Let Ruin End Here
Brooklyn - July 8, 2025
Three years ago. That was the last time I was hungry. It was late, and I had one 28 of the 35 Pages I needed to submit in order to apply for grad school. I shoved half a bag of pretzel thins into my mouth and wrote for several hours on my kitchen table until the 11 o’clock deadline.
Now I sit at my kitchen table, looking at 250 pages of the manuscript that helped me graduate from grad school last month, and I can hardly touch it. It frightens me.
I’ve met with a spiritual counselor, a psychiatrist, and two therapists last week in order to ease my fears. I tell each of them I’m in financial trouble, and they nod and jot down that I don’t have insurance. I typically wake up, do not look at my bank account, do not apply for jobs, or check my email, or reach out to my network, and instead I lie on the couch and scroll.
I tell my psych I am feeling pretty good and not depressed at all, and she tells me in the survey I filled out, I scored in the moderate to severe range for both depression and anxiety. When she asked me how I relieved those feelings, I shrugged. That night, I lay awake believing that perhaps the sudden calm had anything to do with avoidance.
If I am in a period of growth, as Alice Walker suggests. Restlessness disguised as calm, I imagine there are some things I must let go of. I went on to read the speech that the quote came from, addressed to young women at Spelman College. For the most part, it was quite whimsical and introspective, and Walker determined in that speech that she needed a new relationship with her hair in order to move forward spiritually.
I cannot wait for those kinds of problems. While my hair and I have our own relationship dynamics, I do not think that is what stands between me and this new level of personality.
If someone presented you with the question: Do you want an easy life or a hard life, which do you think you’d pick?
Is that question too simple? What if I told you that a hard life is more noble and an easy life is for those who are selfish? Now, which do you choose?
A friend mentioned this poem to me during a writing circle, and I believe it illustrates my answer to this question, caveats included.
let ruin end here
let him find honey
where there once was a slaughter
let him enter the lion’s cage
& find a field of lilacs
let this be the healing
& if not let it be
I don’t know how danez smith intended for this poem, little prayer, to be interpreted, or how the millions of New Yorkers who watch this poem posted inside of their trains will interpret it, but, for me it indicates a possibility, that shame no longer accumulates where the truth of who I am resides. And perhaps there is no ‘easy’ life that exists, but how often have I chosen suffering because it was the only thing I was familiar with?
I don’t know if I was being more honest when I told my psych I didn’t feel depressed anymore, or when I had filled out the intake forms a week prior that indicated the risk, or if a very expensive mental health team will remove my fear of writing, which is really a fear of living.
But, I do know for sure, I cannot go back.
Let this be the healing / & if not let it be
Love,
Mads