Tag: recovery

Wheeling Motel

The vast waters flow past its back yard.
You can purchase a six-pack in bars!
Tammy Wynette’s on the marquee

a block down. It’s twenty-five years ago:
you went to death, I to life, and
which was luckier God only knows.

There’s this line in an unpublished poem of yours.
The river is like that,
a blind familiar.

The wind will die down when I say so;
the leaden and lessening light on
the current.

Then the moon will rise
like the word reconciliation,
like Walt Whitman examining the tear on a dead face.

– Franz Wright

the kind of morning where I have listened to this ten times in a row

“I started starving myself, fucked up my bodily health
I didn’t wanna be attractive to nobody else
I didn’t want the appeal, wanted to stunt my own growth
But there’s a fucking reason behind every scar that I show…

My biggest problem was fear, and what being fearful could do
It made me run, it made me hide it made me scared of the truth
I’m not deranged anymore, I’m not the same anymore
I mean I’m sane but I’m insane but not the same as before”

Romance as means of redemption is the worst kind of Western medicine, but an obsession with personal transformation is an even more American tendency, or at least it is mine. In the last couple years it became a more interesting challenge to be “good” than bad. I started living alone, vacuuming my apartment weekly, saving parmesan rinds for soup, calling to negotiate better rates for utilities. I became a better cook and friend, especially to myself. These specific tasks are not meant to demonstrate adulthood, the inane fantasy of the unrigorous that there is a finite level—based often on what you can afford to own and what that implies—at which no further acquisition of skills or growth is necessary. Rather, it’s to illustrate that I now live my life in a way that suggests I care to be in it. Naturally that desire transfers to other tasks, practices, and ways of relating––what I mean is that it transfers to love.


“Every Long Letter Is A Love Letter” by Lucy Morris

Feeling listened to and understood changes our physiology; being able to articulate a complex feeling, and having our feelings recognized, lights up our limbic brain and creates an “aha moment”. In contrast, being met by silence and incomprehension kills the spirit. Or, as John Bowlby so memorably put it: “What can not be spoken to the [m]other cannot be told to the self.”

Bessel Van Der Kolk, The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind and Body in the Healing of Trauma
(via abrce)
Source: jumbocrab