On Pain, Purpose, and Community
How do we keep nourishing hope and connection across necessary silence?
I went silent toward the end of last year, and not just on Substack. The injunction to say something, the right thing, and also contribute something useful feels crushing. Increasingly, the horror unfolding in the world compels me to grow quieter, listen read, observe, and try to put a few things together, come to some sort of understanding. I’ve been coming up empty. I refuse to normalize this degree of absurdity. At the same time, we are all being asked to function as if everything were business as usual. Screaming from the rooftops seems futile, or just an exercise in temporary catharsis. A friend tells me there’s a danger to this. She says that silencing ourselves, even when we believe we have nothing to express but fear, can grow into as much of a destructive cycle as constantly spewing our fleeting thoughts.
Recently, a talented writer who suffers from chronic pain posted on Instagram about how pain doesn’t give her anything to write about. It doesn’t inspire her or induce any profound thought—it’s just pain. My obsession with my own pain with EDS, POTS, and fibromyalgia revealed itself briefly to me as both a response to the world and simply a challenge that I can only sometimes navigate around and through. A brick wall rather than a framework. One of the problems chronic pain sufferers have is the fear of exhausting others with our pain, fatigue, inability to maintain plans, and often desperate need for assistance or relief. Perhaps it’s a framework for me because it’s always the closest thing at hand in my consciousness. Is that narcissism? Is it futile? Perhaps, I’ve been thinking, it’s time to shut up about that too.
On the other hand, what I’ve always found fascinating about pain is the legacy of writers who have taken pain as their point of inquiry specifically because it is so resistant to language. A universal experience that is nonetheless impossible to communicate. What is a poet’s job if not to think about how language—a mutable, incomplete, and dangerously slippery tool—can function to bring us as close to the unspeakable as possible? If it’s the unspeakable we’re after, then aren’t long periods of silence in which we take the world in, however painful, fundamentally necessary to the work?
In the wake of a ceasefire that we have every reason to be deeply grateful for— and deeply suspicious of—while praying ardently for the aid, safety, and security of the living and peace for our martyrs; in the wake of an inauguration and first day that has spelled unimaginable further traumas personal, collective, and global, my thinking about pain has expanded so that it’s beginning to double as a kind of expression of loneliness and despair. Perhaps my body is exploding less about the weather and more about the world. My pain is both organic and psychosomatic, and I don’t particularly see them as different, separate, or sequential. I feel everything with everything. I have learned to make peace with being a live wire. What to do with it on the other hand…
The only answer that has compelled me over the last couple of years is community, community, community. Sadly, chronic pain and illness can also make it profoundly difficult to nourish community consistently, and know how to contribute meaningfully. Before I became this ill, I’d navigate the world on fire by sitting with my students and our texts so that we could make some sense of it together. It saved no one, but it stimulated our minds and fostered our bonds. It made us ask the most courageous and generous questions we knew how to ask. Pain and neglect for public health took teaching away from me, and I find myself unable to understand how purpose functions in this new environment for myself personally, and beyond in the world. What’s an educator with a classroom, without students? How does one in my position remake oneself to give enough, to feel like something more than an embodied scream?
So I’m asking. In DMs or comments or emails, please tell me: Where do you find and cultivate purpose? What have you done when it flags? What keeps it alive when under threat? How does it keep itself bonded with hope? I look forward to hearing your answers.
News and Announcements:
I am deeply honored to have been featured in in Poetry Society of America’s In Their Own Words series commenting on an early poem in The Relativity of Living Well!
Writer and Director of Wee Sparrow Reviews, Nitika Balaram not only wrote a gorgeous review of Relativity, but invited me to join the Wee Sparrow Poetry team as a Reviewer!
My first residency as a low-res Randolph College MFA candidate was a beautiful kick in the side. I was surrounded by extraordinarily generous and talented poets and writers, and could not be more grateful to be amongst them. As part of my work, I’ll be reading much more than usual, and likely writing microreviews of everything I read, so prepare for a lot of random frantic excitement about the brilliance of these books I’m sitting surrounded by on my bed.
Upcoming Events:
In Surreal Life Fellow Graduation
Friday, January 24, 2025, 7 p.m. ET, Zoom
Email insurreallife@gmail.com for Zoom link!
I’ve had the honor of serving the In Surreal Life community as a fellow for the last two years alongside my sister Slack magician, Judith Ohikuare. We are being honored and bid farewell this Friday, and all are welcome to attend! I’d love for ISLiens current and former and all those who love us to come celebrate with poetry and outrageous Zoom chat comments!
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No, Dear Magazine’s (Re)Present Reading Series
Friday, January 31st | IRL | 2018 West 13th Street, Room 210, New York, NY
Join local poets Joey De Jesus, Kat Rejsek, Marti Irving, Kyle Carrero Lopez, and Omotara James and celebrate No, Dear Magazine!
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Wee Sparrow Free Online Poetry Readings on LOVE
Saturday, February 15 | Zoom
11 am & 6 pm Central European | 5 am & 12 pm EST
Email: theweesparrowpoetrypress@gmail.com for Zoom link
The Wee Sparrow Poetry Press will be hosting a free online poetry reading on Zoom on the theme of “love” on Saturday 15th February. We invite poets to come along and read a poem of theirs on this theme. The world can be overwhelming, frightening, and stressful but we must not forget about love in all its many forms. To join, email theweesparrowpoetrypress@gmail.com for the Zoom link. Include your name and location. The online readings will be at 11 am Central European Time & 6 pm Central European Time. Come along to one or both. (We have chosen these times hoping to cover as many different time zones as possible.) Poets may read one poem of their own each, previously published or new. We ask that your poems be no more than 30 lines to allow time for each reader.
Cool Things My Friends are Up To:
There are few people I can trust to offer trauma-informed and good-natured self-defense instruction to people of all ilks more than my sweet beloved Michael Weston, Chinese mixed martial arts expert, who is now offering his services to the general public weekly. If interested, Learning to Learn Martial Arts with Michael Weston might be the place to kick off any new year resolutions about working out and personal safety.
I am routinely inspired and impressed by the poetic divinations of Eduardo Martinez-Leyva, whose debut collection Cowboy Park has rightly been honored by multiple prizes in the last several weeks, and is being celebrated alongside fabulous poets Seth Leeper, River Dandelion, and Francisco Marquez on Thursday, January 30, 2025 IRL at Bureau of General Services—Queer Division, 208 W 13th St #210, 7pm. I for one will be there with bells on—join me!
Recommended:
Poems:
“Tired” by Langston Huges
“So This Is The Revolution” by jess janz
“Portrait of my mother studying for her citizenship exam” by Eduardo Martinez-Leyva
“My Apologies” by Ammiel Alcalay
“less hope” by Danez Smith
Music:
Mama by Michelle Rescigno
Until next time.
Wow! Going to think a bit on these questions about purpose. On the spot - it is difficult. Sometimes I have dark thoughts about why I was given a miracle. I think my French grandmother put it best in her photo albums and I'll give a rough translation: "no matter how many hardships and obstacles she goes through, Béatrice shows us all that the will and desire to live is stronger" or something like that.... I was younger than 5 when she wrote that in her albums. Community is , and I know too much about loneliness and despair, the ultimate purpose and dream. Hoorah for all these residences and opportunities you've had the honor to get these past weeks and months.
My therapist once said, you have more than one purpose. It helped me look inside myself a little longer and deeper. As someone also sick - this felt like asking each part of my body what it wants to do, and what it can. Evaluating what the gaps are which I know you know already. it helped me find the things that had the least amount of gaps - and work towards them. I worked towards ease - towards honesty, vulnerability, towards making myself as much in need, as I know I can be. n i think the purposes I found were not just work related, but relationships related, loving myself, taking meds on time, learning to set boundries and capacities and somewhere it helped my community also talk about their own needs. I think purposes can be found in places where there is ease.