Coco Peezy's Blog

I stumbled upon a quotation from Mary Oliver’s essay, “Of Power and Time,” while reading a chapter from the book Heartbreak by Florence Williams. I quickly located my copy of Upstream to re-read the essay in length.

In this piece, Oliver writes about her three selves: the child, the social self, and a third self that is “out of love with the ordinary… out of love with time” and “has a hunger for eternity” (27). She implores that if we are not heeding to this vital self, all the while considering ourselves an artist, then we are imposters to our creativity (a poser of the creative realm, if you will). In doing so, we are neglecting our innate truth, as Oliver writes, “The most regretful people on earth are those who felt the call to creative work, who felt their own creative power restive and uprising, and gave to it neither power nor time” (30).

Revisiting this essay at this time is with no coincidence. Here I am, a full week off my anti-depressants for the first time since I began taking them five years ago. There is no doubt that they were keeping me together (mentally, physically, emotionally) for a majority of that time. However, for fear of what would happen if I stopped sooner, I also feel they’ve withheld me from accessing this third self whom I’d been coming to know back in 2017.

Perhaps not long from now, I will fall apart all over again and run to their aid, but life is all so different now (despite being so much the same internally). Since 2017, I’ve obliged to my social self. I will remain close to my child self indefinitely. But now, as I withdrawal from the synthetic support of medication, I open up to my third, lesser understood self, to indulge in the power and the time that has been lost; to engross herself with the call to create.

As Oliver describes, “…I have no shame. Neither do I have guilt” (30). I rejoice in this self unapologetically, to engage with what I’ve believed was my purpose since I could comprehend and identify what exactly gave me utter fulfillment: words.