I Don’t Want to be Demure of Respectable

I have always loved the intimacy of reading. That feeling when you read a line that feels like it could have been written entirely for you. There is beauty in knowing that the deepest corners of yourself are not dissimilar to the crinkled edges of someone else. That even when it starts to feel lonely in a head that thinks a lot – there are other heads out there thinking much the same. There is a kind of comfort in that – a feeling of being seen.

Reading and writing are often misunderstood as solitary acts. But at their core they’re about connection, about exposing a piece of yourself in the hopes that someone else might say hey I feel that too. If vulnerability is integral to connection, then words are the foundation that hold them up.

A few months ago I bought Mary Olivers Devotions - an anthology of over 200 of her poems. And I have been unable to get this one out of my head. Maybe it might speak to one of you the way it does me…

I DON’T WANT TO BE DEMURE OR RESPECTABLE

I don’t want to be demure or respectable.
I was that way, asleep, for years.
That way, you forget too many important things.
How the little stones, even if you can’t hear them, are singing.
How the river can’t wait to get to the ocean and the sky, it’s been there before.
What traveling is that!
It is a joy to imagine such distances.
I could skip sleep for the next hundred years.
There is a fire in the lashes of my eyes.
It doesn’t matter where I am, it could be a small room.
The glimmer of gold Böhme saw on the kitchen pot
was missed by everyone else in the house.

Maybe the fire in my lashes is a reflection of that.
Why do I have so many thoughts, they are driving me crazy.
Why am I always going anywhere, instead of somewhere?
Listen to me or not, it hardly matters.
I’m not trying to be wise, that would be foolish.
I’m just chattering.

As a self-diagnosed people pleaser, I often find it hard to distinguish what it is that I really want, from what it is others want from me. While I know people pleasing’s roots are buried deep within the need to be loveable or rather the anxiety that you might not be, for me it’s also closely tied to the way that I love. I am guilty of thinking there is poetry in self-sacrifice. In loving so deeply you would happily give up something you want so that the person you love can have it their way. I want to be easy for the people I love.

But as I get older being ‘easy’ is getting a lot harder.

It takes a huge amount of energy to be easy, which is the oxymoron of it all.

And if you’re too afraid to say where you want to go how are you ever meant to get there?  

I don’t want to be so preoccupied worrying about my own likeability that I forget “too many important things”… like the magic of being with people you can be unapologetically yourself with - no people pleasing required, the way my nephew will skip down a busy street without a care in the world (we should all skip more), how my mother can nurture a garden from tiny seeds and bare earth to a plethora of pinks and blues and yellow, how those flowers don’t try to be less colourful for the flowers that surround them.  

I used to think that there was poetry in being willing to dim your light so that others can shine brighter. But maybe that defeats the point. There is no such thing as too much sunlight after all.

I think Mary Oliver is right, I don’t want to be demure or respectable. I don’t want to be asleep to the world. I don’t want to always be going anywhere rather than somewhere.

I’m still working on what the line between poetry and pushover looks like, but that in itself feels like a decision to go ‘somewhere rather than anywhere’.

Anyway, Mary said it best …

“Listen to me or not, it hardly matters. I’m not trying to be wise, that would be foolish. I’m just chattering.”

xx Bob

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