Joy Sullivan: When the Road Calls
Joy Sullivan is the author of Instructions for Traveling West, which is a guidebook of poems for letting your life fall apart and remake itself as something new. In our conversation, Joy and I explore her early life: how she grew up in Africa, the child of medical missionaries, bound tight by evangelicalism and purity culture—and her relationship to religion and faith now that she’s left that behind. Eve is a central figure in Joy’s poetry, and you will hear why. Okay, let’s get to our conversation.
MORE FROM JOY SULLIVAN:
Instructions for Traveling West
Follow Joy on Instagram
Joy’s Newsletter, “Necessary Salt”
Joy’s Website
TRANSCRIPT:
(Edited slightly for clarity.)
ELISE LOEHNEN: I was thinking it'd be nice if you read us a poem to kick off our conversation
JOY SULLIVAN: That would be so lovely. All right. " Instructions For Traveling West." First, you must realize you're homesick for all the lives you're not living. Then, you must commit to the road and the rising loneliness, to the sincere thrill of coming apart. Divorce yourself from routine and control. Instead, find a desert and fall in. Take the trail that promises of you. Get lost. Break your toes. Bruise your knees. Keep going. Watch a purple meadow quiver, get still, pet trail dogs, buy the hat, run out of gas, befriend strangers, knight yourself every morning for your newborn courage. Give grief her own lullaby, drink whiskey beside a hundred year old cactus, honor everything, pray to something unnameable, fall for someone impractical, reacquaint yourself with desire and all her slender hands, bear beauty for as long as you are able, and if you spot a sunning warbler glowing like a prism, remind yourself, Joy is not a trick.
ELISE: Beautiful. I know that's the title of the book. And I could sense the journey, but I am not a poet and I don't read that much poetry. So as you're putting together a collection of poems like this, are they of a theme? I could sense the themes or the recurrent moments throughout, but is there a journey?
JOY: Yeah, it was kind of a strange evolution of this book. It had a totally different title. For a long time it was called New Fruit and it really centered around this idea of exodus, like a Edenic beginning, and then a rupture, and then an exodus into some other new space post rupture, right? And so I wrote this poem instructions for traveling West when I was actually on a really long sojourn myself in the middle of the pandemic, and I wrote it really as like a pep talk to me that was traveling throughout the desert in Sedona and throughout Arizona and just like really trying to get the courage to keep going. I had not traveled solo and I was really nervous to do it, and so beginning to stretch that muscle was really just a practice in finding new things that pushed me a little bit further outside my comfort zone. And so when I decided to write the book, I laid out all of my poems on the floor, and the poem was structured into three categories, right? So Eden, fracture, rupture, which really was symbolic of the pandemic. And then this idea of home or peace at the end. And what I found organizing the book was that wasn't true. Like that wasn't true to the experience.
ELISE: it sounds tidy, though.
JOY: Yeah, you have to be suspicious of anything that's too tidy, right? Because you're like, wait, that's feeling really cute. And I just thought, God, I didn't go through all of this, this big leap out of all of the things I left out of that led to this book. I didn't go through all of that to not tell the truth of that experience. And I didn't wanna write a book that wasn't honest and true. And so the structure of the book came with saying, okay, I don't know if I could promise my readers or even myself at the end of this journey, you'll always find home, or you'll always rest in this place of perfect harmony or peace, but I can promise you at the end, you will know yourself more fully, and you will experience some experience of joy, right, which is why the structure of the book Reoriented to not the original structure, but lines from that poem, almost as guideposts along the journey. So there's literal lines now of that poem that I just read that mark each section of the book and take us through this journey that culminates with joy is not a trick, which I could say is true. More true than my experience than home and peace.
ELISE: Joy Sullivan is not tricking you. No, I love that. And I love that idea of this pattern, the wisdom pattern to quote Richard Rohr of order, disorder, reorder, that you can find throughout our lives and throughout our history, but it's never as tidy. And when you're in the process, when you're in the pattern, which we, I guess, all are every day, but you can't really identify that you're in the pattern until you're on the other side. And It's not very pleasant, right? Part of the disorder is like, you have to let go. It's falling apart.
JOY: Yeah. And that's why, you know, those lines at the beginning are like, commit to the road and the rising loneliness. Like, you just got to know that in this fragmentation, you yourself and that sense of identity is also going to rupture. And that's really disorienting and painful. Like, we never know when we leap. Obviously, now I have the gift of hindsight. I'm so glad I left Ohio when I did, and I moved across country. At that time, I quit my corporate job. I left a partner. I decided to become a full time poet. I mean, things were not exactly feeling stable, right? And in that process, you're like, I might be making the worst decision of my life and I might really hate myself for this. But for me, what was beautiful about that sort of rupture, order, disorder experience is that even if it didn't resolve in a tidy fashion, I gained so much through the experience of choice. Like, Getting to say I as sovereign self choose this path and I will walk it and I've thought a lot about your own book and your own conversation about how women feel often like they have to be good and I think that idea of always having to be good makes us really terrified of making mistakes.
ELISE: Yes. It's a synonym. I would say the way that we culturally construct this idea of goodness is a synonym for perfect and to fail or fall short feels irredeemable, I think for a lot of women, people listening might be like, oh, that sounds extreme, but when you actually look at it over your life, it might not be so extreme, right? When you talk about the loneliness of the road, or the fear, the anxiety, whatever was present with you, what was that?
JOY: For me, it was just this immense sense of like, I had a good life and I was blowing it up. And who was I to pass on a good thing? Like I had worked as a teacher for a long time that felt really unstable in terms of just like the longevity of that career, burnout, making enough to survive. And I had got a job in marketing and that job in corporate America for a long time was like the best thing that had happened to me. And then here I was six years later blowing that all up, it just felt like almost an act of ingratitude and it felt like there was this voice in me like, you're getting too big for your britches. Like, you're pushing a little too far. Like, who are you to say life can get better or should get better, right? And here you have this great man, you know, that you're partnered with who wants to marry you, again like, who are you to say that there could be more? And I think that's one reason that I returned so much to this idea of desire and appetite in the book, which is like, what if I let myself just like really yearn or desire something bigger? And it didn't have to mean exactly what you were beginning to unpack, like it didn't have to mean something immoral or unsatiated about me. It could just be really human and it could be really expansive.
ELISE: I just opened the book hoping to find a poem, and I opened to that poem. So I feel like I need you to read this next, which is page 63. Eden.
JOY: Yeah. So this is Eden. " He said, if you leave me, I'll go hungry. Above them, the moon paled and held its breath. She said, come with me. It will be easy in the dark. He said, it isn't the right time. She said, I'm 100 years old and I'm tired. The grass began to slither. He said, the crops will fail. The animals run wild. She said, my body will be the harvest. She flexed the sentence like a muscle. The tree panted and sighed. He said, I'm afraid. She made a web out of her hands and caught his face. She said, I'll go first.
ELISE: Chills. So, Eve and Eden, obviously central figures in this book, and fascinating that you are the child of medical missionaries. And, so tell us about that. You grew up in East Africa?
JOY: Central African Republic and before that, Haiti and before that Quebec for language studies. So my parents had really felt sort of a francophone trajectory in terms of fields and areas where they knew they could speak the language. So most of my real memories as a child begin in CAR central African Republic. And my parents were evangelical missionaries, and my dad was a general surgeon. So religion and the Eve story was a really big part of my psyche and I've been fascinated that even women who aren't necessarily raised in such maybe intense religious upbringings, that story of Eve and constraint and access to knowledge, that all permeates, right? It's just sort of a cultural. understanding of like, well, a woman did something she wasn't supposed to, and you know, humanity collapsed. And then we're like, why are women afraid to fail? Like, it's just so funny to me how that story permeates a lot of different faith traditions and a lot of different backgrounds. But for me, I really internalized that idea of sort of containment, right? And especially also in that idea of purity culture, which was also so important in my upbringing. There was such a focus on the like symbolic ness of being clean, being pure, again, that idea of being good, being moral. I found when I became a woman was, creating a very small life for myself. And so I almost as an act of survival, I felt that I had to go back and examine that origin myth, which in many ways wasn't origin myth for me, for the woman that I was, and I had to almost rupture or unpack or subvert that. And so the book actually began before any of the other poems, it began with Eve and it began as almost a rewriting of that Genesis story in which I gave Eve omniscience, Adam got just like awkwardness and God got some social anxiety. And that was a story that I could sort of find myself in to invert traditional roles. And there was so much healing that happened in rewriting that story. And also the idea that any narrative, any story we've been given, we can fracture and we can mold into some new narrative, a new story in which allows us more space to live our lives.
ELISE: Yeah. Well, and it's so powerful. I'm not at all a biblical scholar. Obviously, I'm very interested in the way that. religion as culture has seeded itself into our lives and been interpreted over time, but so it's Augustine, right, who is the one who associates Adam and Eve with anxiety about being physically exposed to each other and having lust. And, you know, I read about this in my book, and I'm not the one who made this association, it was someone in the New Yorker and then Ian Kerner talks about it too, who's a PhD in sex, essentially, but that when you go back and you read Confessions, which I've read, he speaks like someone who has, like, out of control sexual urges. He speaks like a sex addict, and that's sort of his origin story in religion. But he's the one who really took that story and made it about lust, and made it about sexual sin, and made it about the covering of private parts. But when you go back to the root of the story, I love the fact that you're reauthoring it, or that we're allowed to do that based on the core text. Right? Like, when you go back to the cortex, like, what do you hear?
JOY: Yeah, I mean, it was tricky for me even to begin the process because you have to go back and you have to look at the literal scriptures and read them. And for me, that was always presented as this patriarchal model and this idea of absolute truth. And so even to look at it and begin to write and to be able to drag something into the existence as if I were God and name it, right? And give it light, I struggled with that almost as an act of rebellion. I started these poems in grad school and that was 10 years ago. And didn't have the courage until now to put them out into the world, but I began to see. And I began to see other people doing this and I saw it even in workshops I was leading, for a long time I was leading workshops for girls who had been survivors of human trafficking and I began to see how they had narratives, stories, names, labels that they had been given within their previous lives, and when they came to the Rehabilitation Center where I was volunteering, a lot of the work we would do would be to take these really terrifying stories and re author them, and to see the girls then get to choose their own names, because they had to use pen names for privacy sake, but to get to pick their own pen name and write it as the author of this story, to get to use the language in which they would recount these events, to get to use the metaphors that they would choose to explain the emotional state that they were left in, it was so powerful and radical. And I began to see that it was like, in some ways more effective than therapy. Talk therapy for these girls was this sort of subversive reauthoring. And we can get really interesting, like, for all of us, what are the stories, who's the voice in our heads that's told us that our sovereignty is lesser than or is inferior than, and then what story can we reauthor to meet that old story and heal it, ultimately.
ELISE: Yeah. As meaning making creatures, this is how we make sense of our lives, and I do it myself, like, the self mythologizing, the finding meaning, reconstruction, if this hadn't happened, then this wouldn't have happened. I try to do it in a positive way, but so many of us are dragging these stories, right? Many of which are not ours and dragging them behind us like, you know, tin cans on the back of a just married car. And someone in my DMS was like, talk to me about the point of therapy, because sometimes I just feel like, what am I doing? Like, what's the point? Right? Of rehashing everything that's gone wrong in my life. I'm like, for me, at least it's about pattern matching and context. And more importantly, like, what are the scripts? Like, what am I listening to? What's happening here? And catching myself, going back to sort of how we opened the conversation, catching myself in moments of like easy deception or trickery, where I'm like, Oh, my mom was the one who implanted that or that must have been... the way that we so easily go to, Then when you stop and you fact check yourself, right? Or you say like, is that what happened? And I don't know. It's the most valuable I thing I think that we can do. And it can be a cage and it can be our freedom, I guess I would say that.
JOY: Yeah, absolutely. And this notion as you were talking, I was thinking about like, yeah, there was so much shame that I experienced around this idea of being a woman raised very heavily in purity culture, very sheltered for the majority of my life until we were evacuated from car and came back and I went to school in the U. S. And then had some semblance of sort of reentry into A lot of pop culture and all of the things that came with acculturation. But this notion of, like whose shame is being perpetuated in these stories of fear? And this idea that shame is often just somebody's fear, somebody else's fear that's, like, doubled up in a big coat. And it's become this monster, this boogeyman that's passed on to other people that we try and terrify them into feeling the same way about whatever it is that we're uncomfortable with. And I thought there's a lot about a lot of the scripts that I've been given as a woman, like this idea of like at 25, you know, that was kind of like the time that I was told that you needed to have settled down. It's just wild to hear me say this now, but like, you should have, you should be married and you should have a house and you should be having kids or be thinking about kids and like none of those things happens in my 20s. None of them happens and not for lack of trying. I mean, I wasn't like emancipated from those ideals yet. I tried and I didn't get those things. And I found that the more I pushed out of those. The more I wasn't sure if those were even things that fit where I wanted, where I even needed. But I always felt like I had to be like a little ashamed that I hadn't gotten those things or those markers or those gold stars. And it was so freeing to finally push out of those scripts far enough that I could feel my own experiences around those ideas. Instead of just internalizing all the things that I thought I was supposed to feel or the grief or the shame I was supposed to experience since I didn't get them.
ELISE: mm that's such a big thing I think that we don't really think about, which is that for so many of us, our lives feel pre-authored, right? Where there's no real imagination required because you're going to follow this protocol and your life is sort of going to end at 30, right? Or that's when, as a woman, at that point, you better be in deep service to the needs of your family. And, I was interviewing or I don't remember if I was on her pod, who was leading the conversation but Kate Kennedy who has this Podcast be there in five. She also grew up in purity culture and she's really funny, but she just in her book she's like I just got to this point, maybe, I don't know, 35, probably 35, where she was like, I realized, I'd never let my imagination extend beyond my early 30s. I'd never thought about it, because I was already in this prescribed path and to do something different Never really occurred to her. And I think that it's so wild when you're off path, right? I sort of stayed on the path, In a way that like the constraint of that is good at quelling some of my own anxiety. It's like you can make yourself bound to the life and then it's like well I can't just get on the road and go. Right?
JOY: Right. Right. And I think about that a lot because, you know, not everybody can do what I did. Like me not getting what I said that I wanted for nearly a decade in my 20s paved the way to the life that I have. So I really leaned into, okay, I didn't get those things. What do I have available? Well, I can quit my corporate job. I can drive west with my, you know, two cats and six plants. And I can just fling myself into this huge gift of the unknown. And I think that's really hard to do when you've had a different life. And I don't want to suggest for folks that like one is better or one is lesser. Like, I think they're both really valid, beautiful paths. And I think they're both feminist paths. I just needed to like, make good on the life that I had and to really make it as juicy and expansive as possible.
ELISE: Will you read for us Giving Notice on page 35?
JOY: Yeah, absolutely.
Am I picking
ELISE: the greatest hits?
JOY: I love it. You're doing a great job. These are the
ELISE: there are so many good ones.
JOY: this is a poem that I literally wrote after giving my own notice in my job from corporate America. And a lot of people don't know about this little piece of context before I read, I was working a really intense job and while I was traveling in Arizona on that six week sojourn working remotely in the pandemic, I had realized that I had developed really extreme kind of a carpal tunnel related nerve damage in my wrists and hands from constantly working on a laptop as a copywriter. I just, I don't know, I got a little taste of sunshine in that six weeks and it really inverted for me what I was going to prioritize and what work felt meaningless and what work felt meaningful in the middle of this global crisis. And did I want to keep breaking my body for work that I wasn't sure I found purposeful. So I wrote giving notice and it's welcome to use it for any resignation letters. It's open content giving notice one day soon. You'll rise from your desk or quietly excuse yourself from the meeting or turn the car around in the middle of the street. Anything might trigger it an open window a sunny day in April. Daffodils panning in a mason jar, call it madness, call it glorious disappearance, call it locomotion. Do what you should have done years ago, let your body out to pasture, fill your calendar with nothing but sky, surrender to the woods, to cicadas and sap beetles, to the moths, the color of memory and dream, wear dusk like an ancient cloak, hurry, There's still time to creature, to pluck all the wild cloudberries and carry them home. Even now you can hear coyotes crying at the canyon's edge. Find your first fang, grow back your hackles and howl. This was always your chorus, the mother tongue, a feral hymn, you know by heart.
ELISE: Beautiful.
JOY: Thank you.
ELISE: So when you teach, or when you work with people who are authoring their own story, who are maybe constrained by nine to five jobs or trauma or whatever it may be, like, what is the crack in the door look like of, oh, my life could be maybe different?
JOY: Well, I think I could answer that question a couple of different ways. If we're talking specifically about writing, like, the poem or the page has been home. Like, as somebody who can't ever define home, I've moved so much, like, I've always found the sacredness of the page, that space that I can inhabit fully. But it's also been a space of great exploration and flinging like I say to my students, leaping on the page is how you begin to take leaps in your own life. And, you know, you have to kind of be careful what you write down because that performs this beautiful, strange, terrifying alchemy of what your life can shift into.
And I think even the naming of desire and the quietude that comes with writing and getting really in touch. Maya Angelou has this beautiful quote. That she was asked, you know, can anyone be a writer or poet? And she says, I think any anyone can be. I'm not sure if anyone will be. You have to have sharp eyes and ears and not be afraid of being human. And I think it's like that getting in touch with really what is the ache of being human? What is the ache of being alive? What is that instinct that might be asking me to do something really unadvisable or radical or leap outside the bounds of my own life? And that's the space by which I think we move forward in life. And that's the space in which I think we move forward honestly on the page and in writing. And I tell people, you know, what is it that you want to explore in your writing? Like the page is this beautiful opportunity to start taking some big risks, whether it's persona poetry, where you're literally writing in a different voice, or you're naming something that cannot be held in any any other space available to you or you're testing out just an idea that you're not ready to say out loud. The page is this really beautiful field that gives us a lot of courage to then apply that, I think, to our actual lives. And I mean, what's terrifying is that I wrote instructions for traveling west as a poem, and 40 years later, I sold my house and left my relationship and was driving cross country.
ELISE: Watch out.
JOY: yeah, write holy fear, friend, because it's powerful and it's life changing, but it certainly can't be taken lightly. It's beautiful in that way.
ELISE: Well, I think it's the primary way to reveal the unconscious to ourselves. And for me at least, and write in a different space, but it's the only way that I figured out what I'm up to is by working it out on the page and letting it come out of me rather than trying to sort of keep it in my mind as a giant Gordian knot to untangle, and as you start writing, or me, like, writing newsletters, or books, or making videos, it's how you reveal yourself to yourself in some ways and then when you look back, you're like, Oh, I understand what I'm doing here, but it's not conscious, right?
JOY: Totally. I mean, it reminds me of in grad school, I was writing all these really sexy poems and I had just this amazing professor she was like, you know, Joy, you really write a lot about sex and desire. And I was like, Oh, yes, because I've been raised in purity culture, and I have never had the space in my own life or the courage in my own life to do any of these things. So I wrote about them all the time. And I'm so grateful, Kathy Wagner for that professor, because she said, That's exactly what you should be doing. Like let the page be your haven where you work out all of these things so that when you need to translate them into, to real life, you can do that. But I just remember that like exploration of being able to be really sexy and beautiful and desire and to want to get to put that on the page first before I even had the courage to do any of that in my real life as I was exiting evangelicalism.
ELISE: So interesting, you know, listening to that too, because so much in my book, I wrote about sexual trauma, for example, that I've never really even talked to my therapist about. And yet, somehow it was easier for me to work it out in my book, and with Whit, our common editor, and deliver it to the world. Like it was easier somehow to do that, to make a public confession on the page, than to process it with my therapist, which I think about it a lot, because I'm like, oh, right, I forget that anyone who's read my book knows that story about me, knows a lot about me. But it doesn't feel that way. It still feels very personal. So in the process, how do you think of yourself now in the context of faith and religion? And I would separate them. I know for many people they're not separated, but how do you feel about that now? And what do you feel like you're bringing through?
JOY: So much of it's tied to childhood. And for me, there was this big fracture in my own childhood because we were evacuated in 1996 because of conflict and warfare in CAR and we literally left everything we owned and flew to Ohio, you know, like, just like it's such a discrepancy between worlds. And I think that was also one of the first sort of fractures in my faith tradition of this, you know, you're moving through this place where you've been sort of told that you're there as. special, anointed, chosen, you're bringing you know, this very problematic language that's used. And then I had to reinvent and I was in that faith tradition for a really long time. I think I now I'm just very skeptical of certainty on any level, like any kind of dogma. And sometimes I see people who are like, Oh, I don't believe in anything with a certain level of certainty. I'm like, well, that's great. But my posture is always going to be one of humility, just because that feels the best to me. I always am going to say that I don't know. And that was even a very transversal, transgressive thing to say as a child, like, I don't know. I don't know what the truth is. To me, that feels the most comfortable to say anything as possible. When people tell me ghost stories, I believe them. When they tell me experiences of seeing angels, I believe them. When they tell me they've never had a spiritual experience, I believe them. And so for me, I am able to give the generosity of believing Folks who tell and share with me the gift of their spiritual experiences, but also for myself to like rest in that posture of like, I don't know, and I don't have to know, but I'm also totally willing to be surprised at any turn. And on multiple psychedelic trips have been surprised at what else could be out there. So for me, that's an exciting posture to be, and it's pretty radical and revolutionary to what I grew up with.
ELISE: Yeah. I feel like, Richard Rohr has this amazing line. I'm a Richard Rohr stan, if you can't tell where he says that the opposite of certainty isn't doubt, it's faith. I'm probably getting this wrong, but essentially it's the ability to rest in the unknowing is faith and the ability to let go of all certainty about everything is the most radical act of faith. And I try to stay there if I can, similar to you, in part because people who are atheists or are hardcore materialists or, you know, scientism is its own type of religion. So is atheism. To me can feel as fundamental as any extreme religion where it's like, you're not going to open the door. Like there's no crack in that armor and it feels, not to judge the atheists amongst us, but I also am like, God, that would be a terrifying way to live. I I don't have the courage for certainty. I really have the courage for faith and to hope that there's, as we started the conversation, that there is some unfolding or some story that's holding us together that is a pattern that we can recognize if we look closely enough. It might not be what we would choose, but that there is some underlying order.
JOY: Yeah.
ELISE: That we can touch, sometimes.
JOY: think that's so beautifully said, because it just allows for the possibility of like, God, I don't have to have it all figured out. And I just love the idea of being surprised. Like, I remember when I was driving once with coworkers, and there was a girl had been raised Pentecostal, and she was very stressed to find out that I, you know, considered myself agnostic. And she decided to ask me about this in the car with coworkers. And I was like, Sitting between my creative director who was an atheist and this girl who was like a hardcore Pentecostal Christian and she said, well, what do you think happens after we die? And I was just like, Oh my God, we're not stopping anytime soon. How do I answer this? And I just said, the first thing I could think of was, you know, all I know is that life has surprised me so much in ways that I could never have imagined or predicted or known or foreseen, I have no reason to think that death won't also totally surprise me in so many ways. And I got out of the car unscathed. So that has always been what I kind of held to as like always wanting to have a posture of allowing mystery and also just this like radical hope that I'll get surprised along the way.
ELISE: Yeah. Well, it goes too to that idea of like how so many of us have committed to the Mad Lib of life, right? Or choose your own adventure in some limited way, or where you're constrained to the story and we know how the story ends. And like, all we know is that we're all going to die. No one has managed at this point to live forever. I know there are many men in the world working on this problem. I'm very happy for them. It's funny, I saw something, I think it was Yuval Noel Harari, but he was saying like absent death, like the level of anxiety would just be so unbearable. Because if you could engineer a way to be here forever, barring some sort of massive accident, wouldn't you live your whole life in fear of an accident? Similarly, it's like, I hope death is shocking and exciting.
JOY: Yeah.
ELISE: And if it's not, it's not, Joy.
JOY: Yeah, I won't...
ELISE: then you're dead.
JOY: Yeah, you won't be around to complain about it.
ELISE: I hope it's a wild ride. Oh, there's so many good poems. Let's do our last sprint. Well, it's a waltz. It's not a sprint. Will you read Want on 67?
JOY: Yes, absolutely. All right. This is one of the first poems that really like My DM is just filled up with women saying, here's what I want. And that's a fun thing to wake up to every morning to just hear a litany of what women want out there. This is a short poem called Want. " They say men want freedom and girls want love. But I've seen women leave lovers and country and kingdoms of comfort just for the chance to sleep unbothered, to bathe unwatched, to waltz around apartments all their own, wearing nothing but lipstick, the color of desire."
ELISE: So beautiful. What do women tell you that they want?
JOY: My God, women want the most incredible things. Women want to get a little high and have their boyfriends come over and make love to them. That's one that I got that I was just like, that's amazing. One woman wants burnt orange sheets for her bedroom. One woman wants just one goddamn hour where she can be by herself. It's so beautiful to hear the impossibly poignant and tender things that women actually want. And in writing that poem, What I heard so much is women ultimately across the board want to exist sort of unwatched or unobserved, like fully in their humanity. They just want to like move in the world comfortably without feeling like they're either the object of critique, judgment or constant observation or constant, like, needing to perform some kind of, you know, need meeting for either children or partners. And so that's really, when I released that poem, I also asked women, you know, what is it that you want? And that's where I got these beautiful replies, which was so exciting to read.
ELISE: That's beautiful. I think too, that idea of being not observed. I think for me when I think about that, because I do get to spend a lot of time alone in the corner of my bedroom working, which is wonderful. But for me, I'm assuming that other women can relate to this, but I also feel so watched by myself. I don't know if that's carried across people, that everyone has that level of self consciousness or that inner voice of judgment, but that's An eye that I would like to close and turn down the volume on that as well.
JOY: Yeah, and how we escape that, because so much of that is internalized voices that I think even when people are giving us validation or affirmation, like, closing that last eye, you said, or turning down that voice, especially to begin something like writing or an artistic or creative practice, like, that's the voice that it's the hardest to close, definitely struggle with that.
ELISE: And I think it's what keeps so many women out of our bodies too, or keeps us separate, right? Is this like watchfulness, this policing of our own behavior, for me, the most pernicious is really like policing of my own thoughts, you know, where I can think something that's unkind about someone. And be ruthless, you know, there's no action, it's fleeting, and yet I feel like women in particular are like intentful in our holding ourselves accountable for perfect thoughts as well as perfect actions.
JOY: Absolutely. I mean, I feel like this is like the entirety of my conversations with my therapist and she's like, you know, joy, you have not transgressed. You haven't even transgressed yet. You've just had the thought and you're still sort of like, totally verklempt because you've had the thought or you've had the feeling and I have this poem in the book called culpable where I talk about how that sort of always policing the thought, always policing the pre action, you know, I think it's another reason it keeps women really contained, because it's that idea, for me, personally, it was that idea of sin, and thoughts are sin, right, in the tradition I was raised in. So if you think thought, it's as if you've committed it, which, you know, here's a therapy now, we know that they're really different. And like everyone has thoughts, but for a long time, that idea of culpability and also having two sisters and a mom, it was like, I needed to ask permission or forgiveness for almost every choice I made, especially, you know, when I was younger and through my 20s, and then for me to start taking really risky moves that could be mistakes, or that could actually be wrong, or somebody out there for Could think was immoral, especially when it came to dating or relationships or being sexually active. I mean, those are things that you are drawing real lines in the sand and saying, I'm now stepping over and making that decision. It's scary to do that as a woman because you don't want to be culpable.
ELISE: Yeah. And I think for women, too, in the public eye, again, Richard Rohr talks about orthopraxy and this idea of it's actually really about right action and how are you showing up in the world. That's the only thing that matters. Like, are you actively harming people or are you serving love, kindness, whatever it may be. But for women, I think we get tripped up internally and then we're policed about this in public for, again, thoughts. I think that's our own internal censorship, and then things that we might say. And men can transgress across all three. And there are no repercussions. Whereas women, it's like, you can say something that's off, or that's insensitive, or people could say is like problematic or hurtful or whatever. And that's enough. That's enough, Joy. I hope, in time we give ourselves and each other more freedom, but we have a lot of work to do as a culture.
JOY: Yeah, you know, there's a poem in the book called comment section, which just talks about just like all the reactions that people have to things that I write as a woman. And it does feel gendered. I don't feel weird saying that it's a very gendered experience being a woman on the internet and sort of the way we love to scapegoat women for a whole host of experiences and just anything that people could perceive could be a mess up or a mistake or not ideal. People love to let a woman on the internet know and this idea of like, what is women's responsibility to hold all that? And then like, also, it's not always just men, like it's women, you know, you say you want to be thinner online, and you say, you don't like something about your face. And, you know, your DMS are so Swarmed with women being like, just love yourself, you idiot. And there's just this like intense pressure to also get self love right, to get feminism right, that I think really can hurt women in their own process of trying to like, not feel so lonely in this experience we all have of trying to be alive and make it through life of like, you also have to get emancipation right from patriarchy. You have to get feminism perfectly. You have to get self love perfectly. And if you admit that you're struggling in some way, then you're not living it up. And we talk about just alternate ages. I think that can be a cage to where women hold each other now to some standard of what it is to live liberated that's really also not realistic.
ELISE: No. And we're in the middle of like a cultural moment, which is relevant for me as a podcast host where Andrew Huberman, there's a New York mag profile about, I would say quite immoral action against a number of women. And, Then there was a story in the Guardian about Jay Shetty and his background not quite coordinating with the story that he's told about who he is and I was thinking about that and watching as they don't acknowledge it and are moving forward because a man in my Instagram was like what do we give them when they repent or I mean, he wasn't using religious language, but like, what does it look like to have sort of reconciliation? I was like, well, we don't know what that looks like, because no man ever really takes accountability in a public sphere in this way. And like, they'll be fine. Like, nobody worry, they're going to be fine. Nobody will remember this. And then I was thinking about, in contrast, you know, and it's a kind of a tricky example, but that sort of makes a good, this woman named Rachel Hollis, who might be familiar to you, because I feel like she's also from the evangelical tradition and the Girl Wash Your Face and like, huge podcast and she during COVID made a really insensitive comment I don't know if it was on a live Zoom, I'm not a follower of Rachel Hollis's, but I just remember seeing it, she made a comment about how a woman, like, oh, she cleans my toilets or something like that, something vile, it was not good, not defending it, but I'm not gonna judge, but the vitriol...
JOY: unmatched.
ELISE: Unmatched, and I feel like she's kind of disappeared. I know she still has a podcast, but like, that was banishment, from what I can tell. Or at least, like, a severe punishing. And for saying something, again, unkind, I get it, but then to watch that versus like actual deception as action is wild, I think, and a good example of like, I don't know how to feel about any of this and the personal and the professional and the Venn diagram of those two, but I think you sort of are who you are. Anyway, I don't know why I took us there, but I was thinking about it this morning where I was like, it's pretty wild. The outsized, the huge response to her, and I think she did take accountability or apologized and tried to repair. I don't know.
JOY: I see it too. It actually, I think it's an incredible way to silence women, because I'm thinking of a specific author and influencer who made a mistake, did something wrong, later took full accountability for it. It was an action that wasn't ideal. It was kind of deception via omission and took full responsibility for it and lived with almost two years with death threats to her for that. Whole reddits that were Just dedicated to hating this woman. And it's just unbelievable to me. Like, what more do we want this woman to do? She has owned fully in integrity that she made a mistake that she should have been more honest about something publicly, but then it feels like it becomes this, like extremely punitive thing where we are all working out our own consciousness, but we're using the symbol of the woman. Yeah. Yeah.
ELISE: And like, she is not going to get away with this because I would not get away with it. I don't know exactly what's at play. And then this idea again of perfection. And if you do not uphold the standard, we will destroy you.
JOY: we'll literally kill
ELISE: kill you.
JOY: Yeah. I'm reminded briefly of a story that was at the same time that I was working with those girls who had been trafficked and doing trauma informed workshops. I applied for a technology grant and I really wanted the girls to have Google Chromebooks to write on because that's how I write. And so I thought this is going to be so great. They can print their poems off. It's going to be amazing. And I got a lot of money, a couple thousand dollars from the technology grant to get these Chromebooks. And when I brought the Chromebooks to the girls, they hated them. They were like super weirded out by them. Most of the girls were young, 12 to 16, and they just didn't like the Chromebooks and they wanted Things to color with and markers and they wanted more books of poetry and we just needed the money for different things. We especially needed brownies, which was like the universal icebreaker. And I remember being so just like unbelievably stressed that I had gotten this grant. I'd gotten this money and I'd gotten it for the wrong thing. I'd made this really bad miscalculation. And so I remember going back to the founder of the organization that gave me the grant. And I said, look, I have to return all this money because the girls aren't using the phone books. They don't want them and we need the money for something else. We need it for brownies. And I just, I'll never forget what she said to me. It was really healing, honestly, she said, you know, women feel like they can't fail. They can't make a mistake or misjudgment or they can't just actually do something wrong, like actually make a mistake, do something they wish they hadn't done. They feel like they can't do that. And that kind of pressure limits them in all aspects of their life. personally, creatively, professionally. And she said, you have to be able to fail sometimes and come back from a failure. And she said, I'm going to ask you to do something hard, she said, I'm going to ask you to keep the money and I want you to use it for art supplies, books, and buy those damn brownies. And that's what I did. She said, but at the end of the day, you got to get those girls to keep writing because I believe in it and it doesn't have to happen on our Chromebooks. And so that's what I ended up doing. I ended up returning the Chromebooks and using the money to just buy what we actually needed. And I tell myself that when I'm in a place where I just made an accidental mistake, or I've actually done something that I wish I hadn't done, I say, you know what Joy? Just go buy the damn brownies and keep going, you know.
ELISE: On that note, buy the brownies, travel west, and we'll see you on the other side.
Instructions for Traveling West, poems by Joy Sullivan are beautiful, it’s a slightly book, perfect for one little snack a day. Here is her poem “Even If”: Even if foolhardy / ill-advised, or half-mad. / Even if you do not yet / understand your own / reasons and the waves / are at your throat. Even if / leaving guts your heart / to its last / thrumming fiber. / Even still, go / and let this life eat you / to the bone. I’ll see you next week.
