i'm just a cliché waiting to happen

on the beauty of finding new fillings for old molds

I’ve spent the past few weeks joking that my two hobbies as of late are cliché (white/male/English major/Brooklynite I’ve also been told?): poetry and film photography.

My hindsight has been a damning force in my understanding these past few weeks. Keep in mind: I’m still so young. I just celebrated my 25th birthday two months ago, and the surprise comes from both directions, with lots of people thinking I’m an ageless sprite with a timeless face and a combination of laughter lines and acne that still puzzles their preconceived notions of adulthood (or at least, that’s what I hear when people say “really?”). But there’s nothing like a big achievement to make you look back and say, “Wow, look how far I’ve come! Oh god, look how far away I am.”

I think that when I was younger, I always assumed I would be breaking some sort of barrier—changing the world in one fell swoop of an achievement. My father found an old project I’d made in fifth grade:

First off: please be nice. I want to hear no slander for being vulnerable and sharing my transition lenses and awful handwriting. I will, however, let you poke fun at how sweet and doe-eyed I was, thinking that I could be a biologist at any point in my life knowing that I full well cannot balance a chemical equation to this day.

Regardless, this is a typical child’s dreamscape—it’s harmless, it’s purely driven by hope, and it’s beautiful to look back on this amount of ambition. So why do I feel a heavy blanket of shame?

I think that what I feel most ashamed of, when looking back, isn’t necessarily that I haven’t brought any of these massive milestone goals to fruition, nor is it that I think it’s silly to dream big. I knew I wasn’t going to do all of these, even when I was 10. I wanted to, though, and that’s where the shame lies. Even then, I couldn’t come up with something original. All of these goals are so vastly unspecific. Did I want to cure all cancer? What kind of book did I want to write? What the heck is a world clean up? It’s all the same dreams every other kid in the class had. You want to change the world, and you don’t know how.

When I set out to write, I wanted to do something that had never been done before. And to get published, that’s often what you have to believe—because that’s what you have to sell. You have to play this funny balance of trying to say hey, there’s an audience for this that exists, but there’s a specific subset of this audience that hasn’t been reached, and they’re out there I promise, and if you publish me, I will reach them, and I will sell millions of copies, and I will finally have achieved one of my fifth grade goals.

Lo and behold, I then studied English. I think that the best writers study literature before and alongside creative writing, and I think that having a good scope of literary history and the development of the industry is paramount to creating. It’s learning about your ancestral history, even if it’s not your actual grandparents—it’s like learning that Indonesians are mostly Muslim simply because it was a rallying cry for people who were against Dutch colonization(!). It’s learning about where you come from, and finding that you can’t repeat what they’ve done. You have to expand their lineage.

But then you find: holy shit, everything’s been said. Milton’s done Adam and Eve. Dante’s done Hell. Cecilia Vicuńa’s done performance. Theresa Hak Kyung Cha has done a take on a transnational version of the nine muses.

For a long time, I said that driver’s seat echo was the side-hoe to my MFA thesis, which is a long and sweeping performance piece about meeting all my past selves in purgatory, and it’s my latest version of something that could be groundbreaking and powerful and new. But as I read from driver’s seat echo at the release, I found that even when I was filling the time-tested shoes of lyric poetry, I still found myself feeling something new.

I cried at the reading. It felt like I was looking at an old skin that I had worn and loved and grown into and out of. I have an endless amount of gratitude for my friends who came to watch me blubber for the last five minutes and run way overtime. And as I looked around the room after each poem, I felt something shift in my understanding of changing the world. As I read, I revealed more about myself than I ever had to people who knew me better than anyone ever had in a place where I was surrounded by the most high-caliber books that ever had graced the planet. Daniel and I have been stressed about this election year, and the ongoing genocide in Gaza, and feeling like the little things we do don’t matter, and what’s the point anyway. And the point is that the world is big, and we are small, but we can change other minds in small places, and those people can love you, and those people can love the things you love, and then you can build a small crowd in the bookstore that claps when you show off your keffiyeh.

I think of it this way: I almost always read lyric poems when I’m invited to perform my poetry. It’s the bread and butter of my readings, but it’s not what I spend most of my writing time stressing about. It’s just how I live my life. It’s just what I have to do. And just by doing that, I have people stopping me on my way out the door to say, “hey, I felt that. I didn’t know I felt that.” And doesn’t that count as changing the world?

The reason I’m a writer is because books changed me. I wouldn’t have my political views if I’d not read Marx and Fanon. I wouldn’t be so excited about world building if I hadn’t read Franny Choi. I wouldn’t be as empathetic if I didn’t cry when I read Karen Tei Yamashita. And these books and poems and novels and ideologies came from the feelings that are burst open at every seam.

Lyric poems aren’t boring. They’ve never been boring. I’ve never grown bored of writing them. I’ve never grown bored of reading them. But they’ve evolved over the years. They’ve changed. And that’s where experimental poetry comes in. It changes that and breathes new life. I do both. And I can do both. And doing both feels good. And doing both changes minds. It can slowly, very slowly, change the world.

I’m not saying everyone’s going to read a book and suddenly know everything about policy and action. I’m saying that organizing a world clean up means nothing if the next generation lays the world to filth again. What’s the use in finding a new galaxy if we’re going to colonize the aliens? While we’re fighting for monumental change, we also have to work on changing the people we can touch, right here in our lives. Let’s have the hard conversations. Let’s teach our kids how to be stewards of the right path. Let’s make the revolution sustainable for the future.

Maybe we all die in flames. Maybe that happens soon. But it hasn’t happened yet. And who knows—if we survive, why don’t we try and set the survivors up for success?

So I’m going to keep writing poems. I’m going to keep taking film photos. I’m going to look at the world, capture it from my lens, and see if I can get people to see the same thing. There’s a reason that it’s white/male/English major/Brooklynite—culture is an old guard that changes slowly, and I’m going to be a part of those loud young people who will speed that up.

All this to say—maybe it’s okay to live little clichés, and in the process of birthing something new, maybe my favorite way of fulfilling my dreams is finding the most stellar, radical, hopefully unpredictable things I can do in the world I have.

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Thinking about also starting an advice column on here. Message me things you want my opinion on (you can be anonymous!!!).