cancerclub:

“It’s the thirteenth day of spring and all the snow
is dirtier than it was yesterday. My teeth
are one day older and the sky
has another thousand molecules of cancer moving through it,
but my eyes have been dry,
and that feels really nice, in bed eating Oreos
like a normal person, my feet getting warm as my brain
softens and slips away from itself
like a moon, a sailboat, all the pretty things
we don’t know how to hold.
You asked me for a letter
and I sent you a star-shaped piece of my tongue.
You asked me for a letter
and this isn’t it. I’m sorry. I get so busy
thinking about you that I forget
to think about you. I imagine my insides
like a whole sea of sailboats
murmuring to each other in the dark,
and I wonder how many secrets exist on the Earth at any given moment,
what breed of flowers
will dig their roots into our graves, what shade of gold
is your breath when you dream?
You make me want to make stamps out of morning,
seal every envelope with a moan.
How many fibers of the universe have we given birth to?
Like this I am always wading through an orchestra, my hips
always brushing against some sort of glass, all these breakable
thoughts about God, the sun
in April, the sound you make when you look at me and don’t make any sound.”

-Sarah Certa: “JULIET”

Read the chapbook

some ppl confuse empathy and/or spirituality with hyper-optimism & I think this is dangerous. whether the hyper-optimism comes from a place of privilege or is itself a self-defense mechanism to keep their own painful emotions buried, when ppl respond to other ppl’s pain with hyper-optimism it often further invalidates that pain, which ultimately only leads to more pain. I view emotions as energy frequencies, ranging on a scale from high to low, so it only makes physical sense to me that low-frequency feelings, such as depression, for example, are not going to suddenly bounce up to the high-end range of the scale, & even if they did, this dramatic shift would be unpleasant & maybe frightening, forcing your energetic system to adjust from one polarity to the other. my own energetic system used to do this all the time & it was excruciatingly painful, known to some in the western psych world as rapid-cycling bipolar disorder and/or the rapidly changing emotions that often accompany the class of symptoms the DSM calls ‘borderline personality disorder’ (which I have a *very long impassioned theory about that I will maybe share at another time*). So anyway if someone is feeling on the low-end of the spectrum it makes sense to me to 1) validate those emotions! Emotions are energetic signals – they are telling us something, even the unpleasant emotions we would rather not hear from. We are energetic beings & exist in so many more multi-dimensional ways than our physical bodies. Low-frequency/painful emotions are messages that something is wrong, & some might say “well yes there is a lack of serotonin in the brain” but that still doesn’t answer *why* there is a lack of serotonin in the brain (and sometimes it has nothing to do w/ serotonin or the physical brain at all so neuroscience as the universal foundation for figuring out emotional pain really doesn’t cut it for me & also largely ignores or at least does not center the roots of trauma & sociopolitical oppression), & if you’ve been my facebook friend for a while you know I am all about getting to the root of things. which brings me back to my favorite topic: QUANTUM PHYSICS. I believe that feelings are composed of subatomic particles just like everything else in the universe, which means I believe that our feelings have a direct impact on the physical world simply because feelings are, at their subatomic root, already a part of the physical world. BUT – I believe it is dangerous to translate this into the idea that hyper-optimism is the key to transforming painful emotions into less or not-painful emotions (this is known as the cringe-worthy concept of “positive thinking” as the cure to all yr woes), because to do so is to ignore or resist the energetic messages those painful emotions are sending us, & it is **resistance to energy** that is most painful of all. I believe painful energy needs to be processed & before it can be processed it has to be recognized & validated, & to me recognizing & validating where people are currently emotionally at is the first step in extending true empathy. and this true empathy is, at an energetic level, the highest frequency of all!!! I call this highest frequency Love & it is so fine & so electric & so infinite & multi-dimensional that you don’t even have to speak it for it to do its work. it works subtly, beneath the surface of what we can see, so that when someone is in pain & you choose to empathize with that person instead of project hyper-optimism or what *you* think they *should* be doing/feeling, you are both meeting that person’s current emotional need, an energetic alignment which helps provide some energetic stability, (which is much healthier than jumping from low to high anyway), AND stirring up the subconscious or perhaps unconscious high frequencies of Love that will continue to do their work even after you are finished extending empathy. this is why when we are in pain we cringe when someone tells us to just “cheer up” or “snap out of it.” that cringing is a sign that their energetic vibrations are not what we currently need, otherwise their messages would feel good! often we know exactly what we need: someone who is willing to listen & validate us, which is why it feels so good when someone does. that good feeling is the subtle work of Love as we process our pain. we need empathy/ Love.

a lot of hyper-optimism comes from privileged New Age thinking that does not empathize with sociopolitical experiences outside of the status quo, which is partly because we are currently living in a global empathy deficit & it is exhausting & downright awful. yet somehow I have hope, & I swear that’s not hyper-optimism lol.

I love you. <3

I’ve realized the men who’ve hurt me don’t actually hate me. They hate themselves. They hate themselves so much they never let me hold them.

When people come to me I want them to feel like they are standing at the edge of a lake. I want to be reflective like that, cool like that, calm like that. When they touch me I want them to feel infinite and not because of me but because of them. I want you to love yourself, why don’t you love yourself, who’s been stopping you all these years?

I study neuroscience and know we are infinite. There are a trillion neural pathways in each of our brains, it’s no wonder we feel lost, it’s no wonder we always find ourselves anyway, blinking up at the light like the children we fear we still are.

We still are.

I want to love myself but first I have to find her/ what was ever found that wasn’t fueld by love? Curisoity/ the desire to know/ to know/ to undo the fear that keeps us from ourselves/ each other.

I got so close to you, it was like living inside you, all those chains rattling against your insides. I picked so many of your locks/ you let me touch everything except for you.

I gave you everything, including me, like a mother I loved you unconditionally/ is there any other way to love/ if there is I don’t want to know it/ I need to know it.

I cannot let you rape me I cannot let you rape me I cannot let you rape me/ you raped me/ I won’t unsay it because you can’t undo it.

But still. This bundle of axons I’m always toeing along, this imaginary tie to you/ madness/ how are these feelings any less real than when I said I loved you/ how are you actually any further away? So much of what we built was invisible/ so much of what you destroyed was invisible/ still, all of this matters.

I am tired of not being known/ touched/ able to exist in all my human parts. I keep telling people I am mangled from the inside out but I never actually show them/ myself/ hold myself.

I’ve clung to my truths as a way to avoid other truths. This poem was once as true as this poem and I am both of them and neither and more all at once. “I contain multitudes” lol but really it’s true. There is no room for nuance and there is room/ I have to make room/ secretly/ I am it.  

Everything I do is in service to someone else, an addiction to being needed/ useful. I try to break this cycle and all my illusions break away/ I am left with myself/ nothing.

I slip into this pain and think of you curled up like an infant on the floor in your apartment because the cap to your water bottle didn’t click three times/ or maybe it did/ how can you know/ I don’t know/ the water/ the water/ the germs. They really are everywhere. I used to suspect you were magic for being able to sense them/ this magic thinking of mine/ this is how I built you/ loved you.

Don’t mistake these words as me saying yes. I refuse to be ping-ponged from one side of the dichotomy to the other/ I am not an object, after all/ I object/ I am infinite.

I am a person. The danger is that I project my inner self onto others/ when I humanize myself I cannot help but humanize you/ love you/ myself. I need all of these things to be okay/ I need to have my needs met/ I need to learn how to say no as a way of saying yes/ to myself/ you/ the part I never reached.

I write as if you are inextricable from me/ maybe this is a truth/ a lie to distract me from other truths.

I don’t actually know.

I sit down against the wall and hug my knees to my chest like the child I feel that I am. This is what she needed/ needs/ this is where she is. Go there, I say to myself, and I realize I say it only to myself.

For most of my life I didn’t know how to say no to anyone because I imagined everyone as the babies they once were/ everyone as innocent/ everyone as hurting. This is selfish pacifist thinking/ this was me projecting/ this was a cry for help coming up from the depths of me/ every person became a mirror for the unloved self in me/ I just never learned how to recognize her.

Still sometimes I don’t recognize her/ she is not always a her/ but she is something/ she is holding me now. I hug myself and become her/ she becomes my guide. I close my eyes and show her my thoughts, how often I think about leaving, those thoughts like fiberglass, they insulate me.

She looks at me and says No. She doesn’t even beg, her voice still like the lake I want to be/ she knows I want to be/ she knows I will listen. She just has to say it/ I just have to listen. I will listen.

I am listening, still. Stay.