Issue 06 | All Hail Jenifer Lewis, The Cost Of Compromise, The Queering Of The Musical Canon, & The Aliveness Of Sin
This Is What I Know To Be For Me True Right Now (a journal of my real life—and all that I love). 02.01.23
i. /
In so many moments in this life, we must ask ourselves a series of questions:
What compromise is necessary here, am I willing to make it, and—if so—what will it cost me?
The courage it takes to ask these questions (no small thing), and the willingness to face an honest answer (and make no mistake, this is one holy hell of an ask), are, for me, crucial to staying on a path of integrity with myself.
ii./
This video with the inimitable Jenifer Lewis lead me down a rabbit hole of interview after interview. I lost an entire morning last week, and I am not mad about it.
I would be more than satisfied if I could hold a room with the level of presence this woman has in the tip of her pinky finger. Seriously.
Favorite quote:
”Love yourself so love will not be a stranger when it comes. And it will come.”
If you need a dose of moxie and audacity and the sort of diction most of us would kill for, just go google “Jenifer Lewis interviews’ and get inspired.
iii./
How do we learn to recognize healthy love when we have not yet experienced it ourselves, or have not lived it for so very long, or only experienced it in all too brief flashes and glimpses?
I think she is right. It is not that I believe all those internet memes are true. I do not think we have to love ourselves fully to deserve or accept the love of another. I do not believe that we must heal in solitude in order to deserve a healthy partnership.
But do I believe that the very best way we can know what we want, need, and deserve is to begin by giving it to ourselves, tenaciously, stubbornly, in every way that we can?
Yes.
Love yourself so very well, so that the kind of holy-good-god-damn loving you’ve been longing for will not be a stranger when it comes.
It’s got to begin there.
iv./
I once asked, “Has anyone ever tried to convince you that fashion was frivolous?”
It’s no secret that fashion, for me, is integral to self-expression, as much a part of me as my writing or my photography, or the way that I love.
As I explained today “It’s like … dressing like myself is a big part of feeling like myself which is a big part of existing as myself in the world.”
It’s about taking up space and calling attention and naming myself worthy of both.
And the further I feel that essential part of me slip-sliding, when I am tired or anxious or uncertain of where I belong, the more resolved I am about the practice of dressing in a way that feels wholly me. It is, in fact, a part of the way that I love myself, and I am devoted to it, entirely.
So no, fashion is not frivolous. Anything but.
v./
Yesterday Isabel Abbott asked me:
what hurts?
what feels good?
what matters right now?
what is magic?
I answered quickly this morning, the first responses that came to body and mind. But now the questions live in me, touchstones of a sort, & more swirls about in me in response, not yet ready to land in the world.
And so I take these questions into my journal and let them live and breathe there for a bit before I return to seek a deeper answer.
vi./
We can’t always grasp the fullness of the real answer right away. But what I have come to know is true is that somewhere, maybe way down deep, most of the answers live in us, waiting to be discovered. And sometimes, if we trust, the questions themselves are the entire point.
vii./
The most heartbreaking moment of any ending isn’t really the ending, I don’t think. It’s not the abject grief of the early days or the grasping denial that follows. It comes months later. When life has found new equilibrium and you’ve adjusted to what now is, and even made a tenuous sort of peace—a rational understanding—of the hows and whys and what’s of the necessity of this ending.
And then, that moment comes—and it always does—when you realize that this human, the one you knew inside and out. The one on whose skin you could have mapped every tattoo and freckle and scar. The one whose taste your mouth had memorized, whose heartbeat had synced with yours in the deep of so many 3 am dreamscapes. The one with whom you fell hard and laughed harder and cried and grappled and fought and lost.
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That person, once as close to you as breath, is now a stranger. Living an entire life you know nothing of. With joy and grief and struggle and celebrations and motivation and a thousand ordinary moments to which you are not privy. Making choices that feel perplexing. Moving, as is appropriate, on with their lives. Becoming, with each day that passes, a being you no longer know.
It is in that moment, I believe, that the real letting go occurs.
Where hands and heart loosen the last of their grip, palms turn upward into the open air. Where you throw your head back to the sun, take the deepest of inhales, sending breath down into the roots of you, and you just let go.
Yes, in many ways, this is the most heartbreaking moment of any goodbye. The true relinquishment of the joint story, of that knowing that once felt so entirely holy. It may be a moment that holds tender grief, yes.
But this is also the moment that finally sets you free.
viii./
My beloved Rachael Maddoxwrites about her experience of publishing her first book, Secret Bad Girl, a sexual trauma memoir.
“If you’re tired of wearing false politeness on your face, and you want to meet your most beloved kin, write everything. I mean, everything. Your horror stories. Your unpopular opinions. Your salvation songs. Your wildest racy dreams. Write seductive invitations to people you aren’t yet sure exist. Write a coming out manifesto and publish it far and wide. Write the truth that makes your insides tremble, knowing some will love you for it, and some will absolutely not.”
Rachael Maddox
As I have often said. The story you write has the power to save a life. Who knows, maybe even your own.
(P.S., Several years ago, Rachael and I created a ten-lesson workshop on writing safely through trauma and grief - you can check it out here).
ix./
'I have heard all of the stories about girls like me, and I am unafraid to make more of them.'
Carmen Maria Machado 'The Husband Stitch'.
x./
are you gonna fall?
is someone supposed to catch you?
or will you catch yourself?
there will be something worth falling for.
you’re shit scared
and your whole body is shaking
you go in there and you just fucking do it
you just do it, whatever it is
and then boom, it’s gone
the fear is gone.
// pink. trustfall.
This song, and how many times I played it this weekend alone have caused me to create a “2023 Spotify Wrapped Predictions” playlist, exclusively for the songs that immediately capture my attention and hold it tightly. What songs do you think will be on yours?
xi./
Let’s be real
This whole damn
EXPERIENCE
of LIVING is just one
big 'ole
TRUSTFALL.
The tentative extension of hearts and bodies and wounding and hope, leaning into the possibility of crushing/wanting/loving/needing one more time, even after every attempt thus far has met with some sort of end.
Trustfall.
Throwing your entire being into the work of your heart and soul and holding it with outstretched hands, hoping someone out there in the wild ethers will see it and say yes, this is everything I have been searching for. Thank god, you made this. It—and you—are worthy.
Trustfall.
Just waking up and taking a breath and surrendering to the fact that this life may hold you for another day and it also might not. This might be it, the last day you ever get to do and say and experience it all. And so you get up and do it, despite everything that makes you want to pull the covers over your head and hide.
Trustfall.
My god. we are wild and desperate and BRAVE AS FUCK.
And my god, I love this for us.
Against all odds foolish dreamers.
Valiant hearts.
Burning wild with godd//ess fire.
Making the leap and trusting, somehow, that the ground will be steady enough to hold us all.
xii./
The unapologetically queer, drag, and burlesque-inspired Video Sam Smith just realized for I’m Not Here To Make Friends has the conservatives clutching their pearls, and I couldn’t be more into it.
xiii./
”I am not the exception, I am a blessing of a body to love on”.
Sam Smith - I’m Not Here To Make Friends.
Speak that to yourself in the early morning hours, as you wake and run your hands over your own tender flesh.
I am a blessing of a body to love on.
I am a blessing of a body to love on.
I am a blessing of a body to love on.
Whisper it to the moon.
Repeat it in the mirror.
Sing it in the shower.
Not an exception.
Not a freakshow.
Not too needy
or greedy
or queer.
A blessing of a body, ready for love.
xiv./
In other queer music news - as an unashamed Swiftie (I can thank my oldest for that, and yes, she got tickets) I am obsessed with the fact that Taylor used Trans actor Laith Ashley in her Lavender Haze video.
And yes, Midnights 3am is once again back on frequent rotation.
xv./
When it comes to the progressive queering of the musical canon, you can file it under:
Things that make my closeted-until-my-30s self super giddy.
A long overdue trend I am entirely here for.
A beautiful inevitability of an ever more expansive world.
Queer representation in music, just like queer love and sex scenes in books, is a life-giving experience of the beauty of my community. Thank the fuck god for queerness, in all its forms. In all its beauty.
In her 2011 spoken word poem ‘Dear Straight People’, Denice Frohman says:
Dear Queer Young Girl,
I see you.
You don’t want them to see you so you change the pronouns in your love poems to “him” instead of “her.”
I used to do that.
Dear Straight People,
You make young poets make bad edits.
It is now 12 years since I first watched this poem. I am so very glad fewer young poets need to make bad edits.
xvi./
While we are on the topic…
I am often of the opinion that one should not mess with the greats unless you are also great yourself.
In other words, don’t cover Joni Mitchell (unless you’re Brandi Carlile). Don't cover Dolly (unless you’re Whitney).
But I’ll make an exception for this entirely queer reframe of Jolene.
”Dolly, dolly, dolly, I’m begging of you please just leave your man…”
xvii./
question one:
In how many stories have you been willing to play the role of a character who is complicit in their own diminishment?
question two:
are you finally ready to be done?
xviii./ “how many times have you broken bones trying to unfold yourself thinly enough to fit into every one of his crevices? do you ache with shame from all the acrobatics you have done? i too have played contortionist found myself in the smallest places it’s amazing how we fold and unfold ourselves, call it love.” — 'the contortionist' by Della Hicks-Wilson
xix./
When it comes to the things that take us by surprise // hurt like hell // bring the trigger rushing up and out ready to take down all in our path, we must be willing to ask ourselves:
1. what part arises from our fierce and tender heart letting go of a story we wanted to hold?
2. what part originates in our delicate and prickly ego and the particularly ouchy experience of untangling the delusion of our own exceptionalism?
3. what part is grief masquerading as anger directed inward because we were willing to lie to ourselves about what was real?
To the hurting heart, offer care, trust, the gentle loving of the very kindest souls, the proven balm of time and space, and copious amounts of ice cream.
To the battered ego, buy a new outfit that makes you feel fabulous, gather your besties, go dancing in a crowded club. After you make it through the bathroom line, take a moment—look yourself dead in the eye in that dirty mirror, deliver tough love honest reflection, halt the projections, and get down with what is real.
To the righteous grief masquerading as anger, offer a firm reminder that though you may have been willing to live in the lie for a time, you are now existing firmly in the richness of truth.
You’re hurt because you tried. Because you cared. Because you gave a damn about something. Your ego is wounded because it’s crazy hard to take an honest look at the ways we perpetuate our own wounding, the ways we are all just fumbling through this life, trying our darndest to make something real, but god damn if you aren’t brave enough to do really hard things. And you’re angry because it took you longer than you think it should have to move on. Your friends knew and the books knew and maybe you even knew for a long time before you did the thing, and fuck if it doesn’t suck to take a look at that.
xx./
BUT YOU DID IT LOVE.
You got out
//walked away
//made the leap
//chose yourself.
Of all the things you know
right now,
that’s the one
you hold close.
xxi./
My daughter texts me a quiz. ”Are you a Soldier, a Poet, or a King?”, it asks.
I am, like most humans, perpetually fascinated with myself, and so of course I take the quiz.
Question 14 of 20.
What is sin?
In the whole of my 47 years on this life and in this human body—when I think of the times that I have felt most here, most present, more assured of my own existence, the lush and undeniable truth of my being—were moments of what someone, somewhere would have called sin.
The answer? The only answer I can entertain?
ALIVE.
Sin, for me, has always been alive.
