2021 Was the Year of the Selfie, Pour Moi. 2022, However, Is the Year of the Selfie.

Yes it’s true, I’m 36 and jumped out of my skin this January when I looked in the mirror and saw the face of—not a wise woman, not an elder, not a witch or hag—but a 36-year old. :( So disappointing, after all I have not done to prevent sun damage. And then I was disappointed for being disappointed, after all I have done to reject the beauty myth (a la Naomi Wolf) and embrace the Wild Woman archetype (thank you Clarissa Pinkola Estés). Anyways, carefully, with tiny instruments, I am separating the good selfie from pile and making sure to post it for my enemies. (J/k I don't have those.)

So anyway this particular bathroom selfie is the product, believe it or not, of anxiety (well yeah that’s obv) and an unsustainable level of excitement. I was jittery. I took this photo on my way home from the first writer’s retreat I have ever attended. It was not even a writer’s retreat in the popular sense. It was just me, driving to Savannah Georgia by myself, to an Airbnb, to organize my writing, and to organize my brain about my writing.

I’ve spent the past 9 years organizing my life around enormously chaotic life happenings (including but not limited to a husband diagnosed with chronic degenerative disease, myself un-diagnosed with postpartum depression, just having a small child PERIODT) and have reached a point where I can sever a few old ties and make a new one. Mind-boggling. A path forward into trackless forest. Dusk gathers. Hoarse cries of crows in the canopy. Actually, it's a path forward into prioritizing my writing, accepting myself as the greatest poet who has ever lived the worst writer born to woman a solid poet with work to do.

I had just created a first draft of a full-length poetry collection, and for the first time since graduate school, submitted a shit-ton of poems to journals and litmags. Since the time this selfie was taken, I’ve created two chapbook manuscripts and done an amount of revision that really helps me see what I have. I’m proud of these three manuscripts, but since they’re the first ones I’ve created without the assistance of readers, workshops, and professors (talking about my MA thesis, here, which I can’t publish because my university snatched it out of my hands with a “Thank YEW I’ll take that for fucking free forever” and there it bobs in their thesis & dissertation blood bank for all time), I currently have a feeling of free-falling. Which makes me feel bad about my face. About time for another selfie, then.

Thanks for reading and don’t forget to smash that link for my new poem in The Racket! Noah Sanders is running a beautiful journal out there in SF. I just so much love what he’s doing. If you're writing poetry, send him some!