I started reading my friend's poetry dissertation last night. I couldn't sleep after settling into bed--thanks to a blessedly "necessary" late nap--and decided to pop open the document that had been sitting in my inbox for a couple of weeks. Whether it was the lateness of the hour, the quiet of the night which allowed my thoughts to feast uninterrupted, or the fabulous use of language my friend used in all her fabulously nerdy brilliance ("nerd" being one of the highest honorifics I can offer), I feel like the world shifted just a little. Or maybe came full circle.
My friend alluded that the life of the voice of the poem of Illiadic proportions was drawn from personal experiences. The rawness of the experiences and the messages laced throughout them gave me a look into a world that I have yet to understand. Imagine a world where "The Barbie Movie" meets The Boy and the Heron" and it just might capture that same feeling of....something. Maybe a truth (or a million!) that are beautiful and big and yet just out of reach...
Before diving into my exploration of my reactions to the as of now not-completely-read-150-page-some-odd poem, I have to clearly state that this is not meant to be interpretive of what I feel is almost a sacred work--merely reactive in the sense that I feel I need to work through my initial reaction through writing. Please indulge me using this platform, although maybe no indulgence is required as this is a self-proclaimed blog following my journey to life found in truth.
The poem itself is very narrative, in the sense that it captures life experiences and perspectives (and her reactions to both) in a very personal way. You are drawn into Emily's world--seeing, feeling, thinking as she does. In one sense my initial reaction is sad. I mourn for Emily and her self-dubbed quasi-gothic existence. But even in taking the liberty of using the word "quasi-gothic," I stumble across one of the many often quixotic ideas that have floated to the surface of my musings: labels.
Are they defining or confining?
SO many of Emily's experiences resonate with me: social shaming, seeing the world around you differently than others do. But unlike me, she calls out those differences she sees without worrying about couching it in gentle or tactful terms. Which is appropriate. It's introspective. It's her permission to get a glimpse into how she sees the world mingled with a little context--for who can truly understand the context of another's perspective, save God? She encounters labels as she progresses. Labels she attaches to herself and labels she attaches to others, even while crying out against unfairness, arbitrariness and insufficiency of labeling.
And interestingly, as she probes behind the labels, I find myself once again labeled. Labeled for how I am seeing living my religion, living my womanhood,...even my goals and perspective are seen through a lens of messy labeling. My dear friend would be the first to say whether or not it was not her intention to do so--being the fabulously real, brilliant, and genuine person that she is. (And it could be "tongue in cheek," a phrase that popped into my mind as potentially fitting but which I had to look up to make sure lol.) It is just so interesting that in seeking to define, qualify and validate our own lives that it seems that we push the people around us and even ourselves into these messy partially false, partially true labels. From the outside they seem to fit, but they don't capture the journey or frame of reference of choices that lie within the picture we see of other people's lives. She introduces new levels of labeling that I didn't even know existed.
My dear friend is one who--to me--defies labels consistently. In fact, it is one of the many qualities of her that I find endearing. Yet, in reading this poem about Emily, I see a tiny glimpse into her personal journey of discovering truths--about herself, God, herself, society, herself, existence itself and (you guessed it) herself. I find that she--in seeming to defy so many labels--has actually seemed to find labels that I didn't even know existed that define who she sees herself to be. I don't even pretend to have any kind of accurate assessment of this work of art my friend generated as her doctoral poetic thesis. What I do find is myself responding to is assessing labels in my own life.
I have experienced some of the predatory aspects of society that she experienced. I experienced the harshness of those around me who try to determine which labels were acceptable and which were not. I could recognize on one level that I was unique, as I sensed were those inexplicable fellow journeyers around me. I even captured my--and perhaps many others--inner cry of resistance at a young age writing this poem in first grade:
Because one thing I knew about labels is that they can hurt.
