Jennifer Hopkins

I.

This is the story about the time that I healed.

Or the time that I continued to redefine my ways of thinking.

I stopped writing when I stopped feeling inspired, this was in conjunct with the pressures of the “Real World” and giving my time up to my full time job, maintaining a constant routine and loosing the chaos of the flexibility of a life outside of 9–5. There used the time to exist, or just breathe and express that chaos.

Someone intelligent, that inspires me, but yet I forget to recall their name said that although most of us with access to read this have fairly well-off lives… we can eat well, get a job, have a roof over our head and access to clean water — exist in a state of yearning and sacrificing for the future rather than existing truly in the present.

What does this fundamental fact of working a job, having a hobby, skill or passion, that takes up most of life, in order to receive something in return … like a paycheck or monetary sustenance just to make sure you can later experience happiness or joy or just to survive.

How often are we truly able to connect with ourselves and others - including the fundamental flow of life that includes pain and joy…

For the sake of our present moment, do we trade for the comforts and luxuries of modern society? 

A constant state of working now, so something can get done in the future. A disconnect — a fundamental flush of true potential to exist within the moment that may give us truth.

But yes, it is possible to combine your work with what allows you to exist in the present moment. Or you can find moments of laughter, joy, compassion, nature and other things that allow you to really understand.

I feel - there is much disconnect in society, and often within ourselves.

II.

The moment I stopped making time for my writing was the moment that I felt a disconnect with my true nature and the truth of my existence. The one thing that allows me to rip and tear the present moment to shreds — the one that allows me to incessantly let the words flow from my fingertips without a conscious awareness — without my ego stepping through — a literal purging of my entire thought-out existence.

Where would i be without my words? Dead, or at least living and not present?

Where would I be without this passion that runs through my veins for the existence in what matters here and now?

Is love an illusion or are we disconnected from our truth?

Where can I find the humanity in the moments of stillness, and how can i become more of myself.

III.

We understand sacrifice when we’re challenged by life’s circumstances to give up a valued concept, thing, or our time in order to be successful, help the people we love or make a positive difference. In the past, I’ve felt disconnected from the root of my first and early-life sacrifices.

Sure. I learned to sacrifice my time, budget, and choice of friendships in lieu of loneliness. I learned to sacrifice my time and energy to meet basic human needs for connection and survival. This sacrifice was my college experience.

In the long run, it resulted in a positive: An on-campus job where I learned how to personal train, and where I invested my free time into moving my body, fighting my stress, and coping with what felt like lingering feelings of depression and anxiety. When really, it was just the harsher aspects of my reality that let me know that I wasn’t as privileged as I use to be and that things had changed for myself and my family in terms of finances.

But then again, I remind myself that I’ve always known financial struggle. I’ve only ever known how to keep my head up for myself, how to take care of my mother mentally and emotionally, and how to draw firm boundaries between myself and my family so that their problems don’t overwhelm me. If I had a therapist, I already know what she would say regarding my problems in relationships.

For so long, I was so unaware of this and who I had become. Unaware of my struggles, forgotten in the past as I wanted to dump everything harsh about my life behind me as a naive and inexperienced eighteen-year-old. Sometimes I look back at the girl who arrived at college as someone more mature than the girl tested later on. Somehow parts of her remained, parts of her failed, and parts of her succeeded.

Towards the end, she came out as someone who was reacquainted with the more harsh realities of her life. There is not a need for pitty or comparison. To think that my problems exist and that yours don’t. There is no shame in where you come from, it is apart of who you are, but it is not your definition.

I believe that absolutely everyone should be able to cultivate positive relationships, to find true love in what they love: a career, in a partner, or both. I no longer think that these two things are mutually exclusive, as I used to believe. It felt like love came at a sacrifice in my life.

One love of a career needed to be separate from one love in romantic partnerships. It’s not enough to say, “balance,” but it is enough to not lose yourself in either of the two. It’s enough to have separation. To answer, this is what I do, but this is not who I am. He is who I love, but he is not who I am.

I felt like I had become the person that I was with. It felt like the qualities that I admired in them were the ones that I thought that I lacked. I will always believe in love no matter what, but now I am more aware of the likely possibility that emotions can fool us. They can allow us to repeat the unhealthy patterns that set us dead in our ways.

They say, take care of this person. Fix this person. Help this person. They’ll become better. They’ll be better. They’ll be who you want them to be, keep trying. These whispers, and these lies that your emotions tell you, are only a representation of experience without the brain compartmentalizing it as a pre-conditioned and learned experience.

We all go through life learning and believing that we need to make sacrifices in love to be happy. The moral is that no matter what, the sacrifices that you make should never be at the sake of lowering your bar of standards or your bar of happiness, or your bar of quality to maintain that person in your life.

We owe it to ourselves to understand that material wealth does not go as far as spiritual wealth. To maintain a balanced, aware, and insightful inner life is something that we should try to strive for every day, until we get better, until we improve in the ways we wish materially. Until we learn ourselves.

My first chapbook of poetry New Dust is a success! Mostly because I had fun in the process of creating each of the individual copies. These little Astro-children of mine – each rocky planet atop of the covers is uniquely different as I used a combination of watercolor and oil paint to construct a universe that gives a home to my sometimes bending and abstract wording. I’d rather the work speak for itself (which, if you had me speak on it i’d say nothing but these little babies need to be workshopped more!) Here’s a peek at one of my favorites from the book!

UNDERSTANDING PRESCRIPTIVISM AND LANGUAGE HISTORY

from the roots of the English language to the present day

April 24th, 2019

   The book “Fixing English: Prescriptivism and Language History” is a review of what it means to have a grasp of understanding and usage of the English language put into a relevant historical context. Written by Anne Curzan, most of the book’s tone focuses on describing prescriptivism in an informative based tone that would be suggested for scholars or people trying to use the English language in the field of their profession. For instance, this is a great choice if you are a writer, teacher, editor, or someone in the field that encourages a historical understanding of the practical use of the English language.

   Fixing English has seven chapters, in which prescriptivism is defined and introduced in the first. The book aims to explain that a variety of language is best to be used as well as encouraging, further in the book, a variety in how we understand how to use this language. However, in the additional aspects to variety, the book foremost sets up the application of prescriptivism as the rules/guidelines for the English language. Enforcing that we should understand it’s usage in a certain definitive way in which is correct and can be malleable within these guidelines.

   For instance, there is the application of understanding the political correctness of words, which is especially important if you plan to write for a publication or in journalism. The writer needs to have an appropriate understanding of where words come from, what their meaning entails, and how it can affect the overall tone and the influence of the piece. It is not as much as what you say or write, more than it is the effect in how we come to understand these words in their usage. The book brings up an example of presidents, like George Bush, using words that are not defined in the dictionary and how it influences public usage of this word that is not a word, as well as our consideration to how we understand the influence of people in power and how much they are able to sway public opinion, and in result their use of the English language should be perfected.

   Relatively speaking this book socially pinpoints the importance of understanding sexist language and the now ever apparent importance of gendered words and pronouns. These conversations of what to use, when to use it, and how to address other people are the conversations that need to be happening. Because of this book, we are encouraged to think beyond just referring to someone as “they” in a neutral tone. Using these words in daily life and understanding a pronoun’s ability to influence how people who are not exposed to the diversity and variety of the ever-changing social opinion and eye, to think differently about how others’ choose to live their lives, and why they should be entitled to defining their own identity.

   In giving these guidelines and rules for prescriptivism there is almost more of a sense of freedom that the writer is able to gain from the use of the English language. We have mostly an explanation of the things that often matter and should be talked about presented in this book. Whether it is the usage of words in relation to how they affect society, and how we can come to understand them and further the historical significance of certain words. How the English language will continue to change and adapt to how we function as a society?

2017: Florida State University 

Alabama’s Highest Peak: 

  “Slant Six” was an experience that shed a new light on how I can come to understand poetry as a growing student. I think most of all that this book was something that intrigued me from the beginning. Its front cover art work pulled me aside in the Barnes and Nobel shelves as I imagined it’s words to present a mysterious piece or a puzzle, that would lead me or take me on a guided journey. I never expected this journey to be the embodiment of what I believe is the 2014 stereotypical life of a middle-aged adult woman in America.

   There are significant details that she incorporates in the book that are so truly dark that they are humorous with respect. It’s something that we all can recognize, like the wound up woman in her mini-van waiting to pick up her kids, cutting people off in traffic, and simultaneously existing to preach things like kindness in the poem “Machines.” It is like she theoretically pulled together all of the stereotypes that we are aware of and somehow surpass to find depth in through our day to day existence.

   I have to say that content wise, this book is authentically American in how it calls out the trials and tribulations of our day to day experience. Personally, I have always said I will never be the mom in the mini-van, that I refuse to find myself falling into that “Slant Six”, so immediately I felt a personal connection to what this book tries to grapple with.

   Stylistically, of the poetry books that I’ve read this one exemplifies a range of diversity. I am never bored as I am not reading the same type of poem over and over. I am excited by the turns of the pages in how some of the spaces create pauses in short images, and others provide lengthy narratives. Even in the poem “Victoria Room” the vibrancy of color and images sets the scene and tone in a way that makes me feel, somehow, what it might be to be a woman in America in this room.

   However, her technique does not break any stylistic barriers. I do think that she does an exceptional job at painting specific pictures by crafting a book along the lines of images and perspectives in which offer a layered sense of honesty rather than judgment and apprehension in regards to what may be wronged in our society.

   She presents these things in a darkened tone in which is honest and accepting the things that are mundane. She seems to address what it is like to find yourself in the “middle” of America. From the consistent images that she paints throughout the book to the arrangement of the poems that breeze over love, then over to potatoes, and to the immigrant, to domesticity, Victoria Secret, lighthouses, and socialite parties. There is a tone that is gently navigating me through the things that seem inevitable, but not so much ambivalent. She has a way of drawing our attention to stereotypes that not so much need to be addressed, but can be addressed through of our awareness anyway. It is not like she is directly calling out people, their problems, or America in general. It is more so that she is empathizing with how we are, what we have become, and what it may mean to continue going this way.

   It doesn’t so much come to a conclusion much as it does navigate us in a way, just like the image on the cover suggests.

   Towards the end of the book, I read that Belieu spent time teaching at Florida State University and that she lived in Tallahassee during this time. I was able to pinpoint my familiarity with this when she spoke about places in Florida that I could recognize like “the man from north Florida” and how she talks about political biases from people in Miami, it gently suggested to me the stereotypes that my Cuban friends from Miami tell me are the truth about how people who have been affected by their culture come to view political parties in America, and none of that is wrong, more than it is right in their own perspective of things. This adds an element that reinforces the uniqueness in each of our perspectives.

   There were portions in the book that little tiny, volume icons were used. This seemed to be a unique way to emphasize the volume in which she wanted her words to speak for her. It was like after every icon that her paragraphs became increasingly more loud in tone, solely because of the icon, and not because of what was said. I read these with more quickness, urgency, and attention than I would have if the icons were not included. This is another unique technique that again reinforces her message and the consistency of the book.

   I do not feel as if I have enough room to critique the book in a poetic way. As a writer, I enjoyed picking up on how she provided stylistic, somewhat comical, yet serious techniques to approach the topic of navigating the mundane aspects of life in America. It made me feel a sense of home in the book, and a sense of narrative that I am now able to possibly understand my words with. I am a growing writer, and I have to say that this book makes me feel more confident in the narrative ability to paint a picture somewhere because of it’s inherent directness and urgency. Her words are as explicit as what she means to say, and she does so in a way that is heartfelt and understanding of the things that we forget to understand.