Protecting Your Energy: Notes from a First-Generation Latina
Since I was a kid, people have told me I overthink. They've said I'm in my head too much as if there is a proper amount. As an adult, a dear friend suggested that I didn't need to smoke weed; I was already meta. I bring this up because the go-to response for creatives like me (a poet, mostly) experiencing PTSD and other trauma responses from watching active ICE raids on the internet has been to protect our space. Protect your energy, they say. Get off of social media, they say. Maybe, don't watch crime shows, they say. While these aren't ill-intended pieces of advice, I've been exploring what it means to be someone who turns inward for answers when the outside world is scarier by the minute.
What kind of poem would suffice in a time like now? What can a creative community do right now?
When my friend referred to me as meta, I liked the term. It sounded like a clean way to describe someone who self-evaluates. However, according to Google, the word has several definitions.
META:
Adjective (*my personal favorite*)
meta (adjective)
(of a creative work) referring to itself or the conventions of its genre; self-referential:
"The enterprise is inherent "meta" since it doesn't review movies; for example, it reviews the reviewers who review movies.
My therapist used to say...
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