April 2023 State of the Blog

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When I started this blog, I intended it to be focused on improving one’s mental health. I had a lot to say on the subject. I am an intellectual-izer (I made that word up just now) and, once diagnosed in my twenties with Major Depression and PTSD, had made it my life’s mission to learn about the mental illnesses that plagued me and stopped me from living the life I wanted. I became an armchair expert, which I will not discount— I don’t generally think a lack of formal education makes one’s expertise invalid, after all.

But recently, in my journeys with psychodynamic therapy and actually improving from my treatment for the first time, I have realized that I don’t actually know all that much about mental health. This Beginner’s Mind (or Socratean realization that I only know that I know nothing) has helped me make strides in my recovery by reminding me not to be set in my ways. Knowledge is not necessarily wisdom, and knowing the difference between dopamine and serotonin did not make me any happier or more functional. Obviously, despite all my research, I still had a lot to learn, and I want this blog to reflect that.

From now on, this blog will be loosely themed around becoming a better person. There will still be poems and book reviews and other musings and anything I feel like publishing (tbh), but I have decided I want to take the “meat and potatoes” of the blog in a new direction. There will probably still be a lot of stuff about mental and emotional health, but I also want to write about stuff like:

  • social justice (especially transgender issues)
  • being your true, authentic self
  • learning (both formally and informally)
  • anti-capitalist ethics and leftism
  • setting and achieving goals
  • healthy masculinity and what it means to be a man
  • healthy relationships (especially polyamory)
  • getting organized (especially Bullet Journaling)

On to my credentials: I have none. I am not a psychologist, psychiatrist, or therapist. I am not an influencer or a wildly successful business owner. I am just someone who has struggled to improve himself over the course of about 10 years.

A note on money: My job doesn’t pay all that well, but I make enough to survive. Write Mind will never involve affiliate marketing, selling ads, or upselling (beyond basic SEO to get my words seen by people who could use them). The point of Write Mind is not to make money. Any money I make will be from Patreon, in which subscribers can contribute donations freely and without coercion. If I make any resources or downloads, they will be free for anyone to use and not require an email list sign-up. If you appreciate my content and would like to be someone who helps me out, I’d love that!

If you’d like to be part of my journey, please stick around to read more!

Review: Lavender House

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Title: Lavender House

Author: Lev AC Rosen

Published: 2022

Summary: The year is 1952, and Andy is a recently disgraced investigator on the San Francisco police force. Despite the rollicking local queer scene, Andy has never been able to be out and proud, and instead used his insider knowledge to avoid the clubs getting busted by his colleagues. His secret finally catches up to him, so he decides to get drunk enough to throw himself into the bay when he is approached by a woman named Pearl. Pearl knows his secret and wants to hire him to investigate the death of her wife, Irene.

What I Liked:

  • When talking about this book, I described it as a “gay murder mystery.” Several times, I got asked if the detective was gay or if the suspects were gay. The answer is: both. Almost every single person in the entire book is queer, which is the opposite of tokenism and I am here for it.
  • The ending was absolutely perfect. I won’t spoil it, but I felt it wrapped up the themes in a satisfying way.
  • I am against what I call “copaganda,” or the insistence on painting the police as heroes in fiction. Despite the main character being a former police detective, he is regularly forced to confront the evils of the system he upheld, and I really appreciated that.

What I Didn’t Like:

  • The only thing I didn’t like was the inclusion of some hate-crimey violence. It was very explicit and felt unnecessary, a harsh reality that intruded on an otherwise relatively cozy story.

Rating: 4/5.

I’m not rating it a full 5 stars because it isn’t one of my favorite books of all time, but it is extremely solid, and queer people who like murder mysteries better than I do should definitely pick it up.

Self Care as Bowling Bumpers

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The other day in therapy I came across a metaphor.

Doing self care (like eating regularly, staying hydrated, taking your meds on time, and resting) is like having the bumpers up when you’re bowling. If you go off course and bounce a little, it’s not a big deal.

I used to wait so long to eat that I was incapable of preparing something, so I would sit on the kitchen floor and cry until someone came across me and rescued me by making me a sandwich.

Now, if I wait a little too long to eat, the rest of my self care shores me up and I am capable of making myself something (or asking for help).

Doing the absolute most to take care of yourself will pay off in the moments that you falter.

my dad

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near bedtime, very often and for years now, i get this unnameable WANT

it’s not h*rny of any variety and it’s not chocolate (which is what i always try first lol) (because it’s what my ex would feed me every time i had a ptsd nightmare)

but i think i figured it out? i think it’s cinnamon sugar toast, which my dad would make for me when I couldn’t sleep.

when i was a kid my dad was a really bad insomniac, getting about 30 minutes of sleep a night, and so if i wandered out of my shared bedroom in our tiny house he would be there in the garage, chainsmoking and watching cartoons.

(there are certain key phrases, ive found, that can activate even non-caretaking types into caretaking mode. for my dad, it’s “I can’t sleep.”)

he insisted, at all times of day, that the worst thing you could do for insomnia was lay around. he advocated for flipping your pillow and switching your head to the other end of the bed, and if that didn’t work, he would say the next step is to get out of bed and do something to tire yourself out.

when i whined “dad, I can’t sleep!” he would jump into action, using his rusty diner prep cook skills to make perfect toast with margarine (always margarine in our house). i would grab my star trek novel collection, which was a fat purple book with transcriptions of the episodes. i would read and munch until i was frankly bored to tears by the blow by blow account of the episode Charlie X, and i would then go to bed and finally be able to sleep.

as i transition, i think more and more about what it means to be a man, and what it meant and means to my dad. i wonder if we all become our parents in the end, and which parent I’m going to end up as. i think a lot about laying in bed at age 12 wishing for a “sex change” and then deciding i was going to stop thinking about it because there was no way my parents could afford it. i think about age 9 begging to be allowed to shave my head, and my dad saying he doesn’t want to look at anyone’s knobbly scalp, regardless of gender. i think a lot about how my mom insists she doesn’t snore.

when people have emotions around my dad, he is instantly bewildered. you can see it in the way his eyes widen into circles. he wants to fix you like you’re leaking oil. sometimes this comes in the form of an explosion, the impulse to beat you back into line. other times he is practically begging you to stop. but no matter what, he is absolutely appalled by any show of feeling.

im not like that, am i? when people have emotions around me, do i just wish for it to stop? am i a safe person to cry to? am i a safe person to slam doors around? do i laugh and joke and do a little jig to avoid anything, anything that might smack of strife?

i am my dad, but shorter. i am my dad but ive been r*ped. i am my dad but with the knowledge that my perspective isn’t always the truth. i am just a man, with hands.

this = reality

joelsherwoodLeave a comment 
i.

i found it washing dishes
after sharing supper. i am not
a biographer. i am not
a biographer.

i am just a man, with hands.
the kind that put themselves to work
tearing trinkets off my skin.
i am just a man, with skin.

i have visions of future kitchens,
warm and full.

ii.

    this is socks in bed and a lazy eye.
this is the alchemy of the interrogative. this is
every millimeter of eyelashes and
the seashell curl of a lip. this is pouring jaegermeister
and three day warm cider
into cheap sweet wine and
sharing it.

    this is a dropout genius allotting 25 IQ points to crime
at all times. this is warm skin
and depth perception. this is knowing
death in your cells, and with your hands,
and on your mouth.

    this is cutting potatoes in your palm. this is
an obsession with neurochemistry. this is nightmares.

iii. 

what is in the folds of your brain
is not belly button lint. what leaks out of you
is not shameful. you are not
a wide-eyed deer.
you are not
a place to plant a flag. you are not
a work horse.
learn what it feels like.

you exist.
you exist.
you exist.

Mother

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i. fifteen months

my brother, head too wide for thin hips,
had been extracted with a scalpel. the new nurse
pressed the afterbirth out of her belly and
she screamed. i screamed longer.

ii. eight years

i smoothed my brother's hair while i held him
alone on grandmother's stained couch and told him
mom wasn't dead, just blown up
like a red balloon, tongue swollen into silence.
i thought i was lying.

iii. sixteen years

when she couldn't carry her own spine,
i held her purse and followed her rented scooter
through the grocery store. she
backed beeping into the fresh pie display
and, jointly splashed with raspberries,
we exploded in laughter.

iv. twenty-one years

bracing one foot against the porcelain,
i fished my mother out of the bathtub
when she had taken one pill too many and

her blood had split apart. she
was coated in spilled shampoo
but i tucked her into bed
and talked to her about the attractive weatherman
on channel thirteen news, until she asked
to be helped outside for a cigarette.

Losing Teeth

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In the naked bulb light, your shielding shoulder doesn't hide
your reflection's study of its teeth,
apprehensive, the close-clinging film
a death sentence and now

whimsically, your flowered hair like seaweed
over my upturned face, brushing the blanket
copper-stained & electric, & your voice
oakly shadowed and plastic
like you practice

& my mouth is too stuffed to say
what I want, so instead I offer a smile
and the fishing hook in my lip and a wish
that you hadn't asked me to be your doll,
fluffed by petticoats and beestung lips, to be kept
in the living room, in the dentist's chair

Morning

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i was told a bedtime story--
a boy had a shotgun and saw a crow
and the crow was gone
in a puff of feathers and a tiny crack.

anyone's eyes on me
and i am gone, same as the crow.
i am an unholy pinocchio and my pine
would charcoal in the sun.
i was not drawn with an outline.

my molecules are safer
in the dark, when the atmosphere
presses heavy on my clothes
to keep me in.

Faint

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with my veins churning into vials,
someone else's family is leaning over me
hiding me from the nurse's needle

--my vision balloons, filling empty space
with the sterile blue curtain cliff

and the grandmother is telling me that my hair looks like lake ice,
like blackberries, like her dead daughter's dishes

and the grandfather turns to me, dirge-tempo, (i have been told
that his cells are eating him but he
is doing alright)

and he stuffs my eye sockets with gauze