grace, enough
Mood: Soft Shock (acoustic) - Yeah Yeah Yeahs (this fan-made video has been on my mind a lot lately)
I have been writing, though you probably wouldn’t know it to look at these sparse pages. When I started writing, fifteen years ago, I began in long-form. In fiction. I wrote a terrible novel when I was sixteen that strangers on the internet surprisingly loved & that I now call “a terrible novel in a simpler time” whenever anyone asks about my history. By nineteen I’d written a second & most of a third. Deleted it all off the internet when, ten years later, I was still receiving heartfelt, angry comments from strangers about never finishing. This is all a source of pride & embarrassment. I’m a poet now by heart, action, community. This is where I thrive.
I have started writing long-form again.
It’s been an exercise in grace, in this, my year of Grace. I don’t know how to do it anymore. I’ve written four short stories recently & I’m constantly caught between the delight & the humiliation. There is something good in it – I have not lost every thread of talent I possessed, of course – but when I read them back to myself I feel ashamed at how the words quickly lose their magic.
I keep writing anyway.
For the past few years my word of the year has been Audacity. Say it out loud to yourself now to properly flesh it full. Audacity. A friend told me about its year, how we all needed to embody audaciousness because we were worth it. Worth putting ourselves out there & worth being seen. Have the Audacity to apply to this journal. Have the Audacity to ask for what you want. If you don’t have it, this world guaranteed that someone less deserving would. So for years now I held Audacity in my palms, setting it down sometimes when I really just couldn’t & offering it to others when I believed they really just could. It’s served me well & will likely be my honorary word for many years further.
This year though has been Grace. After the fourth person looked & looked at me before finally saying Keayva, Keayva, you are too hard on yourself – I had to finally admit that I had a problem. I know that I push myself to breaking but I guess I thought that it was a secret. That I just came across as hardworking & self-aware & only occasionally fragile. I was not something to be looked & looked at. So I’ve been trying to let myself feel foolish & learn how to live in the muck of it. Trying to find a new place to land instead of looking at my reflection & thinking not enough, not enough, not enough. This has always been my downfall, my absence of perfection. I’ve mentioned this before. It’s the same story.
But: Grace.
I am doing enough. I am trying enough. I am enough.
Anything I do is enough because I am here. & the voice in my head that had an immediate objection to that sentence would do well to remember the forest instead of the trees. The junction of trauma that it once stood at. I am still here & everything past that street or the other one is just an extra tree being planted.
That is to say that this year: I have called myself shitty less. I have called myself ugly less. Compared my selfhood to the her or him less. I have written through the possibility of writing poorly or not enough. & when I fail at the shitty or the ugly or the not enough, I am better at correcting the record. At offering myself more & then reaching up & up & taking it with both hands wide open.
This is progress.
