Nominations and Other Wins
Well, I genuinely never thought this would happen in my life, but my debut book of poetry, Even the Air, Too Heavy, has been nominated for the Firecracker Award! YA’LL! My book was nominated for an award! I am in absolute shock. I’ve been trying to process this all day.
I won’t know if I’m a finalist until spring 2023, and I won’t know if I won until June 2023, and the waiting is going to absolutely stress me the fuck out, but I’m honestly too happy and giddy and euphoric right now to care about the waiting.
Writing has been and still is one of the primary outlets I use to be my most authentic self. Like every other writer I know, I pour my heart and soul into everything I write. I have since I was a kid. Creating this book was one of the hardest and most personally edifying experiences I’ve ever had. It was hard because the subject matter is so incredibly personal; diving back into your trauma for the sake of creating art around it so that someone else won’t feel as alone as you felt going through it, is tremendously difficult. It’s pain. It’s sadness. It’s grief. Sometimes it’s reliving the trauma all over again. And doing all of this knowing that your work may not be picked up by a publisher or read by anyone or acknowledged by anyone outside of your personal acquaintances, doesn’t make it any easier.
And I don’t think it should be easier, but it still takes a mental and emotional toll. So to see this book, to hold it in my hands and see my name on it and look inside and see the poems I wrote sprawled on the page, is honestly an enormous relief. But then, to find out that my publisher loved the book so much, they nominated it for an actual literary award for independent writers, is just…it’s beyond what I can comprehend at the moment.
The book is about my miscarriages, and they were such impactful moments of my life that they almost feel like a dream now. And they’re not dreams, they never were dreams, and it’s been long enough (eight years since my second miscarriage) that the nightmares have stopped. And actually, since every seven years all of the cells in our bodies regenerate, I am currently existing in a body without any cells left from that period of time. So a lot of time has passed and even though a lot of the trauma itself has healed, the grief remains. Every Mother’s Day, I remember my first miscarriage because in 2013, that was the day my first miscarriage started. And every January, I remember my second miscarriage.
But here’s a big reason why these events are still so impactful on who I am today: they are what led me to leave the church, and then leave my ex.
The reactions I got from the christians in my life when I had my miscarriages was, almost universally, horrifying to me. In fact, they, on their own, were a different form of trauma. And it was the worst from my former in-laws. I was told it “was all part of god’s plan,” and “everything happens for a reason,” and “god is testing you”….on and on they went without any consideration whatsoever for whether or not their words would help or harm. And see, that, therein, is one of the biggest issues with christianity: even if the people mean well, their words and actions can cause irreparable harm, and they don’t care. One person sent me bible verse about how losing the things we cherish most is a blessing because it brings us closer to christ. The amount of anger I felt when I received that was palpable.
And this isn’t including the many number of questions and insinuations that I had somehow caused the miscarriage by using a microwave or cleaning the litter box.
These things are what made me walk away from church and church people. The people I would normally have turned to for comfort were suddenly no longer safe for me. I still prayed. I still tried to reach god. I tried for years. But I only ever heard silence. That small voice I always thought was god when I would pray before, it was gone. And I see now that it was my faith that disappeared. And the worst part was that these same christians blamed me for that too, said that my faith must not have been that strong to begin with if some hurtful words from human beings were enough for me to lose that faith.
It’s hard, losing your spirituality. Especially when you’re a very spiritual person, like me. But the longer I was away from the church, the more I realized how much I didn’t belong in or believe the things being taught there. And the longer I was away from the church, the more I started to see my then-husband for who he really was: an emotionally abusive partner. See, every church I’ve ever been in has taught that divorce is a sin, that no matter how bad things get, you stay married and try to work it out. But it wasn’t until I had been out of the church for years that I started to see the ways my ex was mistreating me and abusing me. And then, it still took years for me to leave him because that shame was so deeply rooted inside of me; “I can’t leave him, I can’t give up on our marriage, I have to work harder to keep us together,” and all the while I was abandoning myself for the sake of someone who couldn’t have given two shits about the ways he hurt me.
If I hadn’t left the church, I don’t think I would have realized how abusive my ex was. And if I hadn’t had my miscarriages, I don’t know if I would have left the church. So in many ways, my miscarriages were the contractions that birthed a new version of myself, one who would start putting herself first.
That’s why my first book of poetry had to be about my miscarriages. And that’s why my next book of poetry is going to be about the loss of my faith, and the discovery of who I really am.
Writing this next book is going to hurt like a motherfucker. And I don’t know when I’m going to start it. But the healing I will find among its pages will be exquisite.
And until then, I’ll be waiting to hear about my award nomination!
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