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Welcome to Stuff I Learned Yesterday! My name is Emilee O’Leary and this summer marked my first ever trip to the beautiful Rocky Mountains. I got to spend a week exploring the high-altitudes of Colorado with a couple of my best friends and now finally understand, first hand, why mountains are so breathtaking. This is just one of the many reasons I have for believing that if you aren’t learning, you aren’t living. In today’s installment of Stuff I Learned Yesterday, I’m excited to share the launching point of learning to feel like myself.
Fun Fact
Today’s fun fact is about the poet e.e. cummings. If you’ve never heard the name, or if you have heard it but wouldn’t really know him from Dr. Seuss, this poet is most distinguishable by his often excessive use of lower casing and sparing use of spaces around punctuation. This convention doesn’t really have a name, but the methodology is in the style of avant-garde, which basically just refers to an art form that pushes the boundaries of what is normal. One of my poetry teachers in college called it aesthetic innovation, and I always really liked that.
His real name is Edward Estlin Cummings. He was born in 1894 in Cambridge, MA, attended Harvard, enlisted to serve in World War I, and after publishing a healthy variety of plays and poetry collections, died in 1962 from a stroke. He wrote one of my all-time favorite poems entitled I Carry Your Heart With Me.
I bring up this poet because I want to tell you about a letter he wrote in response to a high school newspaper editor in 1955. This editor asked e.e. cummings how he might become a poet and, in response, Cummings wrote a very profound, albeit a very intimidating, letter about becoming a poet.
Poetry is feeling, Cummings writes in this letter. Almost anybody can learn to think or believe or know, but not a single human being can be taught to feel. He posits this idea that whenever you think or believe or know, you are a lot of different people. But when you feel, you are nobody but yourself.
The following is the quote I based this episode off of: To be nobody-but-yourself — in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else — means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight; and never stop fighting.
The whole letter is quite extraordinary and I’d encourage you to look it up sometime if it sounds interesting to you. Cummings wasn’t a perfect person, he was actually smothered in a lot of controversy, and sometimes it seemed like he focused on all the wrong things in life. But from a very early age he desired strength to be his best self, his most truest self. It’s interesting to me because there are a lot of people we know, personally, who we look at and say, I don’t agree with you or with your lifestyle, but I respect that you pursue what you believe is right regardless of what anyone else says. I get that vibe from Cummings when I read his poetry and it is inspirational.
Be Nobody But Yourself
When I first heard this quote from e.e. cummings, I was struck by the simplicity of the notion that to be oneself is, in fact, a battle. There is an implicit burden attached to that notion that one must fight in the battle, one must be an active participant.
I believe the most profound lie I listened to while learning how to be myself was this notion that in this process I also had to know myself. Only through deep reflection and analysis would I ever understand why I am the way I am. And this, more or less, is true. However, it is not a prerequisite for being oneself.
In the mind of e.e. cummings, being oneself requires feeling. But it doesn’t mean that we feel in order to be ourselves, but that we are most ourselves when we feel.
That’s all the poetry and philosophy I’ll make you endure in this episode, I swear. I am actually leading into a story. An origin story, of sorts.
My involvement with Golden Spiral Media began before it was even called Golden Spiral Media. Before GSM had a podcast for every superhero or sci-fi show. I got on board with The Fringe Podcast when Fringe was nearing the end of its second season. I was a lurker and a minimal contributor for a couple years, until I discovered a reason to speak up and get involved with the discussion. I connected with Fringe’s final season on a new level and because it wasn’t being received very well by fans, I wanted to step in and defend it by diving deeper into the characters and their motivations.
Because I stepped in and contributed, I connected with a ton of people in the community and began to feel a sense of camaraderie with many of them. Clint and Darrell announced that they were going to host a Fringe Finale party in Oklahoma, where they lived, and wanted any Fringe fans to come join in the fun.
For a while, it didn’t even strike me as something I could do. Not because it wasn’t interesting, not because I couldn’t make it work, but because… I don’t know, I just didn’t do stuff like that. I didn’t just go to Oklahoma for the weekend for something like a Fringe finale party. I might be 26, living on my own, holding a full-time job, but… come on, I still needed permission. Right?
I don’t really know how to explain it, other than one day I woke up, was going about my everyday, pretty normal life, when I realized: there was no reason I couldn’t go to this party. I didn’t need anyone’s permission. I wanted to meet Clint and Darrell and people with names like Hydra Island, Xerophytes, Boston Red Vines, Zeppelin Driver, and YogaBon.
And so I did it. I registered. I planned. I drove. I went to the party. The rest is, quite literally, history. I found an incredible mentor in Darrell. I made friends with whom I still travel with on occasion. I discovered a new hobby in becoming a podcaster, myself.
All of those things are great, and I can’t imagine my life without each of them now. But the most significant outcome of attending the Fringe Finale party was that I started to feel like myself. I did something that was very truly something I wanted to do, not something I was doing for someone else or because I thought it was the right thing to do. I gave myself permission to do it and, as a result, I found a new freedom to be myself.
Here’s what I learned.
Some people just have the inherent ability to know this seemingly obvious truth. For me, I really needed to experience what that freedom felt like, and I really needed to go after it, to want it for myself, before everything clicked for me.
Looking back on the last 30 years, I can see myself trying to fit in by saying things I wouldn’t say, do things I wouldn’t do, wear things I wouldn’t wear. But I can also see myself sticking to my own moral compass when pushed, laughing at what I thought was funny, hanging out with the people I liked, and doing the things I wanted to do. It has been a funny combination of trying to manage both states of being.
Attending the Fringe Finale party totally released me from that dualistic mode of living. I really didn’t connected it all until I came across this letter written by e.e. cummings, the one I shared in my fun fact, a couple years ago. To be nobody-but-yourself, in a world which is doing its best to make you everyone else, means to fight the hardest battle any of us might fight. Our culture’s exponentially growing obsession with technology and its tight coupling to celebrity and recognition simultaneously tells us to conform while implying that unless we are different and have something that sets us apart from the crowd we will never gain what they tell us is most important.
Resistance is not a passive activity. It’s not just barricading the doors or refusing to comply with the pressure coming from the outside. When the body resists an infection, the immune system uses its complex network of cells, signals, and organs to recognize the invasion and send the right blood cells to attack the germs.
Ultimately, by giving myself permission to simply go to a party where a bunch of people were going to geek out over a television show, I found the ability to resist the cultural infection of conformity. I learned that it didn’t have to be both ways, that I didn’t have to conform and find ways to be myself, because just by being myself I found an incredible network of people who, in turn, help me to fight off that same infection.
So my encouragement to you is to fight the battle for your identity by building up an immunity! Sometimes our culture will throw different strains of the same virus at us. And we have to keep enhancing our immune system by reacting to these different strains. My immunity is reinforced by you all. Chances are, if you are listening to this, you are part of my immune system. I’m sorry it’s taken so long for me to tell you.
My name is Emilee O’Leary, and this has been Stuff I Learned Yesterday.
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