Letters To A Young Poet IV

September 21, 2018          
            
Jade Pandora            
San Fernando, California            
             
Dear Geoffrey,            
     With your latest letter received, nestled next to my trusty field journal in my leather shoulder tote which sits in its own chair next to mine, I write this letter in the San Fernando Public Library on a Friday’s beautiful late morning.  It’s near where I just came from, the Mission San Fernando Rey de España, in the Mission Hills district of Los Angeles. Where I went to pay my respects at the grave sites of my paternal grandparents over at the San Fernando Mission Cemetery nearby.            
             
     I voted for the historical atmosphere and structure of these places in which to immerse myself. To help me feel my own roots as I reply to your question concerning the crux of your identity. It seems appropriate for me to do it this way, as one real life poet to another. I feel we go through stages of such uncertainty, because life seems tentative enough. But many poets cannot help but question their state of mind when writing to find answers to what is uncovered during the act of self-discovery.              
             
     To one’s legitimacy of any kind. Birth, gender, love, spirituality, sexuality, mental health, worth by outward appearance, status, financial, job, religion, relations, skills of every ilk. The list is endless when broken down by subtext, ad Infinitum. That alone can spur on an identity crisis attack. I see it happen all the time on social media. I myself have had my moments, online and off. But they are not to be compared to your own struggle.            
             
     I was never treated like an underdeveloped child even though I was the baby of my family. I was never talked down to, or prohibited from joining in to socially connect with the adults. Nor discouraged in pursuit of my dreams. What you have experienced, and still do, is everything in the opposite.              
             
     If a child is brought into the world and often finds itself surrounded by positive affirmations by a family unit, whether blood kin or any other permutation, that child will respond as one who is part of the unit, not as a thing of indifference. As we both know: indifference is intensely more harmful than addiction, obsession, or hate.            
             
     If you have something condescending drummed into your head long enough, a portion of your world banged in like sheet metal. Warped, out of proportion. If this is as far as it goes, the distortion it creates is subtle. But continued on for years, from childhood into adulthood, how does one discern and make sense of the true boundaries?              
             
     How does one know what is normal, and where chaos between the lines begins and ends? To blur those lines. My instinct is to reply: how can one know what to answer when the misnomer of a normal concept has never been established?  Yes, that is what I am saying: Is there even such a thing as “normal”? I have come to a point in my life where it doesn’t matter.              
             
     What a society dictates is never a carbon copy observed in every individual home or family unit. There are always variables. The one you grew up in had mutated. And beyond, once you became independent from the nest to your own space, became mutated, times two, in the relationships you had already been experiencing. What seemed normal, was. Your stunted frame of references has been like viewing life through a fisheye lens. Worse. It has been distorting all of your senses.            
             
     And yet, from out of all this, I thank the Universe for the gift you have been protecting your whole life until recently. You were made to feel that writing poetry was a waste of time better spent in endeavors everyone else deemed acceptable, and fit. Fit for the mind, body, and coffers of others, for their benefit. Be damn what it was doing for you. Spitting out their contempt upon the servant boy.              
             
     So you went into yourself, to secret away the poet and his gift. The saving grace. The ultimate sacrifice. The last evidence to keep you from failing that fragile brink of sanity. You are much stronger than you realize. Because, you now question your sanity, when I say: you have never been close to insanity, to be cognoscente enough to ask. You recognize the difference by not having known both.              
             
     If anything, you are a writer, with an innate grasp of your language. Your latest letter with your question is remarkable in its complex depth and sidebar thoughts, while steering back to the main message with the fist that grips the pen. Repeatedly pounding, until the breakthrough of your freethinking realization stands, breathless, in its own light.            
             
     I hope you will allow your very capable mind to wrap itself around what I have both confirmed and suggested, while you go catch a bus and write poetry all the way to the end of the line. Then take a walk on the beach. I will be there in spirit (loving everything about the sea as I do).            
             
mentor to mentor,            
Jade