Like all embraces, you eventually forget the feeling and crave the touch. It’s both exhausting and enlightening to realize that you have to renew your sense of wonder like it’s an expired subscription.

“Listen” by Barbara Crooker:

I want to tell you something. This morning
is bright after all the steady rain, and every iris,
peony, rose, opens its mouth, rejoicing. I want to say,
wake up, open your eyes, there’s a snow-covered road
ahead, a field of blankness, a sheet of paper, an empty screen.
Even the smallest insects are singing, vibrating their entire bodies,
tiny violins of longing and desire. We were made for song.
I can’t tell you what prayer is, but I can take the breath
of the meadow into my mouth, and I can release it for the leaves’
green need. I want to tell you your life is a blue coal, a slice
of orange in the mouth, cut hay in the nostrils. The cardinals’
red song dances in your blood. Look, every month the moon
blossoms into a peony, then shrinks to a sliver of garlic.
And then it blooms again.

I want to widen the lens capturing my attention. I want to feel homesick, to pet dogs outside of the supermarket, to find something new on my walks home that add a little sparkle to the world. Recently, I’ve been leaving my door open at night so my housemate’s cat can come and sleep in my bed if he wants to. It’s an act of welcoming, I suppose.

In renewing this sense of wonder, I’m trying to look outward as well as in, breathing my life through porous skin, saying yes and pushing through challenges. It’s good and necessary to spend individual time working on myself, but I’ve struggled to understand that my life is made up of more than just me. The trees and birds, yes, but also my friends and my colleagues, as well as random strangers who ask me for favors or compliment my shoes or hold the door open for me. It’s a balance that needs re-focusing and tweaking every so often. But I don’t need a magnifying glass or a wide lens to find it. Maybe my vision is fine, just the way it is.

Sometimes I’m irritable and isolate myself, other times I complain about social events but never regret going. All in all, I appreciate my life and body because it’s led me to these people. It doesn’t matter how long it lasts, though I let myself hope it’s forever. I've built this circle of friends and community, a garden I’ve watered from saplings into an abundance of flowers, tall hollyhocks and sunflowers bending towards me. Or, perhaps, I bend towards them. I do catch myself tilting to one side in my loneliest moments.

Ada Limón wrote in her friendship poem “Someplace Like Montana”:

and I think
of that feeling when you’re really full, or life is full
and you can’t think of anything else that could fit in it,
and then even more sky comes and more days
and there is so much to remember and swallow.