This week’s prompt is inspired by a piece I’m revisiting about past romantic relationships. I broke my own heart so many times by falling for mirror images of my mother—emotionally unavailable and abusive. To be clear, I don’t blame my mother for my actions. I’ve learned that you will repeat cycles until you do the work to face yourself and stop them.
I’ve said before: If there was an emotionally unavailable man within 50 miles from me, I was going to find him and I was going to make him love me. Those days are over but she walks with me, that girl and young woman I was who didn’t love herself enough to leave. She has some things to say and some healing to do…
The Prompt
List the romantic loves of your life. How did you meet? What do you remember most about each relationship? Why they didn’t work and/or fall apart? What did these great loves have in common? How were they different? What did you learn from each one? How did you grow? What cycles did you repeat? Who or what can you trace that back to?
The Pearl
In the midst of revision slog, I came across this Kiese Laymon quote, and it’s whirling around in my head for days. This pearl comes to you courtesy of the brilliant author of the memoir Heavy, essay collection How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America & the novel Long Division. If you’ve never read Kiese’s work, do yourself a favor and get on that. You can find some links to his work here and here’s another one of his kick-ass essays titled “My Favorite Restaurant Served Gas.” You’re welcome.
In a podcast, Kiese said about revision:
Love is such a scary word for me as a writer because it’s the most spectacle-laden word that I think we have. At least in my family, we use it a lot, and my classrooms. People will use it to talk about a paragraph or a sentence that they only read once. You know what I’m saying? And I remember as a younger writer, I was just like, wait a minute. I claim to love, let’s say, Toni Morrison’s Nobel Prize address. I remember when I read it the first time, I was like, man, I love this. But love necessitates revisitation. How do you love some shit that you don’t go back to? When I’ve been in relationships with people who I loved, I wanted to see and hear and feel them again. It wasn’t like, I love them and the memory carried and that was enough.
So for me, it was just the notion that revisitation is part of love. Like, we love songs. Often we go back and listen and listen and listen. And those re-listenings give us different portals of entry into us, into the song-maker, into all kind of stuff. And also, to revise in love, you have to listen to people outside of yourself. You have to listen to other visions of yourself. You have to mind other people’s visions of who you are to them. Baldwin wrote about love, and Morrison and wrote through love with such tenacity and love, tenderness, and vigor—I just wanted to maybe add something different to it.
My lens on revision is forever changed. It’s such hard work, but if it’s true that I love these stories and think they’re important, then I must revise. Like Kiese says: “love necessitates revisitation.” See why I crush on his mind so hard?
In 2020, Kiese bought back the rights to his first two books (Long Division & How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America), paying the publisher what he initially received for them. He then revised the books and released them on his own terms! You have to understand, this shit does not happen in publishing! *bow down* You can read more on this gangsta ass move in Kiese’s words here.
For Kiese, revision is a relentless probing of what matters to him most. He writes in Heavy, his mother told him, “Do your work, Kie. Revise, and never, ever let these people see you fail.” He’s been doing that since. And so should we.
Write on. Poco a poco. Día a día.
Much Respect,
V
Oh, man, the story of my life. Even when I didn't choose love interests to keep up my mother's abuse traditions for me, I managed to make friends who did. They're just as stalky as my mom, too, lol. Just one left who won't leave me alone. But now that I'm caregiving my 89 y.o. mom, who has time for an extra?
I have looked forward to these every week. Thank you for the priceless pearls & prompts🙏🏽 💕