Typewriter poetry

Let me tell you a story.

Every post on Enjambment comes fresh each morning. I don't write future outlines or killer quips I thought of. By the next dawn, I may lose some deep, profound, hurting memories. But that's okay. They always come around.

Life is a struggle with imperfect information. I daydream about being a god not for what I might be able to do, but what I might be able to know. To accept that in our relationships, most questions do not have knowable answers. I query the Library of Alexandria and only ash and flame speak to me. There is no interlibrary loan from phantoms and the howling of the dead.

I've changed how I structure therapy multiple times in 2024. In the early summer I began writing therapy outlines, which at their peak approached 2,000 words. A large part of it was a social survey of the week- who is everyone I talked to, who did I do social (or very seldomly, romantic) things with. Were there any conversations 'about us' with people? Did people out of touch finally message back?

By November, I realized that this doesn't work at all. An outline about your feelings loses the structure and clarity that outlines about other topics have and maintain as they grow. I'm quite bad at determining what needs to be written out and what I will naturally cover anyway; I only have so much extensor strength in my hands. Crucially, this inventory of my relationships makes my fears of rejection and tendency to psychoanalyze those I know worse. In a given week, there are only a couple of cases where I might be able to think about my role. Mostly there is statistical noise, an idle vibration.

So I ended up with this blog. Going through and writing a piece here involves a lot of preliminary processing, and helps determine where in a sprawling topic (rejection, love, my sense of purpose) is the heart of the matter. I can intellectualize anything, I can convince myself of anything. Just as I am mentally broken upon the wheel with what others might plausibly do, I do the same with my own thoughts and emotions. Events have to play out. Only then will the meaning of the matter emerge.

I also am able to put people I have very strong feelings about at an arm's distance. Though I do not send this blog out to most people, I am cognizant that anything semi-public on the internet might be read. So there are no names, and I am pretty vague about some of the details. Though the details are important, they are also so close to me, so overwhelming in their specifics, I need to talk a bit more about the role people play in my life. I woke up yesterday morning in tears, because I was thinking of someone mentioned on this site. What about them caught my memory was totally new, part of a now years-long process of where someone can be deeply hurtful, and also someone I thank the wind for having encountered every day.

Most of the writing I do is me as an educator, as a communicator. The style is dry but aims to be conversational. Most of what is publicly available by me may be fairly niche in topic, but it's trying to be accessible to a community college student. There is then my poetry - often very pulsing, frenetic, lyrical - trying to capture the ache that I feel every day. These two styles are vastly different and show me as a creator that is uncomfortable bringing the lessons from one type to the other.

Every morning I sit down and try to figure out how I can talk about my feelings. How do I describe joy I clinically have barely felt for my adult life? How am I going to be honest without self-punishment? I don't know, these posts are a draft, an advisory opinion on the heart. I don't know where it leads. Three years ago I remember the first time my heart moved forward, even just an amount nobody would have known until I leapt up and proclaimed it.

What is joy if not the moment we realize it's not all empty inside?

Artemis