Radio / Self-Talk

A poem about my healing so far.

My self-worship is going great

Remarkable completion of little and big trials:

Forgetting to cancel a subscription for 18 months

Leaving my hiking boots in Oxford, all my nice clothes in the apartment in Qatar

Two car break-ins and a house flood

And the boulderous, deep-rooted fears about my worthiness and naturalness

Previously too tall and insurmountable

Are now just tiny tendrils with brittle, split ends I can crush with two fingers

I guess I “faced the music”

But only after peeking then chickening out and distracting myself first

Many years of externalizing my own sense of alienation by traveling to the most unfamiliar places

Loving the wrong people

And moving to Ohio

But I got around to it when I got too full on loose noise

And instead stored all that hearsay away

To not belong in my prayers

To not play at my altar

Nor my most sacred spaces

But to furnish the room I keep as a hospitable spare

Nostalgic echoes of unnecessary condemnations and outgrown nerves and who I used to be

That I can hear when I walk in there once a month to dust the shelves

And I never say I will do that thing anymore

The thing I used to say I would do

Back when I was sad

But even when I was sad, I was never that sad

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