Starting anew can happen at any moment. Joy Sullivan shares her instructions for taking off.
September is the ninth month of the year, but for many, brings the same refreshing feeling of January. Perhaps it’s the smell of fresh notebooks, new class schedules, and first-day-of-school outfits that lingers in our minds and makes the end of the summer feel like a beginning. But sometimes, we get the urge to start anew on a Wednesday. Or in July. Or at two o’clock in the afternoon when we’ve had a very disagreeable morning and want to restart the clock to try to win back those lost, grumpy hours.
A few deep breaths can help. A short walk to the corner and back can bring an entirely new perspective. Sometimes, simply brewing a fresh cup of coffee, cracking your knuckles, and opening to a clean page in a book or notepad can trick our minds into starting the day anew.
It’s not always just the morning hours we wish we could take back, though. It’s the entire week, the last few months, or, when our spirits are particularly low and tomorrow feels more like an obligation than an opportunity, it’s the last several years that have been weighing us down, tethered to the ankles.
How to set ourselves free? How to, despite everything, start again?
Poetry can help.
During my college years when melancholy trailed me like cigarette fumes, I found solace in leftover napkins, corners of newspapers (for I used to luxuriate in the free time of a college student by reading the newspaper cover to cover every day at eleven o’clock, accompanied only by a toasted bagel with cream cheese and a black coffee), and torn-out, crinkled notepads. I wrote away the malaise, releasing it from me in a disjointed anthology of mediocre poems thrown together in between classes, during classes, at coffee shops, and even in the car when I would hurry to pull into the nearest parking lot to preserve an idea. In a way, those poems preserved me, or at least the me who was ailing, and in capturing her inky ponderings, those poems set the new me free.
“Professional” poems (what I call those published and printed in a book for mass-market sale) helped set the new me free, too.
During difficult times, my melancholy introduced me to Charles Bukowski, Molière and my beloved, dreamy William Butler Yeats. Their works fed the melancholy, helped it steep and simmer until I felt ready enough to let it go. But it was Joy Sullivan who spooned me an all-together new kind of elixir that tasted like optimism, more like a soup, really, the kind of broth over which someone labors for hours, one spoonful of which is enough to soothe the sorest throat and deliver a week’s worth of bed rest in one warm gulp.
Here are a few loving spoonfuls for you:
“I wrote a pep talk recently to myself on a bar napkin: no matter which road you take, it will be both glorious and unbearable. Every road is lonely. Every road, holy. The only error is not walking forth.”
— from “Culpable” in “Instructions for Traveling West” by Joy Sullivan
“First, you must realize you’re homesick for all the lives you’re not living. Then, you must commit to the road and the rising loneliness. To the sincere thrill of coming apart.””
— from “Instructions for Traveling West” in “Instructions for Traveling West” by Joy Sullivan
And one big bowl:
“I opened the door for her. Draped the linen napkin
— from “I Took My Body Out to Dinner” in “Instructions for Traveling West” by Joy Sullivan
across her lap. Fed her sauteed mushrooms licked
with lemon. Bought her a second glass of wine:
darling, you look lovely tonight.
When it was time for home, I said I’d like
to take her out again. The rain came and I covered
her head. In the bedroom mirror, I asked forgiveness
for letting men love her when I could not. Patted
the ripe pillow of her thighs. Her ostentatious ass.
Marveled at the good dip of her belly, softness
of her breast, sweet wizardry of her feet.
I stood in awe of her beautiful bones.
I begged her not to leave me.”
These extracts are from Instructions for Traveling West by Joy Sullivan, a collection of poems I read in one sitting in the bath one winter night, marinating in the memories of who I once was and who I’d become, trying to figure out what was still holding me back from outwardly being the me only I know me to be.
And then I pulled the plug and watched the suds swirl away and decided that that evening was as good a time as any to start anew.
I’ve since gifted my copy of Instructions for Traveling West to a friend and need to replace it. In the meantime, I keep a space on my shelf for these four books that soothe me when existential dread comes back to rear its ugly head.
If you’re feeling the winds giving you a gentle nudge to start anew, see quotes about feeling alone to remind yourself that we are each steering our own ship and capable of reorienting our lives at any moment we choose. Traveling alone can help us determine where we want that ship to go; for cautious or new travelers, these books on traveling alone provide courage to set off.
