As a young person, not knowing how to grieve, feel deeply, or express myself in an acceptable way and be understood, I considered the label “mad.”... That was long before the diagnoses for various post-traumatic impacts or anxiety, depression, ADHD, and spectrum neurodiversity, deviation from the norm. I was just sort of “crazy”. At least that’s how they called it back then.
Some would say I was “wild,”...probably meaning that I had not been tamed by the dictates and doctrines of the Adventist society. I was not a bad girl, but I did break rules when I thought the rules were stupid or merely contrived to control. Secular music, dancing, drugs, short skirts, pre-marital sex, and sin were lumped into one big label of “don’ts” that I just didn't see the actual harm in. Of course, in hindsight, I can tell you the potential harm in all of those things, but alas, I was naive and no longer desired to be “innocent” or be like everyone else.
I was different. At that time, I knew very few orphans, a handful of adoptees, and even fewer friends or classmates who had experience with venturing into the shadow side of the rules. I was an experience junkie. I had a poet’s heart. I had a deep longing for adventure and living outside of the norm. So I could write about it, eventually.
I kept a journal, writing out the things I couldn’t tell anyone: my feelings, my thoughts, and my observations. I was trying to make sense of being alive on the planet after almost not being so.
I was looking for meaning. I was looking for joy, for peace, for love.
I wrote poems, prose, lines of a song that I related to, and descriptions of the moments when I sat down to jot down something in my notebook. I often took my notebook down to Sligo Creek, at the end of our street. I would walk, and sit, and walk some more, maybe swing on the swings, or just follow the creek downaways and walk up some other street and try to figure out how to get home from there. I was exploring, close to home, but mostly alone with my thoughts and my notebook.
When we did Career Day, and I said I wanted to be a writer, they sent me to the Review and Herald publishing house to talk about careers in publishing and journalism within the walls of the institution. I could not see myself in an office writing what I was told to write. I saw myself having adventures and relationships and experiences out in the world and writing poetry about it that inspired others and gave them a peek into an alternative lifestyle. That was what I wanted. I wanted to be a poet.
My high school senior yearbook projects me ten years in the future, stopping by my publisher’s in my Mercedes and dropping off my latest book. And here we are, nearly 50 years later, in a slightly different situation. Apparently, there isn’t much of a market for poets. Or so I thought until the internet self-publishing and connecting other mad poets and writers online. We now have the digital version of coffeehouses, although everyone is making their own coffee (unless they are sitting in a Starbucks or a street cafe in Paris). Thank God for Facebook and Amazon, for writers who still aren’t driving their Mercedes Benz to their publisher’s office.
I am a writer. I am a poet. I may also be “mad”.
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