It is What it is. it IS What it IS What IT IS

An Awesome Perspective

There is a period of a queen’s life when she works alone, building a new nest from memory and scratch. Maybe some kind of collective memory? Maybe that is the definition of instinct: a wasp’s visceral knowledge of what has come before and reckoning over what likely lies ahead. If she is a eusocial wasp, it will be the only time she fosters her own offspring.

This is before she’s trapped by a single task, a segment of the production line, with no view of the whole of her purpose.

For a year or two, my mother worked in a mechanical workshop of some sort, straightening pins. This was in Downey, California. I like the juxtaposition of textures in these words, the associations that simultaneously set your teeth on edge, and wrap you in a soft blue pillow-fight fantasy. Mechanical workshop. Downey.

Before that, she worked in a factory where the machines sporadically spewed out misshapen globs of plastic that she would bring home to give to me.

I will admit that, at the time, I didn’t understand these gifts. But now, yeah, somewhere this fascination with warped creations took hold within me, too. This yearning for the attraction inherent in imperfections. And sometimes in ugliness itself.

Sometimes I wonder, with a touch of self-pity and ennui, if this is what happens when you let go of aspirations of perfection. Had she already done that? She may have been 23 then. 22?

And maybe this is actually a good thing?

I read once that, in some cultures, we walk backwards into the future. I scan the ground, stepping toe-to-heel, reading changes in the terrain as they emerge into view, as I might read the prophecies in tea leaves, or read clues to a murder mystery. That happens sometimes, a corpse appears, a child maybe, and you desperately try to make the world stop spinning, your mind racing backward—forward into walls—to make sense of it: to learn how to prevent it from happening again, but just as earnestly looking for confirmation that it was all inevitable.  

I took a longer vacation than I anticipated. At the start of summer, a mistake with my medications led to some serious side effects. Some people talk about how there are drugs that lead you on a fantastic journey that will heal old wounds and lift old layers of darkness. Drugs that take you to the other side of trauma via psychedelic bliss. But there are also drugs that will lead you to the other side through pain. My world did stop spinning for a few days. I touched bottom, manic but swaddled tightly. I was turned around to find that all the events of my life that were behind me, were in front of me. I had thought that forgiveness was about closing the doors to the past. But forgiveness—especially forgiving oneself—is an active reckoning.

Not my fault, though my responsibility?

(This is where words break down, and context and nuance are so personal that attempts to communicate break down, exposing how everything is metaphor, and how alone we really are with our experiences.)

(Though we can’t help but try.)

Existential crises are difficult under the best of circumstances. Existential crises fuelled by drug-induced mixed states are trials by fire. Not that it is a bad thing. It’s like a shortcut to a clearing where you’ve been expected and are very late to arrive.

Maybe for the first time, I think I could have a meaningful discussion with Artaud about this kind of catharsis. Maybe I get it now. And maybe, just maybe, this was the perfect storm that I needed to move on with the wasps—to move on at all.

During my vacation this summer, I slogged through several bogs, and I hiked (remarkably slowly) several peaks. I gave a lot of thought to the distinction between beauty and awe on the afternoon I’d broken my fingernails, trying to cling to a rock face that leaned out over a scree. What is craggy and difficult and ugly, is also fascinating and frightening: awesome.

If there is a hierarchy of emotions that make you aware of your place in the world, I believe awesome outranks beauty, outranks even grief, because it contains both, and everything.

My friend B.’s favorite word was awesome. I used to tease her about it. But this summer I realised that it was probably because she was a mountaineer. She saw the elements of her world as awesome. She had an awesome perspective.

Now, when I think about the little bits of deformed plastic my mother brought home, I see their awesome quality. They were worthless in the context of the factory’s purpose, but slipped from her pocket, into my hand, something changed. Something changes again, when I considered the whole of the grief and the love and the struggles my mother must have been experiencing then.

And it changes again, now, seen in the context of what came after, after all the years that followed.

Forgiveness is so much easier when you embrace the awesomeness of the world.

I’m ready to return to the manuscript now. To the wasps and the memories. I won’t be ready to publish on the timetable I had laid out, but I will get there eventually. No shortcuts. This also means no villains, no heroes, no lessons.

It is What it Is. And hopefully, it’s all a bit awesome.

blisters.and.bliss

A post shared by @blisters.and.bliss

---

Thank you for taking the time to read/listen to my process journal! I’ll be back on Wednesday, now that the autumn term is revving up, with a poem.

Until then, have awesome days!

Warmly,

Ren Powell’s Acts of a Recovering Drama Queen
Writing against Melodrama by Engaging with the Natural World
Give some love. It only takes a little ❤️.