This was a quick read. I read it in one night. The format is not traditional. It has lyrical poetry format. Which I surprisingly liked. I don’t think I could write in this form without a lot of practice because my words do not have rhythm when I hear them in my brain when I writing. I always wonder how people hear rhythm. Writing poetry or music has to be a different part of the brain. But I am not sure what part it is. I know it is the creative brain. But it is a part of my brain that I don’t know how to activate. Do you all hear rhythm in things? It would make thinking very different and musical. Tonality is a big part of vibration and mood. I think too fast to have music going on with my thoughts in my brain. If I had music in my brain, it would definitely be techno music. I have no clue how to write techno poetry. What an interesting thought! I am high, they poison me so much at the library when I am working on my writing. Or just in general lately. The guy next to me is having a shitting fit and running back and forth to the restroom from all the poisons.
Yrsa’s way with words allowed for me to relate to her story more. She is a black woman from Jamaica who grew up in Northern England. Poetry is her thing. Her escape and way of making sense of her feelings. It was a good book. It was a kind of sad story. Her mother died at a young age, after struggling to raise her and her brother. Yrsa and her brother had to live with their grandparents when growing up at times. So their mother could work nightshifts as a nurse to have enough money to raise them and get by.
“We were not inclined to cleaning, even after all of the meticulous attention to detail we had been taught. Especially after that. At Grandma’s, wiping our faces in the hand towel would earn us a slap. At Mum’s Little Roo and I could do what we wanted. So we did.”
I grew up in a strict household as child. It was different than the household my brother grew up in. Which was the same house with the same Mom, but boy was it different. The house I grew up in was militantly cleaned, ocd cleaned. But after my parents divorced, my Mom’s house turned into a mess. She attaches to things way easier than people. Which makes her a bit of a hoarder. Not bad like the shows on tv, but enough that it is messy.
I am not hoarder. But I am not ocd clean either. Cleaning products have so much poison in them. And my Mom used to get me to clean when I was little and poisoned me with cleaning products. So I have a bit of trauma related to cleaning. I suppose people who grew up in strictly clean houses all have a bit of trauma related to cleaning. It is weird how it makes you just not want to be much into cleaning. What is worse the poison from the cleaning products or the mess from not cleaning? I still have not found the middle ground for this one. Being homeless has helped eliminate this struggle a lot.
“Not one of us can play house well.”
My family never taught me how to live. They just taught me how to play house. So this hit home.
“I do imagine the gravity of what I’m doing. I do consider soul damage. If the very physicality doesn’t get you, it’s the paranoia. What would people think? What would people think of this? What would anybody think?”
Yrsa said this in response to her involvement in the adult industry. I suppose this is why most women do not take part in the only industry where women make more money than men.
“And if we are to survive, what’s it for what is it all for and why why why danger every single day why the everlasting blanket of short breath and stress, anxiety and panic, why the frequency of fear are we coming of age till we die might we burn up in hellfire because we are wrong things always wrong things doing wrong things…”
This is how I feel about life a lot of times. It is relatable because why do we go through all we go through? What is it all for? What’s the point? There is no one right answer to the question of what is the point to life. Somedays I wish there were. Some days I am glad there is not.
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Buddhists believe in a fundamental “point” or purpose to life, which is to achieve enlightenment and escape the cycle of suffering and rebirth (samsara) through the attainment of Nirvana.
This is the best path I have found so far. But I really don’t know if we will ever know what the point of all of this is until we are close to death or dead. I suppose we just have one prolonged and continual existential crisis until we die. Maybe that is what life is? Life is the search for meaning. And we all find different meaning.
Who knows? Somedays I feel like my life has meaning, other days I want to start world wars, but I am always smart enough to know world wars are not the answer. Which seems to rain on my parade a lot. Being smart is annoying sometimes. The good news is I can use it to annoy other people.
I would recommend this book, not necessarily for the content, but for the format. I really liked the format. It is a memoir. But yet it is poetry. I normally do not like poetry. But you all know I like memoirs a lot. I would really like to read more memoirs in this lyrical format.