Brittany Boles
live a magical life
Revision as a Shield
Mr. Tillman, my high school AP English Teacher and dearly remembered mentor, once revised a poetry piece I wrote comparing the death and decline of my addict-mother to a Californian palm tree that had been planted in cold Minnesota soil. I remember handing it to him, handwritten on a torn out piece of notebook paper, between classes, though I do not remember why. It was, like the majority of my compositions, not an assignment but a voluntary work of passion. I had never shared my poetry with him, or any teacher, before that day.
The first time I got in trouble for writing was when I was nine or ten years old. I read and wrote voraciously, keeping intimate journals about my daily horrors and filling pretty notebooks with what I hoped was inspiring poetry. When we moved to Minnesota from California, I was already traumatized as: half an orphan, often homeless, sexually and physically abused, and fleeing my mother’s legal problems. I considered myself a scrupulous and moral person with a deep connection to spirituality, but I was also acting out in the expected, inappropriate ways. My journal was a tell-all expose of the daily life of a neglected child, including sexual exploits with local neighborhood boys and experiments with cigarettes and alcohol alongside older cousins. My mother, though generally incapacitated, read and reacted to one such notebook in such a violent, memorable way that revision was forevermore imbedded into my writing process as a measure of self-protection.
The first poem I ever wrote was called Smoke, Smoke, Smoke, about how my eyes burned and watered due to the clouds of smoke my mother and her friends produced while drinking beers and listening to loud music late into the night. I composed it, and my other earliest pieces, in a floral, spiral-bound notebook with the Serenity Prayer printed on the cover – a relic from my mother’s most recent stint in rehab. Like every piece in that first book, Smoke, Smoke, Smoke began as a testament to suffering but ended with, in this case, a literal and figurative clearing of thought and space. I realized through this form of expression, I could both relieve and inspire myself . . . without the fear of retribution, thanks to heavy-handed metaphorical usage.
So my poetry was freeform, but my journals were live-revised (and heavily guarded) analysis of the impossible situation that was my daily life. Honesty, I found, was a way of maintaining control. When I told the truth, which was always, I was empowered. I wrote the narrative. My journals were ripe with AXES as I struggled to understand and interpret my life and the characters in it. I included quotes from angry or drunk adults, examples of how their behaviors affected me, context (to be fair to all involved), and my signature inspirational take on how I would one day be free of it.
Mr. Tillman once flew to Atlanta with me to accept the prestigious, National First Amendment Award for exemplary, boundary-pushing, uncensored journalism as the Editor-in-Chief of my high school newspaper, The Wolfpack Press. I was a high achiever. But I historically kept my poetry to myself, both afraid of being seen in my vulnerability and convinced of my own obscurity. One day, near the end of my high school career, I handed Mr. Tillman what I felt was an overly-long Ode to How I Became – the poem about my mother, the palm tree.
All he added was punctuation.
My Depression Works the Graveyard Shift
It’s not like the depression just goes away when the environmental factors do. I wish it did. Wouldn’t that be a fuckin boon? Fix your life, fix your mind. So simple.
In the spiritual world, the ultra-self-righteous mindfulness doctrine says, “fix your mind, fix your life.” Weirdly also not true, as years of devoted practice have seemingly not “manifested” “abundance” in this physical reality. But let’s pretend it is true, like I have been for twenty years.
When “bad” thoughts swirl unchecked, they’re easy to categorize and reframe. In fact, my constant refrain of positive self-talk is redundant. My inner narrative is saturated with affirmations. Dripping with self-love. Overflowing with poetry and visions of grandeur.
Yet.
Here I sit, at 10:48pm on a Saturday in January as fatalistic as any non-attachment Buddhist guru on her bs can possibly be. I’m exhausted from the nothing. Grateful for the everything, exhaustING the resources & toolkits like healthy whole foods eating, cooking creatively, moving my body, connecting with loved ones, cleaning up after myself, cleaning my actual self, checking all the boxes, meditating every night, starting a new job, starting college blah blah fuckity blah
Nothing really matters anyway does it because at the end of the day both my mind and life are broken, aren’t they?
Or maybe it’s my heart. Not broken into sharp and bloody daggers, like before; not melted into a liquid puddle of tears, like before; not shattered shards reflecting distortions of what could have been; broken like a sacred relic left on the desert surface, eroded by the weather, dissipating into embers as though it never was. That kind of broken. A hollow, a dusty memory, a name nobody can remember.
Disassociation has always been a relief. It’s a sickness when I seek for it intentionally, clouding up my consciousness with whatever makes the static silence feel like quiet. But when it comes of a sober mind, unbeckoned? Sweet, sweet dimensional fracturing, like watching the husk of my body perform its stupid little life march from some bored and unaffected balcony.
Sometimes the things I think are too gruesome to write, like how my brain just imagined my old and tired body hanging lifeless from the Balcony of Disassociation, like a fuckin white flag warning to those who dare to think at all.
We’ll edit that out later. Can’t be alarming the masses. The masses of nobody who reads a word a write, as one particularly lovely horror story of a boy once reminded me.
Anyway good for me for typing all this out instead of just doing college orientation. Classes start in 24 hours, and I can already feel the trauma of everything I never accomplished crowding the periphery of my brain with black scribbled thoughts about what a nothing it all is.
Falling from Ivy League grace as a very, very sick and alone high school senior. Nobody at my graduation. Nobody by my hospital bed in the months before the cap and gown were donned.
A wedding full of relative strangers, and empty of relatives.
And years – decades – an entire life – spent in half-dark rooms by myself praying for relief. Praying to belong. To be somebody.
I am letting out the scribbles so they cannot crowd my thoughts. I am venting my brain so that the blackness can escape, and I know the years of intentional rewiring will take its place. I know I will wake up in the morning and automatically hear/think, “Wow! My life is beautiful and amazing.” Because I wrote the code myself, I installed it, and I’ve been running it for twenty years.
My mom got so many abortions she and everyone else lost count, before she died. I wonder how many times she aborted me – this very consciousness that lives within this body, the light behind the darkness in my eyes, the Master of Rewire that types out all these garbage words that eventually start to shine – and how those false starts and tragic stops became the blueprint for this life I’m living. I wonder which version of me would’ve been taller, or bustier, or cruel. I wonder how many Brittanys she killed before this one stuck.
I’m very grateful. I am so loved. I am surrounded by light. I am powerful, I am beautiful, I am strong. I can do this. I am so happy. I feel so embraced. Everything is easy and good. I can write my story however I want. What I am seeking is also seeking me.
Nobody is coming to save me.
It is up to me to carry on.
And, my favorite, lately, We Will See.
Joy is already on its way to me! and other lies we tell ourselves to fix our mind, fix our lives.
BB 1.11.25
The Grinchening
It went like this, see … I didn’t always grinch about Christmas. In fact, once upon a time I loved Christmas so much I left my apartment decorated like Whoville for an entire year.
I remember my childhood Christmases were made joyful through the generosity of strangers. I remember opening Barbie’s my mom couldn’t afford because the church or Red Cross or women’s shelter adopted us. I remember going winter clothes shopping with a volunteer from the bank. I loved these Christmases because it was just like the movies — all hope would be lost for this homeless neglected family but at the last minute Santa shows up and brings the magic. Mostly, I was just happy for my little sister; she didn’t deserve to not get presents.
Later, when things “stabilized,” I remember the fighting and the silence leading up to Christmas. The tension, the fear, the tentative wish to feel peace and love … the crushing fearful hope that I might be loved by a family. Every year, thick with hope.
Then I had my first apartment, all alone with my cat, and I decorated it like Dr. Seuss Christmas and left it that way until I moved to an island.
Island Christmas was like a different movie, like one about freedom and debauchery. I dressed up in lingerie under a Santa costume with a pillow-belly and strip teased my musician-boyfriend one Christmas. I danced with a broken knee on crutches to live music while my debonair friend held and twirled me around the pool. I toasted the boat parade. I wore bikinis to dinner.
Moving to New Hampshire is when I cite the grinch beginning to haunt me, but now, in hindsight, it becomes obvious that the decay had already begun.
I married for love, and we had a small family, my gods it was finally mine! Except it wasn’t, see, because his child already had a bunch of family … and on Christmas one year between the many houses he had something like 16 Christmas Trees and more gifts than anyone could count … and I was begging my man, my love, to share cheer and to feel joy. To be *with me* in it.
And none of it came, I mean I baked cookies and watched the movies and thoughtfully gifted as I always do .. I cooked big meals and invited people and tried. But in the noise of 16 trees? What a wasted effort.
I grew my own baby, added him to our family. Promised he would never have 16 Christmases … started leaning into my own spirit and the old traditions, started creating space where no one else was standing. Made solstice into My Holiday. Still did Christmas, too, for the kids, but my heart flickered at the emptiness of the “holiday joy.”
My small family didn’t make it, the love never returned to me, or I couldn’t remember how to see it, and I left because that is what I learned to do.
Six — almost seven — Christmases have happened now, with my even smaller family. Gradually, the grinch took over my glittering joy – I no longer smiled at Christmas commercials, I cringed. The music makes me nauseous. I do not buy a tree. Any trees.
Two years ago, when I realized my child had uncountable gifts and trees and celebrations to attend with his other family, I submitted my resignation. I quit Christmas. Though the hardness in my heart has shrunken it 10 times, I will not let that dark leech into my golden child. He doesn’t need to sit in the dark in my empty home on The Biggest Holiday.
Now — before we go feeling bad and inviting me to stuff — please hear that I have been the “plus one” my entire life. I was half an orphan the day I was born and homeless and displaced since. Friends, boyfriends, distant family, and even strangers love to invite me.
And as much as I appreciate the charitable sentiment, it is not the vision I hold for myself. I dream of *being* a happy family, hosting and attending holidays that feel like … like I’m an integral part of a really big love. Like Christmas.
Not like the grinch, whom everyone eventually pitied and embraced out of guilt.
Once upon a time, I loved Christmas. But now … it is a strange time of calendar blackout during which I will someday travel far, far away.
… one more thing.
My grinchening is not unusual, but it’s a story we don’t tell enough. Not every Scrooge and Grinch we meet is all the way dead inside. Not all of us are selfish. Most of us are glad you like Christmas, even. I’d guess most of us got here like I did, gradually, over the course of a lifetime of rotten Christmases, and that we just want to be left alone about it rather than vilified or turned into your Christmas Charity Project. Respectfully.
“she’s f r a c t u r i n g”
Poems like unread letters
Litter the floor in crumpled heaps
Or is that me
Voicelessly screaming in
-to changeless, whipping wind
She’s praying on the mountaintop again
Sunset tears like glittering waste,
Garbage-pity all over her face
Not for lack of candidates
Nor that of gratitude and grace—
How many spells will she speak,
Promises will she keep,
Collapses when she gets weak
Poems will she read
To remind her of me?
“she’s f r a c t u r i n g”
-bb
10.7.24
Used to be crazy
Astonishing, disheartening, enlightening – the phase of life in which I find myself is dripping with retrospective self-responsibility and it is all these things.
I opened a letter I wrote my future self when I was a freshman in high school. Seeing the writing on the page transported me through time and space into the body of fifteen year old me sitting so self assuredly in some straight backed advanced placement classroom chair. My confidence in my path at the time was so strong I felt it petty, almost inconsequential, to list the achievements I would have gained at some future life stage; instead, I focused on romantic prophecies.
Reading it now disgusts me.
Like a kaleidoscopic movie-frame reel running through my mind, I can see the pivotal moments, can watch other versions of myself make choices that changed everything.
I’ll giver her, me, in all my versions, some credit. She – I – never underestimated a crossroads. Never was a decision made without conscious attempt at foresight, without consulting the gods, without a deeply introspective consideration of consequence.
Nonetheless—
Once again, I feel crazy. The great comic Mitch Hedberg might say, “I use to have mental illness.” He’d pause, then add, “I still do. But I used to, too.”
On one hand, I’ve lived an incredible life, almost backward, in terms of How We Become. I exited the rat race immediately; lived on a tropical island fire dancing, surfing, falling in love; made a fulfilling and exciting career of philanthropy, changing the world, traveling, doing yoga; wrote a book, wrote poetry, did photo shoots at the tops of mountains, ran across the mountains; moved to somewhere remote and beautiful to raise my child in peace—
Gratitude, like sunshine and the sparkle of freshly fallen snow, drips from my chalice, and daily. I know that I am rich in freedom, wealthy in love, wildly successful in health and peace.
Is the price of freedom to be this lonely, though? Is the joy of the wild achievable only through the vow of poverty? Must I struggle so severely to hold onto peace, onto the piece of dirt my roots have claimed, onto a life that seems so beautiful . . . but feels so sad?
As a primarily spiritually-driven person, I turn to my faith. I find comfort and companionship in spirit, in the old texts, in the very earth herself. I build close relationships, participate in community, live authentically and vulnerably. But I see around me robust families or those who’ve made their fortune and exited while on top to create a “simple” life of peace and comfort. I see comfort and safety not as spiritually-bypassing claims of freedom and bliss, but as well established foundations of home, hearth, and security.
I ask myself why I cannot find a good job, a good man, why I am alone most of the time, why I feel hollow and sad. And I give myself grace, years of grace, years of patient waiting and standing strong and firm in my vision. Yet—
The advantage of being raised in a vacuum, a close friend once pointed out, is that I am free to choose my own life. I have no expectations to live up to, no familial obligation to fulfil, no authority to answer to—no structure. Total freedom.
There is gap, though, an invisible but necessary foundational component that is missed when one builds one’s life entirely on ideals. Poverty is a mentality, but it is also a life experience, see – and in order to permanently escape it (because, do not misunderstand, poverty is enslavement, no matter how it is sustained or caused), to be truly free of it, there must be a holistic sustainability container, a protective shield of abundance, let’s call it.
In other words, being poor and free is, eventually, equally as heavy as being poor and miserable. Many of my earlier adult decisions were based on a different assumption, though: if I can scrape by here, where it sucks, why not scrape by somewhere beautiful? And that assumption was perfect for the stage of healing I was in – the stage of allowing myself to experience the ideals of an unburdened childhood that were robbed from my actual, traumatic as fuck childhood.
Life is longer than any other me realized it would be, though. Not in terms of life expectancy, as it is no secret that I have always planned to live an inordinately long and healthy life well into my 100’s, but rather in terms of life-iterations.
In terms of “wow, I can’t believe this is my life,” moments. And the impermanence thereof.
And, it turns out, the ability to create a NEW life in any moment.
So I think back to fifteen year old me now with the perspective of thirty-seven year old me who no longer believes romantic love is going to save me, who no longer believes some man is going to be my happily ever after.
My sister recently reminded me, when I mused I should’ve married (or stayed married to) a rich man, that Cher said, “My mother wants me to marry a rich man. I said, ‘Mama, I am a rich man.’”
I remember that fifteen year old me was set to become a lawyer, like Gandhi, who would go on to change the world. I remember that school was easy; my writing flowed like teardrops, like a waterfall, like sunshine. I remember early acceptance to Ivy League schools and feeling like the yellow brick road was laid with gold, and I was already on it.
I do not regret a single turn I’ve taken on or off of that golden road. I do not see it as a broken road, any more than I have judged the stones and roots beneath my feet, leading me to the summit, thinking “how difficult; how sad for me that the trail is not easier.”
Instead, I see the experiences of my adulthood as cornerstones of my future vision. I have worked in the trenches, taken my talent to the bottom and mopped the floor with my intelligence. I have been spoken over and let go by men who could’ve starred in Idiocracy, and I have begged for jobs carrying dirt.
So, when I achieve my law degree, albeit fifteen years “late,” make my fortune not by escaping the Machine, but by rewiring it from within, and become The Rich Man, mama—
My return to the seashore will be that much sweeter. The foundations I pour beneath my mountainside cottage will last, next time. The world I build will be solid, will be the result of alchemizing ideals into a tangible life.
The cost of freedom is not joy. But freedom built on illusion . . . freedom under the threat of poverty . . . is still enslavement. I am grateful for the ways I am truly free, for the demonstrated sovereignty of my life story, and for the courage to rebuild, on purpose, as necessary.
It is the gift of delusion that allows me to see the invisible golden road, by the way. “Somebody once gave me a box of darkness. In time, I realized it, too, was a gift.” -Mary Oliver
I used to be crazy. I still am. But I used to, too.
Brittany Boles 