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Or, when writers have to fix their crap

In my head, I’m a fantasy writer. A fantasy novelist, specifically, with aspirations to the short story. Somewhere in there lurks the identity of a journalist, too, or at least a writer of useful nonfiction articles and, just possibly, personal essays. If you’ve recently come across me, though, you could very readily be forgiven for thinking I’m primarily a sort of middling-decentish poet. From an outside view, all I’ve been writing is poetry.

So if I’m supposed to be writing this other stuff, what gives with all the poems? If I’m a novelist, why is everything I visibly produce not just poetry, but micropoetry? (That’s arguably the extreme opposite end of the scale, if one exists, from novels.) Why the heck have I literally submitted and posted nothing but poems for all of 2020 so far, when my head is stuffed with longer stories?

The answer is foreshadowed in a tweet from the middle of last year:

It’s odd how changing a crucial piece of your identity can feel like starting over again with how you communicate. Nonfiction writing feels weirdly awkward now — like relearning to walk after a major physical change. Not sure when I’ll be ready for the public again … 😉

— Crystal K. Li (@wordsofcrystal) August 24, 2019

Except that it’s not just nonfiction, as it turns out. All of my writing has become a sort of 3-D puzzle that I need to piece back together around the changed shape of my self. I am, as I am wont to say, in transition.

Still? you might ask; or maybe I’m just asking myself that. I do feel like I should be past the awkward figuring-it-out stage already. But that’s not fair of me, really. On average, it takes a year and a half to process a major life change, positive or negative.¹According to the research of psychologist James Pennebaker. He wrote in his book Opening Up that about half of the people he studied followed a pattern of post-traumatic growth that took about eighteen months. It included 4-6 months of intense emotion, then a plateau period of about a year in which life moved on, after which the life change or trauma was assimilated. It hasn’t even been six months for me, and I’m still not ready to talk publicly about last year’s big change — in part because it had a couple of decades of negative momentum behind it, and also because there’s still a lot of social stigma, misunderstanding, and pain tied up in it.

Plus, that’s not the only change I’m dealing with. A lot of things have happened in the past few years that I’m now processing: symbolic deaths and rebirths, literal deaths that have changed my day-to-day life or provoked me to examine my reactions and the reasons behind them, and there have been big life changes in my support network, too.

Progress isn’t always tidy

Wait, some of you might be thinking. You’re still processing stuff from a few years ago? Why?

That happens, sometimes, when you’ve been in emotional debt. That’s what I’m calling it when you put off dealing with emotional issues you know are important, because sheer survival is your first priority. It’s kind of like using a credit card to pay bills and buy groceries when you have no other way to do it — you know it’s not ideal, but the electricity needs to stay on and you need to keep eating if you want to stay around to improve the situation. Putting things off isn’t always irresponsible — sometimes it’s a necessary survival mechanism, because when your daily life is already a constant struggle, you might literally lack the resources to deal with one more stressful thing.

After last year, thankfully, I do finally have the resources to process the backlog of life changes, but I still don’t have a lot of extra processing power to spare. The only way out of the muddle, though, is forward.

Poetry is a multi-tasker

So the reason I’m putting out so much poetry right now is that I want to keep writing through my wonkiness — and I am.

I’m writing quite a lot, actually, not just poetry, but stories that matter (to me, at least), and real articles, too. But the only stuff that’s coming out clearly(ish), the only stuff that’s making it to presentable form, is poems.

Somehow, poetry can slip out through the gunked-up machinery of my creative brain even while my inner workings are being disassembled, cleaned, and reassembled, maybe partly because it’s small enough to wiggle through. Larger works (even ones like this blog post) are way harder to produce now than they once were, because they touch more places in my identity that are under (re)construction.

The difficult works, of course, are the ones I’m really drawn to — the stories that matter most but which were interrupted by inner turmoil, the tales I was trying to tell while things were coming apart inside and around me. Those stories will take more time to get out into the world, but they’ll be worth the work, and I’m doing it — behind the scenes, for now.

And writing poems also serves another purpose. It isn’t just a way to keep my writing hand moving. It’s a creative act that, itself, helps clarify my inner world. To quote a piece of advice that Japanese poet Fujiwara no Teika received from his father, “Poetry […] is something that proceeds from the heart and is understood in the self.” And in writing it, one better understands the self.

Partly, I’m writing all this poetry because it’s good practice: practice listening to myself, translating inner to outer and vice versa, shaping and reshaping words and images and feelings. I’m writing it because working in bite-sized chunks makes it easier to leap past excuses and fears and imperfections. It makes the whole writing process into an accessible, rapidly repeatable microcosm, a ritual I can use to stabilize and strengthen my identity, day by day: In tiny increments, I can write, edit, complete, send out, and share my words and my world.

The sharing part matters especially. When you’re reconstructing a healthier identity, connections matter. The community we exist within matters, and after all, words were meant to be shared, across time, space, culture, and consciousness.

Slow growth is still growth

So if all that comes out for the next whole year is poetry, then so be it. It’s rebuilding my foundation. Someday again there will be multilayered stories about magic, about family, about fighting for what matters and fighting over what doesn’t, about death and love and life and fear, about the good and the terrible, and the intricate areas of gray. There will again be stories about people negotiating the boundaries and complexities of identity and culture and society and relationships.

Those stories will be fictional, but they will also be real, in that the soul inside them will be real; and the heart in them will be stronger, keener, and truer thanks to the unseen work I’m doing now.

For now, I am a poet — and may I ever be. I am also a storyteller, a magicworker, a guide (if a gawky one), a helping hand, an eccentric viewpoint, and hopefully a whisper of inspiration, even if those things largely happen behind the curtain for a while.

I write and share my poetry because poetry is both kind and illuminating, things I need now in my time of transition; and I write it because the more often I trust the words that come, whatever they are, the sooner and the better all the other stories in me will flow free again.

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