Today I’m sharing a new video of my poem, “Living Proof” which I wrote six years ago. It begins with this stanza–
I have a few happy friends.
I ask them about being happy
the same way my high school friends
ask me about being gay. “So, what
do you people do exactly? How do you do IT?”
I still laugh when I read those words, but it’s wild to revisit a poem written during a period when joy felt so out of reach that I had to ask friends how they got their hands on it. I’ve had a lot of those moments in my life. Each of us have, and there’s no shame in it. To be human is to feel it all––grief, despair, terror, gratitude, love, awe, peace. We have days when, like the poem says, we get so low we have to look up to see rock bottom, and we have days in which our spirits are so high we can’t imagine ever coming down.
I don’t want to give too much of the piece away, but it tells the story of a day in my life when I stopped wanting to live.
