Amena Brown:
(silence) For today's episode, I am excited because I'm going to do another edition of Behind The Poetry. And thank y'all for listening to the first one that I tried with Roots and Wings. Thank y'all. It really made me happy to see how many of you were listening to that and vibing with that. So I thought I would pick a poem that I actually wrote in January a couple of years ago, so we're going to get a chance to talk about that today in our HER living room.
Amena Brown:
Also, I wanted to just talk about some of the thoughts, feeling, emotions that come up for me whenever we're in this time of a new year starting. And I am the type of goals person that decides at the beginning of a year to set 50,000 goals for myself that one human being really can't accomplish. I think sometimes I do that because part of me knows I can't accomplish all the things, and I hope maybe I'll accomplish more things by just listing more things than I could actually accomplish.
Amena Brown:
And I had a really humbling moment at the beginning of this year that I wanted to share with you all. There is a group of Black women that I went to Rwanda with a couple of years ago, and we call ourselves Woman to Woman. That was our team name. And some of us knew each other, but a lot of us, we didn't know each other until we took that international trip together a couple of years ago. And now we are a sisterhood unto ourselves. And whenever we would travel, before the pandemic and all, whenever we would travel and end up in each others' cities, we would always try to meet up.
Amena Brown:
And so one of our sisters had come in to Atlanta from out of town, and so a bunch of us that live here, we all met up with her. And it was around this time of the year at the beginning of 2020. And so we were meeting and just doing what we normally do, dreaming and talking, and one of the women at the table was like, "Hey, we should all come up with a goal or two that we want to do for the year, and let's all write it down, keep each other accountable." And so she had written down on one sheet of paper all of the goals that we all had talked about that we wanted to do for last year, and she sent a text to those of us that were at the brunch.
Amena Brown:
And she was like, "Hey, look. I still have this paper. How many of you actually met your goals for 2020? Tell me what some of your goals are for 2021." And my husband and I, every year we do our own business retreat. If we weren't in a pandemic, we would have gone somewhere. We normally like to travel and pick another city to go to so that we can just reassess, think about our business, think about our personal lives, come up with our goals, and kind of do some analysis on what the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats... I'm sure some of you also do SWOT analysis, too.
Amena Brown:
So I was in our retreat meeting, and when I got out of our meeting and went to check my phone, I see all the texts of everyone's goals that they had accomplished in 2020, and goals people had for 2021. And this year, for the first time, probably, in my adult life, I probably had the least amount of goals written. And it's really humbling for me to not have 1,000 things that I'm going to say I'm going to accomplish this year, and it's a good thing. It's just an adjustment. And I know I'm not alone in that. I'm sure there are many of you that listen to this podcast that are still recovering from the crazy, wild year that 2020 was.
Amena Brown:
Apparently, 2021 is not going to start gently for us. We are already experiencing a whole lot of crazy things going on even in the beginning of 2021. So I just wanted to say to anybody that's listening, it's okay if you have a lot of goals this year. It's okay if that's your energy this year. And it's okay if your energy this year is just, happy to be here, making it through the day right now. We've talked a lot on this podcast about the need to give yourself time to recover, and sometimes we need recovery from the things that happen collectively, and sometimes we need recovery from the things that are happening to us personally.
Amena Brown:
So if this is a go-getter year for you, then go get it. And if this is a year for you where your goals are more to be gentle with yourself, or to give yourself more rest, to let yourself sleep in more, or to slow your life way down, which is sort of the season of life I'm experiencing, I just wanted to say that's okay, too, that your new year doesn't have to come in and be an Excel sheet. Your new year can come in and be gentle and enter slowly, and you can just do the best you can with the time that you have. And sometimes the best we can do is just taking our time and not feeling like we're running out of time or like we're behind the time where we should be.
Amena Brown:
So if you get your group text, it's okay if you have 10 goals, and it's okay if you have one, as long as whatever those goals are, they are centered in honoring who you are and honoring that you are not what you do, and that you are not what you achieve, and honoring that you are a whole person who needs love and tenderness and care and gentleness and joy. So happy New Year, everybody.
Amena Brown:
Okay, so this is my second time trying one of these episodes, and now this is going to be a fixture, so I will be back here probably every month or so doing another Behind The Poetry episode. And on these episodes, I take a poem that I have written. Most of these I think will be poems I've written and performed, because the performance of these pieces is a part of what I talk to you about in the episode. So every time we have one of these Behind The Poetry episodes, what I'll do is, you will get a chance to hear a live recording of me having performed the piece if we have a live recording available. And if we don't, you'll get to hear me reading the piece for you.
Amena Brown:
And then I'll share with you some of the journey behind how the poem got written, how the poem got ready for stage. I thought it would be fitting to talk about the poem we're going to be discussing for this episode, which is called Here Breathing. And I actually wrote Here Breathing just three years ago in January. So take a listen to a clip from a longer talk that I did for CreativeMornings Atlanta, and my talk was called Creative Anxiety. And at the end of that talk, I read Here Breathing in public for the first time. So this is the clip that you're hearing. Check it out.
Amena Brown:
I want to close with a poem, and this is going to be actually a moment of me sharing some creative anxiety with you. As a spoken word poet, I really love the most when I have a poem memorized, and I've got it like... I'm about to come up and blow you away. Spoken word poets won't say it out loud to you, but that's how we like to do. We like to make it look very effortless, like we weren't up all night crying and wondering if we were going to remember our words and stuff. So I just finished a new poem, and I want to close today with it, because I thought that would be a really great exercise of me sharing with you some creative anxiety.
Amena Brown:
And I don't know how your life has been, but 2017 was a year that I was glad to break up with. It was not super great for me. I don't know if anybody else had that feeling. Some really great things happened, but then as the great things happened, there was some really terrible things that happened also, so it was this strange mixed bag of stuff. I'm normally not like that when a year's over. I'm kind of like, "Let us reflect on the things that we are thankful for that happened this year, the strawberries that were in season," whatever. And when this year was over, I was like, "Get out of here. No one wants you. We're done with you. You don't matter anymore," or whatever.
Amena Brown:
And I had started tinkering around with this poem idea, sort of my ode to 2017, or just when you go through a really crappy time. And this phrase kept going through the poem about being here, that when you're here, it means you have survived whatever it was that came before this moment that you're here. And some friends took us to see Kamasi Washington in December. I don't know if any of you got to see that show. Kamasi's amazing. And Kamasi is one of a small number of artists who I have gone to a show and cried.
Amena Brown:
And the last song of his set was called Rhythm Changes, and the verses have all these different things about the seasons. And the last line of the verse is this recurring, "But no matter, I'm here. And no matter how anxious we might be, no matter how much of a failure or a success we might feel like, we're here." So I want to read you this new poem called Here Breathing that is my ode to any of us that had a crappy 2017, and really my ode to any of us that have gone through a really, really hard time, but no matter how hard it was, you're sitting in this room with breath in your lungs. You're here. Here's this new poem, and thank y'all for listening.
Amena Brown:
Take a look. Survey the damage. Review the debris, the things that didn't survive. Look closely at the ashes you come from. Remember the way hard times can singe through just about everything. Assess what the flood and quake and sickness and death have stolen. Remember how the pain made you lift a life you never thought you had the strength to lift, gave you new muscles, made you just as strong as you are weak. Remember the time life wanted to fight you in a boxing match you never agreed to, punched you in the gut, hit you straight in the chest, stole the wind out the inside you. Remember rock bottom, how asphalt and concrete left tread marks on your cheeks, how you thought your knees would never find the strength to kneel, certainly not to stand, definitely not to walk, never to run again.
Amena Brown:
How you never thought you'd say, much less live anything like the words get up, but you did. You survived. You are here, breathing. Remember how the words they said punctured your skin, made you bleed, you applied pressure and yet continued to bleed, made you cry, made you question everything, made you doubt yourself, made you doubt God and goodness and grace, how you learned that truth be the best thread for suturing wounds, how time turns a stitch into new skin, how in the old place of pain, new life can find its footing, even when that footing is shaky, how overcoming didn't show up in the clothes you thought it would, but you did.
Amena Brown:
You overcame. You are here, breathing. Look out across the devastation. See the life the fire missed. See the seeds always teaching us how and when and where to start over, how to experience death and bring things back to life, how to poke a limb through the dirt, how to soak up rain, how to search for sun, how to grow a spine so strong that it bends through wind and storm but does not break, how to turn the veins of your palms up, how to preen and dance and find the light, how to study your trunk and limbs and branches, trace the scars, find them grooves.
Amena Brown:
How your body is a quilt, how your skin is a storyteller, how your wrinkles and folds are a map un-colonized, how you found your North Star somewhere between your collar bone and your ribcage. How your voice becomes a stream that always finds its river. How your feet do not fear a path never traveled, how your bones sing freedom, how they whisper. Remember, you are here, breathing.
Amena Brown:
Every time I hear this poem or read or perform this poem, I always just feel a little like I could cry. And even hearing the sound of my own voice, feeling nervous, and thinking about the time of life where I was, sharing that piece only probably a couple of weeks after I had finished writing it, I just feel so tender, like I could really cry thinking about how much I was really going through at the time. So I always start off with what made me write this poem. And I don't really remember when I started tinkering with the poem. I don't remember those parts, because sometimes the poems come with a lot of drafting, so sometimes I'll have a stanza or two that I'm kind of playing around with.
Amena Brown:
And I really don't remember that part about Here Breathing. The part that I remember when I started writing the beginning, is I remember I was going through what was probably one of the toughest seasons in my adult life. And my husband and I were actually talking about the year 2020 and how for us, personally and professionally, 2020 was not our worst year. It was actually one of our best years. But of course, collectively for us as a nation in America, and really around the world, collectively, 2020 was a hard year, right?
Amena Brown:
But for what 2020 was for other people personally, I feel like end of 2017 into 2018 was more of that time in my life. And this is around the time that I started writing Here Breathing. And as I started adding Here Breathing to my sets, I would talk about struggle season. And I coined that term for myself. I don't know if I made up the term, but I was like, "This is the term for what I'm going through right now." Because it was a time in life that it really just felt like, in so many areas of my life, I couldn't win. And every time I turned around, something else really hard was happening.
Amena Brown:
And you know you're going through a struggle season when one hard thing happens, and then another hard thing happens before you have time to recover from the first thing, and then the next hard thing happens before you've had time to recover from the other thing. And before you know it, you look up, and a few or several or a lot of hard things have happened and have hit you so hard that you haven't even had time to really process any of it. And the end of 2017 was like that for me.
Amena Brown:
And I think when hard times in life come, they're always rough and hard, and man. But for me, there's always something extra painful when hard times arrive right after I've had a high. And my second book was called How to Fix a Broken Record, and it's a spiritual memoir where I'm really writing about the time of my 30s. I'm sort of catching up from being 29 and turning 30. And the book sort of follows my journey into maybe 35, 36-ish. And it was triumphant for me, because my first book, I wrote because in a way, I felt like it was time. At that time in my career, I was getting the advice that, "It's time for you to write a book now. In order for you to get these types of speaking engagements, or in order for you to get these types of opportunities, or be visible to these blah, blah, blah people, you need to have written a book."
Amena Brown:
And so I promised myself that I would never write a book under those circumstances again. And I'm still very proud of myself for writing my first book, which was called Breaking Old Rhythms. Although someone joked with me at a book signing once. They were like, "You like broken things, don't you?" And I was like, "I guess I do." So my first book was called Breaking Old Rhythms, and I'm still proud of myself. I mean, writing a book is really an accomplishment. I know there are a lot of us as people that dream to write books, or we have people in our lives that look at us, or hear us talk, or know our story, and they tell you things like, "You should write a book."
Amena Brown:
And you should write your book. And book writing is much harder than I ever thought it would be. So I decided after I wrote my first book, I was like, I don't want to really write anything else because it's time. I want to write when I really feel like I have something to say. And that was how How to Fix a Broken Record showed up for me. I really gave myself time to let the book idea, and even the framework of how the book would be set up, I gave myself time to figure all that out. So there was a lot of work and tears and everything, soul, really, that went into that book.
Amena Brown:
It was the most myself that I had been in my work probably ever up until that point. So How to Fix a Broken Record was scheduled to be released November 7 of 2017. This was a huge deal for me. It was the first time that I had been working with a large publisher. This was when I was doing most of my work in Christian industry. And when I say Christian industry, I mean at that time, it was, for me, really white evangelical space, had been where I'd been performing professionally for most of my career.
Amena Brown:
So to have gotten a book deal with Zondervan, and they were under HarperCollins, and to have just more of a team and resource behind the book, and the people that had agreed to share the book and endorse the book, I mean, it just felt like all these things were aligning. And I remember right before the book came out, three weeks before the book came out... Well, prior to that, like a lot of artists and authors, I always have a team of people that are helping me do what I do. I'm never doing anything alone. The main thing I do alone is when I write my poems. That's the main thing that I do that I'm like, I'm sitting in a room literally alone doing that.
Amena Brown:
But everything else, even while I'm here talking to you all, recording this podcast, my husband's my producer, so he's in the room with me, right? And every project that I do anything, I always have a team. Sometimes that team consists of managers, agents, attorneys, people that are managing your social media, an assistant. It can be so many different people depending on what you're working on and what that season of your career is like. And at that time, I found out some really hard news about how my business team was going to have to be restructured.
Amena Brown:
And I was starting to get the vibes before the book came out, but I knew for sure about a week or a week and a half after the book came out. And so it was this weird feeling of going from this high of my book coming out, and book release day, and everybody posting on social media, all the things, supporting me. I mean, that was so wonderful to experience. I did a book signing at my local Barnes & Noble, and I grew up going to Barnes & Noble with my mom and my mom's side of the family. My husband was laughing because when we were dating, we were talking about what are different things you do for holidays and holiday traditions we had with our families, and I told him that when my mom's side of the family, when we were all together for Thanksgiving, we would celebrate Thanksgiving Day, and then on Black Friday, we would all go to Barnes & Noble and just sit in there for hours.
Amena Brown:
And he was like, "What? What would you do in there?" And I was like, "You read magazines, you read books, and play Scrabble." And he was just looking at me like, what are you talking about? I was like, I hope he's going to keep dating me after this. Which he did, so that worked out. But I just have this long love for Barnes & Noble, and just how it always felt to me going in there. So to have my book signing at my local Barnes & Noble that I was going and buying my books from, and all of the people that came there and showed me so much love after my book came out, it was like this really wonderful high that came crashing to a halt. Because we realized that because our team was going to have to go through this big shift, that a lot of the other preparations for when you release a book, like your book tour dates, and some of your social media stuff being completed, and some of the promo stuff that was supposed to happen, I realized within two weeks of that book being out that none of those things were going to happen for my book.
Amena Brown:
But I didn't quite go into the mode of grieving that at the moment. I went into survival mode. So I started meeting with a creative consultant to try to think about ways I could do some different things with my career, and figure out a new direction. And I was emailing people and reaching out to people trying to figure out, for the team members that we were going to have to replace, who could we replace them with? I went into that mode right up until the holidays of 2017. And I think when it finally got to the end of the year and I realized I had done everything that I knew how to do, and there was nothing else that I could do to fix it.
Amena Brown:
And that was such a helpless feeling. If you've ever been through anything in life where you realized you wanted it to be different, but there was nothing that you could do to fix it or change it, and you tried everything, that is really where my emotions were. So it was around that time towards the end of the year that I had started tinkering around with the idea of the poem, Here Breathing. And I don't know, in part, if I knew how it was going to end. I think I just had the beginning parts of feeling what it feels like when life has knocked you down, and some of those things. I think I was tinkering around with those ideas.
Amena Brown:
And then when the new year came in, into 2018, I returned to whatever I'd been tinkering with on this poem, and the poem really finished itself within the first week or two of the year. Because I think a part of what I became curious with in thinking about writing Here Breathing, is I became curious about the idea of what happens when you survive hard things. You know? It's like there's two phases to the storytelling. There's the story of the hard thing you survived and how difficult it was, and how that affected you, how that impacted you. But then the phase two of the story is what happens when that hard, terrible thing happened to you, and you are still here afterwards. What does that mean?
Amena Brown:
I think that was sort of the question I had running in my head when I was trying to write Here Breathing. When I got to the beginning of 2018, I think I try as much as I can to take some time off the last two weeks of the year, and when I took that time off and then went back into working for the new year, it just felt like, okay, these hard things happened back to back to back. I was also dealing with some health challenges, and it was just anything that could pile on top, was piling on top then. And I got to the beginning of the year and just thought, okay, that was really hard, and I'm still here, and I don't know what that means.
Amena Brown:
And I think as I was writing through that and just realizing that when you survive a hard thing, whatever it is, that it changes you. And I think that's what I was trying to express in the piece. It changes your bones. It feels like it changes your blood flow, your insides. It changes you. You're not the same person that you were before you went through whatever this hard thing is. So as I entered 2018, and I'm finishing up this piece, I decided I needed to go to therapy. Because I was getting to the point that I was having some very, very deep depression.
Amena Brown:
I was having the kind of depression towards the end of 2017, and really into the first few months of 2018, where I was finding it hard to function every day. I could get one or two tasks done, and then I was done for the day. I was starting to retreat from being with people. I remember I had a bad habit at the time. I don't do this as much anymore. I mean, of course we're not hardly seeing anyone in person now because of the pandemic, but even before, in the before times when we could see everyone safely, I used to have a bad habit. I actually think 2018 taught me to stop doing this, but I had a bad habit of, I would be walking around town, or at different events or whatever, and sometimes I'd run into people that I hadn't seen in a while, or might have a random text with someone I hadn't caught up in a while.
Amena Brown:
And before I knew it, I would have two or three coffees with all these different people every week. And I got so depressed that I just didn't have even the energy to meet with anyone in person. I was avoiding a lot of family gatherings. I was that depressed. And so I decided that I really needed to go to therapy because I was so depressed that I wasn't able to function, and was starting to sort of have this combination of depression and anxiety. And I am prone in moments where I'm going through really hard things to also have strange comedic thoughts. And so the thought that kept coming to my mind, for those of you who are Scandal fans, there was a season of Scandal where... I think her name was Mellie, who was the first lady. She was married to the president.
Amena Brown:
And without spoiling it for those of you that haven't seen Scandal, she had experienced a loss, and that loss sent her into a grief-stricken depression. But the part that I found that I felt so seen when I experienced this time of depression right here, is she refused to get dressed. She wore her bathrobe every day, and she was eating potato chips for breakfast. And I have never felt more seen. I just felt like, yes, that is how terrible I feel right now, that I don't see a need to put on clothes that make me have to be concerned with anyone else but myself, and I do think potato chips are great to eat for breakfast. (silence)
Amena Brown:
So I started going to therapy, and y'all, I was doing online therapy at the time. And actually, I think the therapist that I had initially, we weren't even talking on a video chat. It was just a phone session. And y'all... I can laugh about it now. Those of you that work in the field of therapy are going to be incensed, probably, when you hear this part of the story, but I had started first seeing my first... It wasn't my first therapist ever, but the first therapist that I started talking to during this season. And bless her heart. She was babysitting her grandson during the time of our sessions.
Amena Brown:
And so her grandson was playing with some kind of toy. And I'm going to try to do a sound example to y'all of what her grandson sounded like in the background while I'm trying to tell her what's wrong with my life. Her grandson basically sounded like he was doing this with his hand, and he was going... He was humming like that, okay? So imagine the state I've just described to you all that I was in, and my therapist is babysitting her grandson. But I don't know she's babysitting him until I'm starting to hear the humming and bang bang sounds in the back.
Amena Brown:
So she finally says to me, "Oh, yeah, I'm so sorry. I'm babysitting my grandson, and he's normally not this loud and not this noisy." So I'm hearing her trying to find some other place to go in the house where her grandson isn't. But whatever is happening, this noise remains in the background for a while. And so because of that, y'all, she and I only made it two or three sessions. Probably shouldn't have made it that long, but I think I was hoping that that was just a one time thing. I think our first session was great, then the second session she was babysitting her grandson.
Amena Brown:
And then the third session, I think somebody kept coming to her door, and she was answering the door. So I was like, I need a new one. But I'll tell you the one thing she said to me that was really helpful to me during that season of time. She said to me, "Every person has..." She was like, "I want you to imagine it like every person has a container inside, and in that container is our capacity to experience life and all of the feelings that come with it." And she was like, "When you are in a healthy place, whatever happens in life, you have the room in your container to experience whatever comes, whether it's happiness or excitement, or if it's anger, if it's sadness, whatever it is."
Amena Brown:
She told me, "Your container is so full of grief that it is spilling out everywhere." And she told me, she said, "The only way for you to make space in your container is you have to process that grief." So at the time that I'm trying to complete Here Breathing, I'm also beginning the process of trying to process that grief. And I realized based on my pace of life, based on the fact that I was traveling on the road a lot. When you're a traveling artist or speaker, so much of your schedule is really not under your control, not just on a daily basis, but when you look at your year, you were sort of dependent upon, depending on how you run your business... I'm sure I've learned a lot of better lessons how to do this now.
Amena Brown:
But then, it was sort of like you know you're going to have times where people just aren't booking you, so when they are booking you, you take all the gigs you can. Even if you feel like you almost can't breathe a little bit, you're going to go ahead and do that work because you know you might have another three months or six months where nothing comes in, right? So I realized that she was right, that it wasn't just what had happened at the end of 2017. It was some things that had happened in 2014, and some other things that happened in 2015, and so on. It was a lot of things that had happened that I had not taken the time to process. I had just gone back to work because I didn't know what else to do.
Amena Brown:
So she started giving me some assignments. One of the things she suggested to me was... There were some people we were talking about in our sessions, and she was like, "You should write a letter to them, even if you don't give it to them," these types of things. And then I switched from her, bless her heart, because I needed a therapist that maybe wasn't babysitting and wasn't answering the door during our sessions. And so I found another therapist who was the therapist I actually was seeing through most of the rest of 2018. And she was the therapist that really helped me, over that year, start to process that grief.
Amena Brown:
I think Here Breathing was sort of that question, what happens to you after you survive this thing, and I wanted to say that to people that have been through hard things. "You may not have this answer as to how that's going to be resolved. You may not know what's going to happen next, but there you are. You're here. You're breathing." So as I'm going through all of that process, around the same time that I have finished this poem, am at the beginning of the therapy process, trying to do some healing work, I get this amazing phone call about this opportunity to be a part of a radio show.
Amena Brown:
It was with a very reputable radio station, and I have dreamed to be on radio since I was a little girl. So this was very exciting to me, to even think that I was going to have this opportunity. And I was meeting with the general manager of the radio station. He was the one that had approached me about it. He's telling me the vibes of the show, and I'm just like, oh my gosh, this is me. And this was another one of those moments. I don't know if any of you listening, this has happened to you, where you go through so much hard stuff, so much disappointment, so much loss, that you're just looking for anything to come along that will be a win.
Amena Brown:
And so when this radio thing came up, I was like, oh my gosh, this is it. All this terrible stuff that's happened, it's going to be okay because I'm going to be able to say, "I got this gig at this radio show in the middle of this terrible time." And had these first initial meetings and conversations with the general manager, and it could have been me being overly optimistic. It could have been whatever the vibes were on their end. But I just felt like the conversations were going so well. They felt very warm. We were talking about how I could still do the show even while I was traveling, and these different arrangements we could make.
Amena Brown:
It just sounded like we just need to have some conversations about formality now, and get the paperwork done kind of thing. And one of the last steps in the process was, it was going to be an ensemble radio show, so there was a radio personality who was the head of the show. So the last round of it, which I didn't know was the last round, but here we are. The last round of it was to meet with the radio personality. And I meet with the radio personality, I meet with that person and the general manager, and the meeting, from the beginning, felt cold. It felt like I was starting from the beginning almost, like I was in a cold audition space, not having a conversation where they were already interested in me.
Amena Brown:
The meeting ended awkwardly. I could tell that I did not impress the head personality enough. And the meeting ended... Honestly, y'all, the meeting ended in a way that I was like, oh, this is over. The two of them started just talking to each other and stopped talking to me, and that's how I knew the meeting was over. I remember just being like, oh, okay, wow. I need to get my stuff and go home. And y'all, I went home and was just so devastated, because I just needed a win somewhere. And I was like, oh, I was so close and couldn't get it.
Amena Brown:
But let me tell y'all something that's interesting that came back to my mind in thinking about talking to you all about the process of writing Here Breathing. I remember I got home. I remember I was still very depressed, and just went home, and tried to give myself a few days to even process that whole thing. And after I had processed that, I decided... I had been toying around a little bit with the idea of starting a podcast. I had been podcasting prior to this. My sister-in-law and I have a pop-up podcast called Here For the Donuts. That was my first time ever podcasting.
Amena Brown:
And then when How to Fix a Broken Record came out, I did a 10 episode podcast series based on the book, and interviewed different people, riffing off of some of the sections of the book. And so I did the How to Fix a Broken Record podcast because I wanted to see, do I enjoy podcasting when I'm on my own and I don't have a podcast partner? Do I like this? And after I did those 10 episodes, I was like, oh my gosh, I'm in love with this. I would love to do my own podcast, and I put it down.
Amena Brown:
And after that thing happened with the radio, after I... I won't say got over it, because I don't know if that's accurate, but after I gave myself some time to feel my feelings, the first thought that came to my mind was, you are disappointed because you didn't get this opportunity on this radio show, but you don't have to get permission to be on a radio show. You have the field of podcasting, and you can build your own show. And then you have less people to tell you what it should be, or who should do what, this or that. You get to decide. You get to focus on the guests you want to have. You get to make the content however you want to make it.
Amena Brown:
And so I have to tell you, looking back on that season of time, if I had not had that big rejection from this radio show, I don't know that HER With Amena Brown would exist, because I think it's, in a way, being pissed off that I got rejected from that, that gave me... I'm always trying to find what is a woman's substitute for the way that we use the phrase, find the balls. I'm always trying to figure out what is that. Is it, find the fallopian tubes, find the ovary strength, find the mammary boldness? I don't know. I don't know, y'all. I haven't figured out what it is yet, so please write to me on social media and tell me if you have suggestions for me.
Amena Brown:
But whatever that is, I had to grab ahold to my big girl panties and just be like, "You can start this yourself. You can do this." So that is one thing that still inspires me to this day to think about, that sometimes we will have times in life that we get rejected, that we go out for it, whatever it is. Whether that's an audition, a job opportunity, a relationship, we put all our cards on the table, to use that cliché, and we get rejected, and the answer is no, or they choose someone else, or they don't think we're the right fit for it. And maybe we are, maybe we aren't, but sometimes those big rejections come in life to really help us realize what we really want out of life, and that we don't have to wait for someone to give us permission to do it, that there are often a lot of ways for us to make our own decisions and decide that this is what we want, and do it. You know?
Amena Brown:
So the other thing I like to share when I talk about Behind The Poetry is I like to share with you all what is the story behind the first time doing that poem live. Interestingly, I have been a fan of CreativeMornings for a long time. If you don't know about CreativeMornings, you should. You should check it out. It is a lecture series that happens monthly, and it happens globally in a lot of major cities around the world. And each lecture series has a monthly them, so all the cities around the world will do their monthly lecture series around that same them. So I've been just a fan and an attendee of CreativeMornings Atlanta, and then got a little bit more involved in the community there.
Amena Brown:
So I had done some poetry at some events before. One of the months was audience takes the stage, and so I had been one of the participants in that, and did a little seven minute talk there. And so Blake, the founder of the Atlanta chapter, he had approached me before 2017 ended, and he was like, "Hey, wanted to know if you'll be one of our speakers for 2018." And I was like, "Great." So I was actually signed up to speak for March, and the theme was courage. Well, I got this email from the CreativeMornings Atlanta team at the beginning of January, around the same time that I'm finishing up writing Here Breathing, I'm depressed, I'm in therapy. It's all the things.
Amena Brown:
And they were like, "Hey, our January speaker had an emergency. They can't speak now at the last minute. Do you mind switching themes?" So I said, "Well, what's the theme for January?" And they said, "The theme is anxiety." And I was like, "I'm sorry, what?" And even though I was still depressed, still experiencing a lot of anxiety, I had just also been very holed up in the house a lot, and just drowning in grief and sadness, honestly. So something about the opportunity to talk about anxiety in some way seemed like at least they weren't asking me to go there and talk about something that was way left field away from where I was actually in my life. I felt like, at least I wouldn't have to go there and put on.
Amena Brown:
I could still be pretty honest and bring my honest and real self to the moment. So I said, "Sure, yes, we'll do this." And I decided to focus my talk on creative anxiety, on the things that keep us, as creative people, from making art or design or whatever ways that you're creative. We all have creative anxiety, the stuff that becomes the obstacle to actually creating, right? And as I'm building my talk, I get to the end, and I'm giving this example about how there are all these things that come into my mind as it relates to stage work and creating that really, you get stuck in your head about how people will perceive you, and not wanting to let people see you not having it all together.
Amena Brown:
Even as a writer, I like to go into the closed room and write, write, write, write, and then come out, and be like, "Look. Hey. I'm doing brilliant things." Right? It's very rare that I would be like, "Oh, here's this thing that I haven't really finished that I'm still working on." It's very rare I would bring that out in the public. But that's because I want to be perceived a certain way. I don't want people to look at me and feel like I don't have it, air quotes, together, right? And as I was finishing up that talk, and it was only a 20 minute talk, but as I was finishing that up, I got towards the end and was trying to think.
Amena Brown:
I knew how I was going to open it, but I was like, how am I going to close this? And then it came to me. I need to close this with Here Breathing, because I think there will be other people in the audience that may know the feelings of that. And I was like, I think it's a good way to practice ways to navigate creative anxiety, because if I can take this poem that's not memorized, that I hadn't really performed anywhere, so I didn't know what the rhythms of it were going to be. If I could take that poem that's brand spanking new, that's still in its very vulnerable stage, something that I might take to an open mic and read it for the first time, but I would never take it to something where someone asked me to speak there professionally.
Amena Brown:
I would normally not take it to something like that and read it the first time. I thought, isn't this a great example of how we can be present with our creative anxiety? So I closed my talk by reading Here Breathing. And I can't necessarily tell y'all that that moment was this turn of a dime for me in a way. I can't tell you that that was this moment, that I was like, ooh, and right after that, the depression lifted and everything got better. I can't tell you that. I actually felt depressed and full of anxiety probably for another few months. I don't think it was til it got close to summer of that year that I really started to feel that heaviness lifting for me.
Amena Brown:
But I will say, that felt like a beautiful moment for me in the middle of a really hard time. And it was a good reminder to me that even though I was still going through a hard time, was still processing tough times that had happened before, it was this reassurance to me. After I finished the talk and some of my friends had come, and they were there hugging me and just encouraging me, and my husband was there, and just letting me know they were proud of me, and seeing people that I didn't know feel seen and feel affected by that, it let me know that even though hard times come, that they don't have to be the end of my story. It let me know that there was still some hope out there, and that was really welcome. So that was a pretty great first time on stage for Here Breathing.
Amena Brown:
How do I feel about this poem today? I mean, it's still one of my favorites because it's one of my most honest pieces. And I don't say that to say that my other poems are a lie, but there are some poems you write... And hopefully I'll talk about this poem on here, too, but if I think about my poem Dear TV Sitcoms, for example. This is a poem that I love, and it's a lot of fun to perform. I think when I try to compare that type of piece to Here Breathing, Here Breathing is not something that I always put in my sets or anything like that. But there are times, if I feel tender. And I like to go on stage, instead of fighting how I feel, I like to bring however I feel onto stage.
Amena Brown:
And that's one of the things I love about being a poet, that I have the opportunity to do that. But if there are times that I might feel sad, or something tough might be going on in my life or whatever, I like that I have a poem like Here Breathing, that I can hold space for other people in the middle of a poetry show. And are we going to also laugh, and I'm going to tell some ignorant stories about myself? I'm going to do that in the poetry set, too. But I like that Here Breathing is this place to say, "I know there are people who feel like they're crawling through their life every day. They feel like they can barely keep their head up through this whole thing."
Amena Brown:
And I love that this poem is always holding space for that, that it's always saying, "I see you." So I wanted to say, sort of ending this part of the episode where I started. You may be listening to this, and you may be in the middle of struggle season right now. And I hope this episode and hearing some of the story behind this poem, I hope it encourages you that you're not alone in some of the hard things that you're just trying to make it through, you're just trying to survive.
Amena Brown:
And I get that. I get that. I hope that this held some space for you, and that you know you're here, you're breathing. And I'm glad you're here. I'm glad you're here. It matters that you're here. It matters that you have this breath in your lungs. And I am a firm believer that if you've got breath in your lungs, you can take in that breath, you have a reason to be here. And I'm glad you're here. I'm glad we're here together.
Amena Brown:
For this week's episode, I want to give a crown to every cast member of Real Housewives of Atlanta. I hope I can have some of the cast members, whether they're current or former cast members, on my podcast sometime. I know y'all listening. NeNe, I know you listen. Kandi. Okay? Porsha. I know y'all listening. Okay. You're welcome here. Any of the cast members, you're welcome. When I was going through some of my deepest grief and deepest depression that we talked about in today's episode, I decided to start watching through Real Housewives of Atlanta. I had never actually watched a whole episode, and I also felt like there was this whole cultural lexicon that I was missing out on because I hadn't seen it.
Amena Brown:
Sort of like, in a pop culture way, it's kind of like The Godfather in a way, which is one of my favorite films, by the way. But I think I can say this scene hopefully without spoiling it, but also, The Godfather was out so many years ago, so I think spoilers should have a time limit. But that famous scene in The Godfather where this man finds the horse head in his bed. If you haven't seen The Godfather, you're like, "What's going on?" Well, if you've never seen The Godfather, you've seen other movies that have probably referenced some of the things in The Godfather. And when you watch The Godfather, so many things will make sense to you.
Amena Brown:
And that's completely how I felt watching Real Housewives of Atlanta from the beginning. I mean, there was so much in the pop culture lexicon that I just had totally missed out on its origins. Like all of the people saying, "Who going to check me, boo?" I mean, getting to watch the scene where that actually happened, and NeNe Leakes saying, "I'm rich." I mean, there were just so many gems that I caught up on being able to watch it from the beginning. But one of the reasons why I was watching it is because part of my strategy whenever my anxiety starts to become a struggle for me, is I need to have times of stillness, of quiet times where I can journal, times for meditation, times for prayer. I need to have those times.
Amena Brown:
But I also sometimes need things that are mindful distraction, right? And certain TV programs can be that for me, because I might have times that I wake up in the middle of the night and can't go back to sleep or something. And if I sit in the silence too long, then my brain will just keep looping. It might even make my anxiety worse. And so I have to tell y'all, Real Housewives of Atlanta carried me through. Okay? And I know that might sound funny, but maybe sometimes, I don't know. Watching somebody else's life, or at least their reality show life, right, have more drama my life, maybe that was also helping me, helping ease my emotions during that hard time.
Amena Brown:
Either way, the cast of Real Housewives of Atlanta gave me a bit of an escape. They gave me something else to focus my mind on. They gave me a very nice history lesson. I mean, going back to watch that show from the beginning, there are history lessons there of fashion and all sorts of amazing people that you know now that you didn't know were in some way involved, or were playing minor or support characters on Real Housewives of Atlanta. I mean, it offered me a lot. So thank you, Real Housewives of Atlanta, for getting me through the tough times. Give them a crown.
Amena Brown:
HER With Amena Brown is produced by Matt Owen for Sol Graffiti Productions as a part of the Seneca Women Podcast Network in partnership with iHeart Radio. Thanks for listening, and don't forget to subscribe, rate, and review the podcast.