There’s a thing that happens sometimes that’s hard to describe. I’m someone who feels a lot all of the time. I’m very in tune with my emotions (for the most part) and that means that I’m usually highly aware of what I’m feeling in a given moment. I know that doesn’t sound hard to describe, but I really haven’t done this “thing” justice. It goes beyond simple awareness, I just don’t have a word for it.

There’s this other thing that happens when I read that’s hard to describe. It doesn’t happen every time I pick up a book, but sometimes I’ll be reading and something on the page will flick something on inside of me and it’s like the emotions just…gush. Usually it’s something I needed to feel but didn’t know how to access. (This is why reading is magic. I’m not even kidding.) Whatever it is about the poem or the sentence or the chapter, it links with something inside of me and brings it to the forefront of my consciousness.

Then there are the moments when these things happen simultaneously. This does not happen often…maybe once every five books or so (and that’s a generous estimation). And, I swear to god, I’ve never done drugs, but I cannot imagine anything coming close to feeling like this feels. And it just happened.

To be clear, I’m not talking about inspiration. Almost every book I read inspires me to write. That’s why I believe that literature is my Muse. As long as I’m reading, I will always be writing because I engage with the books I read. Sometimes I need to read them more than once to find that level of engagement, but it’s rare for a book not to inspire me to write something. What I’m talking about goes beyond inspiration into something else entirely.

My anxiety has been really bad lately. I don’t know why. There doesn’t really need to be a reason and I’d say a global pandemic is pretty fucking good one, but on top of that I’ve had one hell of a fucking year. Separation; divorce; poverty; loss of friends; heartbreak; betrayal, and through it all I’ve written my goddamn heart out. I’m not surprised to find myself feeling raw. I have an appointment with my doctor tomorrow to talk about getting onto some anti-anxiety medication.

So today I decided not to work on homework. I gave myself the day to chill and binge watch one of my favorite shows, The Magicians. I decided to get some reading done. I opened Terrance Hayes’ poetry collection Lighthead and began reading. And the process which feels a lot like inspiration began to happen. I started hearing sentences/lines in my head. (And even as I’m typing this, the inspiration part is still flowing and I now have an idea for a new poetry book and a new book of essays, but that’s getting away from myself.) Coupled with those lines and sentences were overwhelming waves of emotion. I honestly don’t know how to explain it other than that what I read was linking to something in me emotionally at the same time as it was inspiring me to write and the result was what I can only describe as manifesting a part of my soul onto the page. I feel like part of me healed, like part of me was a wound now exposed to the open air, and I feel like part of me fell away and was replaced with something new.

Again, this doesn’t happen often. It’s more than just the inspiration and the poem written; it’s a poem written from deep inside my emotional self. All poetry is emotion, but not all poetry is deep emotion. Some poems talk around the deep emotions, but that’s not the same as coming from it. It doesn’t mean the poem itself is about something deeply emotional, just that it carries the markers of something that has resonated within me far below the surface. My poem is about anger, but it’s also about what’s underneath my anger, what I’m hiding behind my anger.

My poem got to a truth that I couldn’t even admit to myself until now, when I wrote the poem. It’s not just inspiration. I know I keep saying that, but it’s true. This was more than that. This was urgent, almost like an incantation or a prayer. This was a revelation. This was an answer I didn’t even know I’d been asking in my work these last few months. In The Magicians, it’s understood that magic, the strongest magic, comes from pain, that tragedy actually leads to a stronger, more disciplined magician.

This is how I see my writing. I only found my way back to poetry because of my miscarriages. I went back to school and got my undergraduate degree because I found my way back to poetry. I went to grad school because I went back to undergrad. And I found my way back to poetry a second time when I went through my divorce. The pains of my life, the losses, the betrayals that have cut me deep and left me confused, the lies that have been told about me, have all shaped me into the courageous, compassionate, caring person I am. I didn’t ask to be made strong, but my life demanded it. It was either give in or stand up. So I made myself into someone who breathes fire.

I still have wounds. A lot of them. Trauma doesn’t go away, not even after transformation. Time and therapy and confronting my fears and unlearning the bullshit people have manipulated me into believing about myself is how I’ll heal from these wounds. Writing helps. It always helps. And tonight, I don’t know how, really, or even why, but I found more magic in this body. I found it kind of at the moment I needed it most.

I am grateful for so much in my life right now, and I’m scared shitless because I know that just on the other side of this ledge is a big expanse of air and space that I’ve never seen before and I don’t know what’s coming, I can’t predict my future, but I now hold a morsel of knowledge I didn’t have before, and that’s big. That’s the smallest thing, I know, but it’s the biggest magic (paraphrased from The Magicians). And I’m gonna do something great with it.