If you're reading this, it means that my second poetry chapbook, MY MOTHER CALLED ME A HERMIT, is being released today. Unlike my first collection, which felt like a distillation of a depressed person soaking their brain in the internet during a moment of worldwide crises, these poems are very recent. I spent the last year of my life writing, editing and compiling them together. They are, in a sense, the most present version of my writing, which is a sentence I am typing out right now in this moment, a full 3 weeks before I intend to release it.
I've thought a lot about the creative process as labour over the past couple of years. Living by myself, working full time and trying to squeeze anything artful from the few hours I have before I go to bed are all elements in this process, but more than that, they cost me time. Any time I don't spend writing something meaningful and cogent feels wasted. I feel the past on my back constantly and even doing something successfully brings up numbers in hours, minutes, seconds where I wasn't doing enough. I don't have enough time. Even right now, I'm writing this in a towel because I rushed from the shower to get these thoughts out of my head, and every second I'm not perfectly transcribing what I'm thinking is disappearing. This moment has already gone. You weren't there for it.
Everything I have to say about friendlessness, sexlessness, isolation, depression, suicidality and how I feel about having a ridiculous human body, instead of one made of water or steam, is in this collection. I truly don't think I could articulate myself better than the effort I've poured into this work. So, I'm writing this to let you know that it takes time to put together a picture of perfect loneliness. And I've not always used my time to do this. I have taken whole months off from even looking at it, terrified that when I spin my head back around, I'll have secretly written something heinously ugly and not worthy of an audience's attention.
Maybe I have. Maybe it's the worst thing to ever exist. At this point, I'm releasing it anyway, if only for the moments I've spent experiencing, then interpreting my emotional states, melting them down, fictionalising them, then leaving them to cool on the window sill. It all took so much time and that time was only a year. I did so much. I barely did anything.
My nephew was born last month and his head is already massive. My sister bought a house. My dad's birthday is going to be soon. It will have already passed when I post this. I'm sat in my living room, typing out poems from my notebook. I'm sat in my kitchen editing the front cover of this thing that already exists. I haven't seen my friends in months. I'm going to a housewarming party on the weekend. Everything keeps going. I wrote these poems because I have something to say. I mean them. And, now I hand them over to someone else, with my pen still in my hand, ready to write whatever comes next.