Taking the plunge and dipping a toe
Getting unstuck. A little navel-gazing on how I did something I never thought I’d do: write a poem and read it to a room full of people. And how I realized something I never thought I knew: I have a place in this creative world. And so do you.
It was just a couple months ago, on a normal Tuesday evening, when my friend Michelle thumbed through the pages of an inconspicuous notebook lying on my couch. “Oh, you’ve been writing!” She caught some long ramblings and maybe one page of stanzas. “I didn’t know you write.” Well, no one did, really. And that’s probably because I didn’t consider it much myself. But I told her, yes, I’d been writing things down randomly, and that I was thinking about reading something at Berlin Spoken Word in a few days. She immediately pledged to come (which I wasn’t sure about), and from her thrust of support, a plan was born. I was going to read on Thursday night for the first time. Something I wrote. Out loud, to a group of people. (About fifty strangers.)
At that point I turned off my brain. To think would become to agonize, and then the prospect of performing for two minutes would mutate into a specter of my self-worth, wrought with insecurities that have been eroding it for years. So, I detached. And went on with my week.
The poem I wanted to read was essentially a braindump, a complete purge of anxiety I wrote so that I could stare at it as a pile of words and detangle the strands searching for meaning. Or, rather, for understanding. I needed to get unstuck. I had felt stuck back home in the States for three years and finally got myself across the Atlantic to Berlin — where I then sat in the dead of winter with no job, no visa, dwindling money, and a lack of impulse to do much of anything in the face of everything unknown. So I spewed it onto the page, for no other reason than my own private catharsis. And then, somehow, casually, decided to show it to the public.
After printing my piece at work on Thursday, I skipped out early and practiced the poem on the streets around Du Beast. On the canal bridge, I made a silent salute to the strong women in my life; I took deep breaths and stayed “centered”. Then I had a cigarette. The nicotine skated on my veins and pressed on my chest — it was a terrible idea. So I went in to Du Beast forty-five minutes early and got ein großes Fassbier instead.
Everything was calm. From the well of middle school debate, the metered rhythms of college poetry classes, and the undulating intonations of spoken word I’ve attended and internalized in the last few years — my mouth spoke. My eyes locked on the page, my ears on the sound of my voice, and nothing else existed. When I finished, all senses slipped out of focus, so I don’t remember much.
I remember Mary calling for a second round of applause because it was my first time performing. I remember smiling really hard. I remember wanting another beer. I remember the dreadlocked head of a stranger turning around to nod at me, also smiling. It was to be his first time performing, too, and later we would cheers each other at the bar upstairs.
Ultimately my poem was self-fulfilling. I needed to get unstuck, so I wrote about it, and what I wrote is the very vehicle which got me moving. It brought me to the Berlin Spoken Word stage, and it brought me here to this piece. And now, with that little bit of distance, I understand better what the whole experience was like — the experience of attending something like spoken word and, from your anonymous spot in the audience, feeling admiration, inspiration and some ample amount of impossibility. And then finding yourself on the other side.
For me it was sitting on the shore, absentmindedly digging, and suddenly finding a small pool had formed. And it’s a kind of miracle because you’d been sitting on this dry sand your whole damn life and never knew. I didn’t know I could access the same water that I was watching everyone else play in. Or maybe I didn’t believe. But now I know, and I believe, and I’ll keep inching down the beach until the waves crash over my head.
