Today, in honor of the end of 2020, I sent out ten new poetry submissions. Last year and this year, my number of submissions reduced dramatically. It’s astonishing the things you just don’t have time for when your entire life goes up in flames and you’re left trying to rebuild from the rubble and ashes. So now that I have some work that I’ve revised and edited, work that feels like it’s actually strong, I’ve been slowly sending out these poems over the last few months. It hasn’t been a lot of submissions, but it’s been a consistent flow of work being introduced to the publishing world.
Last week, a literary journal contacted me via Instagram and said they really liked the work they’d seen me share, and they invited me to submit to their journal. So I did. I haven’t heard back yet (which is common), but it was exciting to feel like a somewhat prominent online literary presence.
Writing has often been the only thing I’ve had to keep me going. It was the only thing I had through my divorce. Because as helpful and encouraging as friends and family were, there’s no amount of encouragement and love that can make something as horrible as a divorce be less horrible. It’s still isolating. It’s still lonely. It’s still a struggle every day. Add on depression, anxiety, and probably PTSD from the emotional abuse, and even a mostly peaceful divorce feels like emotional violence. And even though I was in therapy and I was taking steps to look after myself (especially as someone who has struggled off and on with suicidal impulses/desires/fantasies), it took months of pain and suffering, much of it hidden and completely unacknowledged or seen by anyone, to really disconnect myself from my ex.
What got me through? Writing. What got me through my marriage? Writing. What got me through my miscarriages? Writing. In situations where I felt silenced, minimized, and erased, writing allowed me to imprint my voice on something. Writing about my marriage was one of the things that allowed me to even open up and discuss it with others. I remember the night I first shared with my best friend what I had been going through; I stayed with her for a night while her husband was out of town, and we stayed up late talking. And as I watched her react to the things I was relaying, I realized that, while these wounds would always hurt, they hurt much less than they had even a month before. I could recall them without having a panic attack. I could talk about my ex without bursting into tears.
My healing began with writing. My healing continues with writing. It’s not that trauma can only be healed through writing; I’ve been in therapy and I’ve been taking medication and learning the things I need to maintain my mental health, especially because I suffer from mental illness, but I can see the ways in which writing has aided my emotional recovery. It’s one of the reasons I write so openly on here about the things I’m going through. When we refuse to feel shame for our struggles, when we own our story and choose to be vulnerable and share our story, we allow for the building of connections. I’ve been told by several people that my openness and honesty and vulnerability has given them strength to face their own struggles and to tell their own stories, and honestly, that’s my entire goal with writing.
Sometimes I feel weird, sharing so much of my experiences on such an open, public platform. But then I think back to the times when I have felt the most silenced, the most minimized, the most powerless, and I remember why I write. I refuse to be silenced, and I refuse to silence myself. Owning our stories is how we take back our power. It’s how we challenge the narratives built for us by others. I write about my marriage because my experiences, my sufferings, they matter. I don’t write about them to glorify or romanticize the suffering, merely to shine a light on the things I’ve endured because stuffing it inside myself is a recipe for self-destruction.
So I encourage you to embrace your story as we go into 2021. You matter. Your story matters. Your healing matters.
