Janel Brubaker's Blog, page 17

The Most Exciting News

Well, I’m not even sure how to begin this post. I’m so excited, I’m still shaking and can hardly type. I woke up this morning to an email in my inbox communicating that the publisher I submitted my poetry manuscript to has decided to accept it. I’m officially part of their 2022 publishing cohort and next year my first book will be published and available for purchase. I’m going to have a book published.

My book of poetry is going to be published, ya’ll. I am so excited! I can hardly even contain myself right now. I knew this was a possibility, but I didn’t know if it would really happen. That’s the thing with publishing. It takes time and lots of energy and focus and persistence and faith that the right place will see the value of your work and want to send it out into the world. And sometimes it’s really hard to hold onto that belief. It’s hard to push through the self-doubt and the fear and the discouragement.

But when you do, things happen.

2022 is going to be a year of stepping up. It’ll be the year that my first manuscript is published and distributed out into the world. And it’ll be the year I level up and take even more steps towards building the life I want.

Celebrate with me today.

Hopes for the Coming Year

2021 has been a complex year.
There has been good. There has been bad. There has been tragedy. There has been healing.
Looking forward to next year, I can’t help but ask myself what I hope I will accomplish, what I hope I will find, and what I hope I will leave behind.

As for what I hope I will leave behind, I’m sure many of you can guess. I still carry too much of other people’s expectations, their words, their opinions of me. When really, their words and opinions can only make any difference if I let them. Next year, I hope to leave behind all of my impulses to care about their opinions. I don’t want to live in or near the shadow of their misery. What they say and do in regards to me hurts, but I get to choose how to live my life. Those determined to lie about me will continue lying, so I might as well continue living, writing, thriving.

Which leads me to what I hope I will accomplish. In January I’ll begin my M.A. in Literature. I’m honestly counting the days. I feel like this new program will help me close the door on one chapter and open another on a new chapter. That chapter might lead to a PhD, but even if it doesn’t, I will get to spend the next two years studying what I love: literature. And while I was able to study literature in my M.F.A., this time I’ll be studying with an academic and scholarly lens. I began my creative writing journey years ago. This is, I feel, the real beginning of my scholarly writing journey.

I see myself writing scholarly books on the authors I most love. I see myself writing for scholarly journals. I see myself studying hard, reading closely, and adding my voice to the chorus of others writing about the books and authors I am continuously drawn to. I see myself even studying abroad to deepen my research and my understanding of specific places and the roles they play in these books. I see myself fully embracing the writer, reader, studier, and scholar I know I am. This will mean devotedly leaving behind anything and everything that will distract me from this goals, but what better pursuit is there than being my most authentic self?

That’s what I hope to find. More of myself. No more second-guessing. No more insecurity. No more self-doubt. Only the nurturing of my own interests. Only the nurturing of my own growth, my own healing, my own courage. I left an abusive marriage after ten years and I am continuing to choose to heal, to grow, to unlearn the internalized self-hatred. The courage this takes and continues to demand is immeasurable. I hope to find more truths of my past, of my present, and of what I want for the future. I left my ex to rebuild my life. Next year I hope to continue that process.

I also hope to read 100 books of poetry next year. Roughly two books of poetry each week. Some rereads, some for the first time, some classical poets, some contemporary. And this on top of what I’ll be reading for school. I hope to write 150 new poems in 2021, continuing my process of consistent creativity. Moreover, I also want to give myself writing retreats into the woods and the ocean each season so that I can continue focusing on my poetry.

I love the month of December because it helps me prioritize my goals and hopes for the coming year. It helps me focus. And while I don’t claim 2022 as “my year,” I do claim it as a fresh chance to make my life what I hope it will be.

What do you hope for in 2022?

Social Media and Mental Health

I’m taking steps to try something new to see how it works for my mental health.

I’m slowly deleting the most problematic and stress inducing social media platforms that I participate on. Yesterday I started this journey by deleting my Twitter account. It wasn’t much of an issue since I’m rarely ever on Twitter anymore, but this was still a big step for me. I like being connected to people. I like the friends I’ve made online. But social media is, in many ways, a cesspool of toxicity and misinformation.

Don’t get me wrong, there are things I love about social media. But for my own personal wellbeing, I think it’s important to evaluate just how much social media impacts my mental health. Does the good outweigh the bad? Does it relieve or amplify my stress, depression, and anxiety? Am I getting anything from it that I couldn’t get anywhere else?

I don’t have the answers to all of these questions, and I won’t find the answers until I take the difficult steps of cutting down my social media use. I spend an average of 8 hours a day on my phone. I’d say a good two or three hours of that is playing games. Another hour to hour and a half is for work. The rest of the 3.5 hours per day is spent on social media, and while I don’t necessarily think this is an automatically a bad thing, I do think there are other things I’d rather be doing with my time.

Reading.
Writing.
Sleeping.
Walking.
Cleaning. Okay, so I wouldn’t rather be cleaning than scrolling through social media, but it’s something else I could be doing with my time that’s more productive.
Cooking.
Playing with my puppy.
Spending time with my partner.

The list goes on.

Even if I spent that time only reading and writing, imagine how much reading and writing I could get done in just one week? I already spend about an hour reading every day. If I added another 3 hours to that, not only would my reading numbers go up, but I would get so much writing done. And in comparison to how I feel while scrolling through social media (which is usually just apathetic, sad, depressed, and anxious), reading and writing contribute positively to my mental health. More than almost anything else, reading and writing allow me to heal and process and use my creativity to understand my past. Reading and writing are therapeutic.

Social media does allow me to feel less alone which, during the pandemic, has been vital to my wellbeing. I have to acknowledge that. And I think too, for people with mental illness, social media can be another form of escapism. I know TikTok has introduced me to some of the funniest shit I have ever seen in my life. Like, laughing so hard my abs feel like I’ve just done an hour of sit-ups kind of funny. Or there are things that are inspiring. Or really cute and sweet. Or really validating.

The communities that can be built because of social media is really amazing.

But the thing I’ve realized is that, for a long time now, it’s felt like “living” is just something projected into a Facebook status or an Instagram post. And to be fair, because of the pandemic, a lot of living has been reduced to those things because we kind of can’t do the things we used to do. At least, not without a lot of fear since people won’t get vaccinated or wear masks. STILL. So I definitely understand that right now, especially, social media has been a substitute for more in person experiences.

The thing is, I would rather spend my time in a way that doesn’t suck up hours of my time and energy without anything to show for it. And again, this is merely my own journey with my own mental wellbeing. Social media is an undeniably toxic place. Even for all the good it does and can do, it’s still a breeding ground for bullying, misinformation, and hate. And it’s been such a huge part of my adulthood, I’m not even sure I know what my life would look like without it.

All of this to say: I’m working towards deleting most of my social media. I intend to keep this blog and my TikTok page. Possibly my Instagram too, since I use it for a lot of my poetry. But everything else, I’m hoping to have deleted by the end of this year. It’s an experiment to see if my mental health improves, stays the same, or gets worse as time goes on. Will I write more? Read more? Be more consistent in my daily schedule?

I guess we’ll see.

Mental Health and Healing

Yesterday I had a doctor’s appointment. It was my first appointment with my new doctor because I needed a primary care physician who would actually, you know, listen to my concerns regarding my mental health. Prosac has helped with my depression and anxiety, but it has no been anywhere near enough. It took losing my friend Ryan to see just how much I’ve been masking and avoiding the truth regarding my own mental illness.

It’s been over a month and a half now since he died, and I have been in a consistent and horrible depressive episode. This week and some of last week I’ve been able to function better, but it’s still not good. Like, it’s really not good. My new doctor and I talked about my mental health and came up with a plan for treatment moving forward, which includes me staying on the Prosac for now but adding a new medication to take along with it. If in a couple of weeks I don’t see an improvement, she said we can move to a different medication and see if it helps better.

But it’s not just this loss. It’s pretty much my entire fucking adulthood that has lead me to this place. My marriage. The living situation after my marriage which is still a nightmare that I have to process through because they’re still lying about me publicly. My miscarriages. The false plagiarism accusation. Like, yeah, toxic people are gonna do their toxic shit, but it’s really hard to deal with that and the emotions that come with it on top of everything else. It adds to the trauma. And knowing that they then continue to mock me for talking about the pain they caused reinforces so much of the abuse that I internalized from my marriage.

Abusers don’t and never will acknowledge the damage they cause others. And they will always frame their victims as the abusers because it’s the only real power they have. They get off on knowing that their words and actions can still cause pain. How messed up is that?

I’m still learning how to acknowledge my feelings, while reinforcing what I know about myself. It’s okay to be hurt by the lies they spread, but I also need to remember that they are just lies. They don’t have any real bearing on who I am or how I see myself, unless I choose to carry those lies as part of my identity.

Which I don’t.

Today is a raw day. It’s a hard day. I don’t feel strong or courageous or in control. But that doesn’t mean I’m not those things. I did the best I could, and I still do the best I can. I can get my needs met. I fucking survived so much trauma. And I am ENOUGH. Who I was then was enough. Who I am now is enough. And who I’m growing into is enough.

Standing firm in who I am is hard because my entire adulthood has been shaped around other people telling me that who I am is trash. But when I think about how those people reacted to me enforcing my own boundaries (or the ways they removed any chance for me to actually establish those boundaries in the first place), the pattern of manipulation, toxicity, and abuse is abundantly clear. I survived my abusive marriage. I survived the abusive living situation I was in after my marriage. I am not the person they say I am.

I survived.
I am enough.

Focus on the Writer You Are

One of the hardest parts of writing after graduating from an M.F.A. program is that I no longer have specific directions given to me by faculty mentors. No assignments to complete, no book lists to get through outside of the books I’m reading on my own, and no workshops to help point me in different directions than I would have considered otherwise. It’s isolating, and of course it has to be. That’s what the M.F.A. is supposed to prepare us for, a life of writing on our own.

But even a good program that succeeds in giving you those tools can’t really prepare you for the feeling of isolation and confusion that comes with actually stepping into that “writing life.” Because really, unless you have an agent or a publisher waiting to receive pages of a work already in progress, the only person you’re accountable to is yourself. You have to set the goals, deadlines, word counts, timelines, etc. You have to commit not only to the generating of new content, but the continual editing and revising of that and current content. It’s the only way that projects get done and it takes a lot of time, a lot of effort, and a lot of struggle.

For NaNoWriMo, I decided I was going to get started on a book of fantasy I’ve been trying to write for years now. And it went well for a bit, and then I didn’t write anything for probably 20 days or so. I wrote a few posts ago about prioritizing the projects and genres that matter most to us, but I think part of that means focusing on the writer I am in this moment. What am I reading the most of? Poetry. What occupies my creative thoughts? Poetry. What feels the most urgent? Poetry.

I have both a chapbook and full length manuscript of my creative thesis from grad school out for consideration by a local publisher right now and while the suspense of whether either one will be accepted is tormenting me, I am also thrilled with the idea that even if the book(s) isn’t/aren’t accepted, I will have another chance to revise, another chance to look over those poems and make any changes that are more obvious now. This, too, goes along with focusing on the writer I am now because it helps me see which of the poems feel kind of “stuck” in my mind. Those are the poems I can continue reworking.

Because let’s be honest: I’ve read a lot of books since I submitted these manuscripts for consideration. My goal this year was to read 75 books and I am already at 86 with, at least, three more that I know I’ll finish before the end of the year (one poetry and two prose). The idea that I would return to my manuscript now and not find anything that could still be reworked is pretty much patently false. This is why even rejections are beneficial to the writing process. They help us grow.

And even if the best happens and these manuscripts get accepted, I will continue to grow and learn through the publication process. A debut book of poetry is no small thing to release to the world. It will impact the writer I am and help me grow into the writer I hope to be. That’s the real point of focusing on the writer we are in the moment: it allows us to acknowledge our strengths while also acknowledging our limitations. That creates a kind of map for how to get from where we are to where we hope to be, without forcing ourselves into a performance.

That’s what my NaNoWriMo goal was: a performance. I was performing a role for myself based on what I thought would make me money one day. And one day, perhaps it will. But right now I need to focus on poetry. It’s what energizes me.

So ask yourself what writer are you right now? How can you best serve that writer? How have you been hindering that writer? And what’s one thing you can do to help yourself focus on the writer you are so that you can grow into the writer you want to be?

With Love

My partner is going on a work trip and I have decided to spend these days cleaning our condo. I did this the last time he went on a work trip and he loved it. I say this a lot, but he really does so much for me, and most of the time our cleaning consists of the basics to keep the place relatively organized. So it’s a true pleasure to take some extra care and attention to our home and making it as clean as I can while he’s gone. I have my eyes set on cleaning out one of our particularly cluttered closets, so I’m excited to get that done.

Trauma really does fuck us up in ways that lasts a fucking long time. And even healing from trauma still leaves behind the little breadcrumbs that we have to acknowledge from day to day. My therapist is such an honest, blunt person, she helps me face the hard things that I don’t want to look at. And she does it with such compassion, such raw honesty that it hurts to acknowledge them, but then the feeling of shame finally shrinks.

I’m in a writing group that meets once a week and last night I wrote a poem that startled me. It was not like any poem I’ve written before, and I was worried when my time came to read that it would be silly, ridiculous, too “out there” to really be understood. But no. They didn’t just understand, they absorbed and received and felt it. After all of this, I still doubt myself as a poet, but then come the people who remind me that poetry is my body, my mind, my entire being. And just like learning to trust my gut, I also need to learn to trust my being.

Loving myself has been hard. The more work I do to heal, the more raw and vulnerable I feel. But for the first time in a really long time, I feel like I am connected to the people who see and accept me for exactly who I am. I choose to follow those connections because life is way too long to live my life wondering why I’m not liked by everyone, and why I’m outright hated by some. I’ll never have the answers to those questions, and I hope that one day, I won’t even want those answers. They won’t change anything. They won’t matter. And they won’t fuel the life of self-love I’m building.

Learning to be okay with other people’s even negative feelings for/about me is extremely difficult. But I want to care most about how I feel about myself. And what I know is that I am a survivor. I work hard at holding empathy and compassion for others. I do the best I can every single day. And I am enough. If other people can’t/don’t/won’t see that, then nothing I could have done or said would ever have changed that anyway.

It’s easier to be critical of myself than it is to walk in self-love. Radical self-love. Taking my own magic and power back from the people who never deserved it to begin with is hard. I have to acknowledge the ways I did not love myself, the ways I let others define my value and my worth. I was complicit in those situations, but I don’t have to continue to be so. I can make new choices, better choices, and live the way that best suits me. It’s easier said than done, but it’s a start just to see and know that I can. Because honestly, I love who I am. Deep down, underneath the doubts and insecurities, I love who I am. I love the person I see. I don’t always love the choices I make, but I love me.

One of my personal goals going into 2022 is to fall in love with myself. And not in the “love is blind” kind of way, but in the honest, open, compassionate, always-doing-my-best kind of way. Because I want a life of happiness and fulfillment, a life I can look at and say, “I built that from almost nothing.” Because I have. And I will.

Love yourself. Build the life you want. It’s the best revenge.

Book Review – Time Slips Right Before Your Eyes by Erika Hunt

I think often at the heart of poetry is the theme of love. This book begins with a love poem written to a blind ancestor of Erika Hunt’s, and as the book continues to move through time and space, the theme of love resonates so strongly, at times I thought I must be reading one of the romantics. Family, race, love, gender…all are themes wrapped together to build this short but beautiful book of poetry.

“The sun springs across the year / and who has time for sleep?” (pg 5). Indeed, who can sleep when such beautiful language is available to be read and absorbed? I chose to read this book on a whim because I was growing restless for something new, something different from the other books I had been reading at the time. I found this one on my shelf and chose it. The image on the cover, the length of the book, and the fact that I had never heard of the poet before all gave me a desire to peek into its pages and see what I’d find there. “Words perform a miracle and resuscitate the body” (pg 10). “Wake the stone / call back the atoms” (pg 10). “broken glass subsumed into / the bottle” (pg 11). I found here a trove of images, feelings, thoughts, and reflections so incredibly honest in their admission of brokenness as well as their search for mending.

Love, even in its truest form, still includes heartbreak. It must. Until human is without flaw, to love will always mean to hurt. Whether that love is romantic, sexual, mental, familial, friendly, etc. there will always be some pain. How fitting, then, that this book centers on the beauty that can be found in love’s brokenness. How fitting that the love isn’t rendered any less powerful or beautiful for leaving scars behind. And at the center of this love is the power of words, of poetry, of writing, and their ability to capture the nuances of love. “Duties infiltrate the story. The story has a gender, ALWAYS” (pg 15). This chapbook carries within it something truly raw and vulnerable, something unassuming, something transparent in the ways we talk and write about love.

This book stayed with me for days after. Something about it still feels open and raw, like a wound just before it begins to heal. I recommend it.

Book Review – Land to Light On by Dionne Brand

The first book of Dionne Brand’s I ever read was The Blue Clerk. It was a recommended reading for one of the residencies of my M.F.A. program. I read the excerpts that were listed for the residency, and then after the residency ended I went back and reread the whole book because it was an outstanding piece of literary creativity. When I found out Brand was also a prolific poet, I knew I had to start reading her work.

Land to Light On, like many books of poetry, is a conversation about the self in relation to the past. In particular, the horrifically racist past of slavery in the United States, and how that past is still negatively impacting Black people today. Some of the poems feel to almost be written be different speakers, as if the writer herself is channeling the words and lives and experiences of her ancestors and giving them a place to breathe. “The doorway cannot bell a sound, cannot repeat / what is outside. My eyes is not a mirror” (pg 3). “My mouth could not find a language / I find myself instead, useless as that” (pg 5). These poems, these lines are fused with a history that builds an agonizing tension between the reader and the work, as though we are being given a very real gift of seeing into the past and hearing the pain of souls crushed, dominated, and erased.

But there is also a sense of urgency in this book, a sense of the present continuing to point both backward to the past and forward to the potential future. Each poem, each voice that sounds reminiscent of history, also feels full of the primary speaker’s experience. At times, the poems feel to include both present and past simultaneously, and in that way the speaker almost becomes her ancestors, blending together with her own life, views, and pain. “I have to think again what it means that I am here, / what it means that this, harsh as it is and without / a name, can swallow me up” (pg 9). “She is a translator of languages / and souls” (pg 29). “She is a translator of bureaucracies. This race passes through / her, ledgers and columns of thirst, notebooks of bitter / feeling” (pg 29). The only way I can really describe this book is a form of prophecy. The speaker is accessing something both within her and outside of her, something sacred and divine that she has been entrusted with, and that she’s now entrusting the reader with.

And isn’t that the ultimate point of all writing? Taking something sacred, something magical, and entrusting it to the reader? It’s up to us to be worthy of that privilege.

Remembering to Reverse the Internal Narrative

Healing from trauma is not the end of one’s mental health journey. I’m not even sure “healing” can be counted as an end when it is an ongoing process. However, having completed the work of EMDR, my brain has, quite literally, been reprogrammed. Or, as my therapist put it yesterday, I’ve downloaded the new software, I just have to remember to use it. I am the 2.0 version of Riley’s operating system, I just have to remember not to revert back to the old operating system. (It sounds much better when she says it.)

My internal narrative has always been one of never enough. Changing that narrative to fit what I really feel and know inside of myself is a long and arduous process. Trauma, betrayal, and the very real emotional consequences of both, leave me always feeling uncomfortable in my own magic. My therapist said it’s like imposter syndrome, which is a collection of symptoms. I’ve done a huge bulk of the healing work, and yet I keep wondering if I did it right, if it was enough, if I just masked my way through it all. The answer is yes, I did it right, it was enough, and no, I didn’t just mask my way through it all. But the reason I feel these insecurities is because reshaping the mind also means a reshaping of the self.

The fact is, it’s much more uncomfortable to exist in the state of adaptive thinking (reinforcing my positive core beliefs) than it is to revert back to existing in my negative core beliefs. But honestly, just looking back over the last month and seeing how much those negative core beliefs have contributed to my insecurities, it’s astonishing to me that I can even stand to live in that place. Why would I want to live every single day inside of such intense self-doubt?

This week I finally came out of the many weeks long depressive episode I’ve been in, and holy shit, it feels amazing to be here. And I know that I can’t just “choose” to not be depressed, since that’s not how mental illness works, but how often I really focus on those positive core beliefs is a key part of how I feel everyday. It takes time and energy to reinforce them, but it takes even more time and energy to get myself out of the depressive episode.

Remembering to reverse the internal narrative is not easy, but it is worth it. Every time I acknowledge that I’m feeling the negative core belief, and then remind myself of how far I’ve come, I reinforce more positive, self-uplifting thinking. The more I do it, the more good habits are formed. It’s really that simple. It’s also really fucking hard. It’s also so very worth it because I really can continue building a healthier, happier life for myself.

It just comes down to remembering the things that help me on this journey. I can’t do them all at once, and I can’t rebuild my life in one sitting, but I can take intentional steps everyday to invest in both my short and long term well being. It starts inside of me first, and then extends outward to the choices I make, the places I go, and the words I speak. And besides, nothing irks the haters more than seeing you rise up and thrive when all they want is for you to struggle.

I won’t grow bitter.
I won’t dim my light and magic for anyone.
I have survived.
I can get my needs met.
And I am enough.

Book Review – Disobedience by Alice Knotley

I was first introduced to Alice Knotley in my second semester of graduate school. I read the book Grave of Light and it had a radical impact on how I viewed poetry. Wanting to read more long poems and especially poems that blend genres together, I decided my next book of hers to read would be this one, Disobedience.

I’m not sure I was able to fully appreciate the beauty of this book. I only gave it 3 stars, but I filled several pages with quotes that I loved and I remember being fascinated and captivated by it as I read. Although it is written in verse, the book is not just poetry. It is also memoir, fantasy, and autobiography, weaving together memories and other pieces of the narrator’s life and experiences in a way that feels reminiscent of fairy tales. There’s almost a cautionary tale quality to this book and it’s long-form verse, and yet it feels as though the narrator is speaking to her past self as well as her audience.

The more poetry I read, the more I see just how prevalent themes of loss, pain, and grief are to poets. Disobedience resonates with a deep ache, something both spoken and unspoken that hinges the writing to the audience in a way that baffles, excites, and grieves. “I exit into hot empty,” (pg 8); “Don’t arrive anywhere in your sleep / Don’t mix up night and day / soul and detective. No” (pg 11); “does an owl make / her life on reflection?” (pg 15); “in the exact world / to make ends meet draw an arrow / a position moving backwards in time / grasps yesterday quickly before dying” (pg 15). Throughout these lines is a truth that the writer cannot face, something the speaker knows and is wrestling with, ever so often giving us glimpses into the emotional landscape of these poems.

I think one of the reasons this book hit me in such a contradictory way is because Knotley writes poetry in a way I don’t understand. The structure of her lines, her use of blank space, her choice of words and images is…I don’t even know, almost hypnotic. I feel lulled into a kind of reflective anxiety where I’m invited into a narrative I don’t understand, and in which I am now expected to play a part. The speaker guides and then disappears, their voice always present, but their form always coming into and out of view. I don’t, to this day, really know what Disobedience is about and if I had to hazard a guess, I’d say it’s a long poem on self-discovery in grief, but even that feels so superficial.

And yet, what a testament to this poet’s amazing use of language to actually build such a reaction in a reader. I was confused by this book, but the poem itself is not confusing. I think it’s one of those books where the more you read it, the more you understand what’s not being said. “Don’t mix up night and day / soul and detective.” Humanity is examined in this book in a deep, philosophical, intensely honest way. The human soul is, likewise, examined and looked over and considered. I think Knotley is masterful in the way she weaves multiple tapestries together, and I think it will take multiple readings of this book for me to see the whole picture.