On Sounding Stupid: A Love Letter to my OWN DAMN SELF

In my last post here I want to reflect back on what I realized about myself while writing these love letters to my lovely poet friends over the last month of isolation. I wasn’t sure at first where these love letters would take me. I just wanted to reach out. But, as I finished my last letter the other day, I realized that in taking inventory of the ways that these other writers have affected me in my writing life and beyond, I’ve realized that part of the work of reaching out in these letters—whether consciously or unconsciously—was a way of keeping me from having to turn that love inward. Sure, it’s been nice being on RuPaul’s Best Friends Race. But, at the end of this I need to recognize the degree to which turning outward has been a way for me to not have to look in. Because, if I’m being totally honest, I have not super been loving social isolation Dani.

Social isolation is a difficult time to practice self love. I haven’t showered in days. I only just managed to get on that exercise bike that sits beside my desk and we all know that the twenty minutes I did on it this morning was half-assed at best. I’ve procrastinated writing and edits. I’ve spent the better part of the last two weeks rewatching Lost of all things. And, I can’t remember the last time I wore underwear. This dirty, sweaty, lazy person feels difficult to love. Everyone I talk to seems to feel something similar. My partner, Jesse, keeps berating himself for slowing his writing progress; he paces aimlessly from room to room, angry for not being more productive but low on motivation. My sister tells me every other day on the phone that she is being a bad mother. My own mother spent ten minutes on the phone with me this morning upset at herself for taking so long refinishing a cabinet all while working from home. We are being so immensely hard on ourselves and it’s starting to feel like every meme account or shared blog post is about forgiving yourself your lack of motivation, your slowed productivity, your unshaven legs and untrimmed bangs.

I’m not here to tell yourself to forgive yourself. I was raised Catholic and forgiveness is not something I’m particularly good at. What I’m here to say is that the most important thing you can do for yourself while in isolation is to counteract all of that flagellation with some Lizzo-style all-your-flaws-and-fabulousness self love. The most important thing I ever did for my writing, my pedagogy, my relationship(s), and my life was to start trying (working, because it is work) to love myself.

One of the difficulties of writing and sending your work out is that fear of being rejected, of being thought by others as not good enough. As much as I don’t really care about that right now, I used to worry about it. I remember once submitting poetry to a literary journal I was working for under an alias and having to see the other editor’s respond so negatively to my submission that one person wrote something like “That first line is so bad, I can’t believe the poet kept writing.” Did it hurt? Maybe a little then. But, I remember being more concerned that the disguise of the intellectual and the artist that I was working hard to hone was failing me and that eventually my peers would realize that I truly was, underneath this performance, a ditzy suburban white girl who said stupid shit and used “like” and “uhmmm” too much. I spent a long time trying to sound smart but it always seemed to fail me. A “like” would always slip out or I’d pronounce something I’d only ever read incorrectly and then everyone would know that I was a fake, that I hadn’t been bred to be a writer. I don’t know when or how (or, truly, if) I stopped trying to sound smart. I just got tired somewhere along the line and I gave up.

I kept going to school and I kept reading and soon people (family, friends) would say shit like, “I know, you’d never guess, but she’s actually really smart.” I resented it at first. Then I treated it like a trick, a bait-and-switch: watch as this silly little valley girl transforms before your very eyes into a poststructuralist, an intellectual who can converse as easily on Gramsci’s prison notebooks as she recites the Haitians speech from Clueless. But, that trick got old, too. And then maybe Kathleen Hanna or Maggie Nelson or Patti Smith or Emma Goldman (likely, some delightful combination of the four) intervened and I realized that being smart didn’t come as a surprise after sounding stupid. The combination was a radical politics, was punk as fuck, was so very necessary in the academy and especially in my classroom.

Thus was born my favourite poem I ever wrote: “Chant Uhm,” a sound poem written to Kathleen Hanna and published by derek beaulieu’s no press (you can find a scanned copy here on my website but it’s sparkly and pink, so a bit hard to read as a scan). In “Chant Uhm,” I take up the stupid valley girl sounds I make and words I use (mostly filler) to intervene in sound poetry which, as a genre, has been vastly more interested in intellectualizing the violent, harsh, and guttural sounds of the masculinized body. I didn’t and don’t want to dress or act or sound the part of the intellectual. I want my Gramsci thoughts to be punctuated with as many likes and uhms as possible. I need to do this because that’s how I practice self love. I want to love the part of me that was supposed to be just the bait.

And guess what? The first time I performed “Chant Uhm”—at the Invisible Publishing launch of Eric Schmaltz’s Surfaces and Cameron Anstee’s Book of Annotations—I was approached by a young woman who said that hearing it was so exciting, that she too felt alienated by all the intellectual and masculine sounding rhetoric around sound poetry, around poetry in general. I gave her a free copy and a hug and felt very full. And then I started sounding like a valley girl while I taught. I ditched the workplace attire I purchased for my performances as poetry scholar and started teaching in lipstick prints and leopard print and hot pink scrunchies. I started saying “uhm” and “like” while I taught. I think that this past term I really perfected it because I got two (count ‘em, TWO) emails from little ditzy suburban girls who realized because of my sounding stupid that they could be both intellectual and silly. And that shit is life changing, for them and for me.

So, no. I’m not going to forgive myself for smelling pretty fucking nasty right now. It’s gross. I’m not going to forgive myself the lack of work, the overdue edits and the missing scans and the weeks without going on that exercise bike. I’m just going to try to do them later because I know that I’ll feel better for it. I’m not about forgiveness here, even if I maybe should be. BUT, I am going to love the me that cuddles into Jesse for our fourth Lost episode in a row. I’m going to rub my hairy legs on him and our stinky b.o. is going to mingle together and it will feel—intimately, imperfectly—like home. I’m going to make a poop joke, and he’ll laugh. I’m going to quote a Jack Black movie (almost certainly School of Rock) and he’ll sigh. I’m going to have a conversation with the cat about which bath bomb to use and I’m going to dance around the apartment, for the one millionth time, to Whitney Houston’s “I Wanna Dance with Somebody” (inarguably the greatest song of all time). I’m going to dance like a fool. I’m going to look stupid. And, I’m really, really going to love it.