The Turning of the Tide
How to embark in spite of scrutiny.
At the time of parsing out the poem, I would have sworn it was brilliant: a landmark and haunting reflection on a magazine’s outright discrimination. After the subsequent rejection, I felt the usual suspects : frustration, indignation, and, rather dramatically, despair. That is, until I recently took it upon myself to look at the dismissed work in question. It’s not that the work was bad per se, but it was absolutely an unrefined first draft. It was like looking at a body laid completely bare on an examination table: stark, unencumbered by the social graces of literary form, and far too raw for any reputable publication to deem acceptably finished. In this strange gap year of my life, daily putting more distance between my teacher persona and whatever lies beyond, I am reminded how rejection, penned en masse via Submittable or email to all those in the slush pile, is a challenge I purposefully chose.
There is this oft quoted remark that escapes me now, but the barebones premise was this: if spoken word’s building blocks are that of air, written poems are that of ink. I am unsure I am made up of either, but rather this miasma of found treasures: feathers left over from flights of fancy, wisps of gray-haired wisdom now dotting the landscape of my crown, and the hum of haphazard yes’s flung defiantly in the face of my raging inner critic I try to outrun. This journey into the misted, tangled forest of my creativity has been, in every sense of the word, an exploration with no definitive end point. I tread lightly, noting landmarks in efforts not to lose myself to the abyssal undergrowth. Periodically, halogen bulbs light the path to words typed out fervently on a screen across a wooden table. Most every morning, I perch myself near a counter, coffee table, or park bench and await my muse, pen in hand. Sometimes she meets me after two pages of gibberish. Sometimes she strolls by, unbothered by my nonsensical scribblings in my journal. I have authored many newborn brain children this way, dragging them kicking and screaming from the pristine daydreams onto the stark demand of blank pages.
I battle my lack of ego and the relentless shattering of self-deprecation. Who do you even think you are? I mean, the sheer audacity and privilege to take time to write. You gave up everything, for this? In short answer, yes. Yes, I did. I am better for it, this constant meditation on what it means to be human. I traded in hundreds of student, parental, faculty, and administrative voices for just the singular voice in my head that demanded to be heard, demanded to be felt -- finally. For the better of three decades, I tailored myself to fit the confines of every box and container cast off by someone’s misbegotten version of me. Before embarking on any other endeavor, I felt I owed it to myself to parse out, once and for all, what I wanted from this finite life of mine, devoid of others’ contempt and critiques entirely.
Still awash in questions, I likened this feeling to a friend recently as a bottle adrift on the ocean, no coast in sight. Some moments, I wonder where I am going or where to go from here. Should I employ a navigation system, inquire of constellations and maps to make my way to a makeshift home on distant shores? Other times, I find myself buoyed by endless, kaleidoscopic waves and skies the color of crystallized honey, beckoning me just to open my eyes wide and take in the boundless, inexplicable beauty of this life. On the horizon, the crackle of thunder is unmistakable; there is always another storm to anticipate. For this one, minute reprieve from eternity, I choose to enjoy and bask.
Wave after wave of memory, I am keenly aware now of the wayward mimicry I engaged in, the echoes of others’ borrowed strength I mistook for my own. How hermit crab-like, I wonder: my need to shelter and hide within the borrowed home of another. They are the sand engrained underneath the soles of my feet. I regret the years lost in imitation, the borrowing of magic in betrayal of my own. I choose the challenge of charting this course so unlike anything I’ve seen before, one which dares to ask: Who am I? Who do I even think I am?
My soul is made up of puffling thrown cliffside, yearning for the ocean I glimpse for the first time. All the rejections are merely wind, the resistance building flight for this path akin to floating. It is a challenge I most certainly was made for, one that I also now choose because, for once, I am flying. In soaring, there is no better way to see the world, and in the low tide, when the ocean of regret beckons, I find I can swim, too.
