Vocal Made Me a Poet

I joined Vocal in desperation. It had been nearly a decade since I had written anything but marketing copy, and I had just baffled myself by first turning down a CMO position at another company, then giving an agonizing three month's notice to my boss, anyway. I couldn't stay miserable in my career anymore, and I ached to create something, anything meaningful to me.

I knew I had been a creator, once, and when I reached down deeply enough, I could still graze the very tips of my fingers against this dormant warmth in my soul that I'd abandoned so long ago. A spark, patiently hibernating under layers of permafrost.

I wanted to know her again. I worried she wouldn’t let me.

Two Januaries ago, I sat at my desk—the same one I took meeting after mind-numbing meeting at for hours each day—lit a candle for courage, and faced down the blank page for Vocal's Return of the Night Owl challenge. I begged that burning candle to set a fire under my muse.

Delighted, I watched her thaw.

By April, my creativity was an active volcano. I took my exit interview from my office couch—no makeup, bun toppling sideways, old t-shirt splattered with acrylics—because my desk was occupied by a painting I was working on, because the floor was occupied by a different work-in-progress, and there was, quite symbolically, no room in that workroom left to work from.

For months I doodled, I painted, I made digital art, and mostly, I wrote fiction.

My artistic self collided with me in a manic reunion.

Then, she grabbed me by the shoulders and shook me. She somehow wanted more.

Discontent surfaced as a nagging sense that I needed more honesty in my writing. I noticed I was increasingly frustrated by the process of storytelling, as if the words on the page were too distant from what I wanted to express. I tried exploring themes in my fiction that were meaningful to me, but kept abandoning drafts in the disquieted quest for this other voice I didn't yet understand.

When Vocal announced its Get Comfortable poetry challenge, I was confronting some health issues and generally feeling morose. I wanted to do something with that emotion, I realized—make some art about it! So, as I had done in the past, I used a Vocal challenge to push myself, ironically, out of my comfort zone. I wrote a poem for the first time since I was an angsty preteen with a Livejournal—a villanelle about resilience—and a knot inside of me loosened. I took notice.

Then Vocal debuted its first haiku challenge (High-ku), and I thought: Three lines about a mountain. That could be fun.

It was. The imposed limits of structure and brevity became this playground where I could rapidly engage with any memory I'd ever made with a mountain. Watching the sunset over the Rockies with my husband, concerts at Red Rocks Amphitheater, hikes in Boulder and Sedona and Zion, an old house in the Sierras, a cherished trip to Delphi. What did I want to say about this life I'd lived with mountains? How could I say it in a way that was surprising, yet universal?

I realized I could take this assignment further. I could use the concept of a mountain as an abstraction to write about non-mountains, like challenges I'd overcome, observations about the creative act, commentary about modern society. I had stumbled upon the exciting paradox of poetry: the way a poem obfuscates its starting place in order to express it fully.

The medium of fiction was too massive to contain everything I wanted to say, but I could say anything with seventeen syllables.

I wrote 24 haiku about mountains. I was having a blast! And yet...

The act of creating poetry butted up against my inner-critic in magnificent ways. I discovered a mountain of judgment there. I felt silly and small. Remember "angsty preteen with a Livejournal?" Poetry was for the dysregulated emotions of youth, not the wizened stoicism of adulthood.

I had been searching for this voice, and there I was, just barely digging my trowel into the place it was buried... and I was audacious enough to stand on that fertile ground and shout, "you're silly, small, frivolous, bad, wrong."

Yikes. We've got some work to do, here.

This wasn't my first self-actualization rodeo, so in 2023, I hopped on that bucking trigger's back and held on for dear life. I wrote well over 100 poems, and shared many of them here. Nearly every time I felt big emotion—sadness, love, anger, joy, shame, guilt, frustration—I trekked through the brambles of self-judgment and wrote a poem about it along the way. In the early AM hours on the blue light of my cell phone, in my journal with a pen upon waking, into the voice recorder while driving in my car, I poeted so damn hard.

I began making sense of myself in metaphor. It dawned on me: the search for honesty in my voice was actually a quest for authenticity in my life. I found parts of myself that I had disowned. I shed the snakeskin of dead personas. Early traumas popped up like shark fins. I'd begin a poem thinking it was about one thing, and it usually ended up being about something else—something more hidden from view, and usually harder to confront. I kept going.

Each time I excavated a thought, an event, an emotion...

Then wrote about it in poetic language to define it in terms of something different...

I crossed its boundary and understood it with prismatic fullness.

I realized I was conversing with my subconscious mind. My most personal poems became teachers and guideposts, helping me to unravel patterns that were keeping me stuck. They were often heavy with darkness, but somehow they were helping me to love myself more, as if all of those devastating beliefs I had about myself were showing up on the page so that they could be transformed.

My poems exposed how frequently my actions ran perpendicular to my values; their words defined right angles in my way of being, sharp and hard to ignore. I had choices to make. Lots of them.

I began taking action with intention. It’s hard for me to admit, but that started with daily hygiene. Remembering it now, I want to reach back into the not-so-distant past and give that suffering woman the biggest hug. Since leaving my job, I was creating, but I was also lost. I wasn’t taking care of myself in the most basic of ways, and the sinking had happened slowly. I didn’t notice—until my poems forced me to look—that I was drowning in a trench of distraction and despair.

I quit drinking. I quit smoking. I walked every day, then joined a gym, then actually went to it. I discovered that self-love is a verb.

Through a series of poems I wrote exploring codependent behaviors, two of which I shared here and here, I shed old patterns of interrelating with my husband, and our marriage evolved, after eight years of partnership, into something so precious and vibrant and freeing and safe that it melts me, daily.

All of this self-discovery led me to begin training as a hypnotherapist, a vocation that empowers me to use my heart and my creative mind instead of forcing me to cage them away.

In 2023, becoming a poet delivered a tectonic shift in my identity. I’m so grateful for everything that has led me to this season of my life, including Vocal, and even moreso, for every person in the Vocal community who read my poems, witnessed their shadows, and connected with me in resonance or encouragement. Some of you were there with kind words nearly every time I published, which helped me keep writing, which helped me keep growing. Sometimes I couldn't even muster a sunny face to reply to your comments, but I read them and held them in my heart all the same.

In 2024, I’d like to keep using Vocal as a springboard for growth, both as an artist and a human. I'd also like to give back some of what this special corner of the internet has given me. So with that in mind... here are my intentions for the coming year:

1. I will keep writing and sharing my poetry.

I'm adept, now, at using this medium as an outlet. It's reflexive. Big feeling? Time to poet about it.

I imagine it's how a boxer feels burning off rage with a punching bag. More and more I notice, by the time I'm done with a poem, the experience that led me to it contains less emotional charge. I've become a curious observer of my own psyche, confronting it over and over again on the borderlands of consciousness without judgment, and I must say... It's awesome.

2. I will connect more (and with curiosity)!

Life, in myriad ways, is a funny see-saw between creation and consumption. Art, and Vocal’s community of artists, aren’t exempt from this law. I find if I consume too much, it eclipses my creative mind, and if I’m too feverishly creating, even eating food can be hard, let alone eating someone else’s content.

Yet, creating something and knowing other people consumed it feels electric—sometimes cathartic, often just blissful. That may be the greatest significance of an artistic community: we're basically all just devouring each other in creative ecstacy. I'll admit I've been one-sided with this, but I want to consume more of this community, and when possible, I'd like to do it in ways that create conversations.

Because, my favorite comments aren't praise (although it's wonderful to feel encouraged), or helpful critiques (although they help me grow)—my favorite comments are questions. When someone asks a question about my art, I get to see them chewing on it in real time! Yeah, I know I'm stretching this metaphor. What I'm most trying to say is: it's perhaps the greatest honor of all when someone is curious about your art. So in 2024, I'd like to consume and connect with vocal curiosity.

3. I will read & publish in more Vocal communities.

When you find something that works, do it again!

I couldn't have known when I clicked "Submit" for the first time in the Poets community that I had found a key to a lock I'd been trying to pick for months. Yet when I finally opened the door and turned on the lights, I discovered the room was filled with a bounty of gold.

Now I wonder, where might other doors in the Vocal hivemind lead?

I've been inspired by other creators here who have staked their voices in some of the less frequented Vocal communities, like Caroline Jane, whose sage contributions to Feast invite us to this liminal and fascinating intersection in her mind of food, family, art and philosophy. Before she serves up her gorgeous recipes, she treats the reader with a hearty appetizer of profundity that I often chew on for the rest of the day, and I've truly enjoyed getting to know one of my favorite creators in this way (and what the heck, I've read most of her Feast pieces, yet barely commented—c'mon, intention #2).

In 2024, I might explore places like Motivation, Psyche or Longevity, and see what treasures are there. Because...

4. I will write about hypnosis.

All of this transformation finds me here: still transforming. I'm now halfway through training to be a certified clinical and transpersonal hypnotherapist. As it turns out, I'm good at it, because symbols and metaphors comprise the language of the subconscious, and as a poet, I speak that language as fluently as it allows.

Therapeutic hypnosis is a lot like poetry. It has this intangible, blurry quality to it. It's most effective when you're feeling feelings fully, and sometimes, the more you try to make sense of it, the less you understand. It’s meant to be that way—to exist partly beyond conscious reach, so that it can change you.

Hypnosis is a remarkable tool that extracts much of its power from language and metaphor, and in 2024, I'd like to share more of what I'm learning about it. Vocal's provided us all with a place to be read, to be heard, to receive encouraging feedback. The Vocal community has shown me that here, I can share things I'm only just beginning to explore, myself, and grow that much faster by having conversations with thoughtful, supportive, kind fellow artists. I'd really like to delve even deeper into this resource.

And on the flip side—as I begin working with clients in 2024 to help them re-map the territory of their subconscious minds, I might encourage them, between sessions, to go home and write a poem.