Starting and Starting Over: A Beginning and a Continuation

Loving life and building a life, one day at a time. Starting over, because we can. Building a life from where we are, with joy.

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Photo by Rosemary DeSena, February 2023: A cherry tree blooms in Levi Strauss Plaza, San Francisco, California, USA

I don’t know exactly when, but before I could read or write, (or maybe just at those moments that I was learning), I understood that I was a poet.

I didn’t know to identify myself as an introvert, but I knew how happy I was to sit in a place quietly and absorb it. To notice all the details around me and create images for conjuring up later.

In spring, I watched crawling ants diligently unfurling a peony. In the sticky humidity of summer, I stared at the dust particles dancing in sunbeams traveling across the living room while a floor fan whirred in front of me. In autumn, I inhaled the damp earthy smell of the fallen maple leaves as I kicked them across the yard. In winter, I scraped my fingers against ice crystals forming elaborate patterns on the leaded glass windows in my bedroom.

As then, soon as I could read or write a little, I wasted no time in starting my craft, putting my observations to paper.

Here is one of my first poems (8 years old) written about my trip to the beach while visiting my maternal grandmother on Cape Cod, Massachusetts, USA:

Typewritten poem by Rosemary DeSena, May 1982

ABOVE THE SANDY SHORE

When the tide rises, and the sun sets
I go out on the sandy shore, 
And listen to the seagulls cry.
I look above me. 
I see pink, purple, red
All over the sky.
The water runs through my toes,
And I bury my feet in the sand.
But above me is the everlasting sky
And the sun setting on this beautiful day!

- Rosemary DeSena, May 1982

I continued writing through my teen and college years, and then into my twenties and thirties, taking a class here or there after college, but didn’t share much with anyone. Instead I filled up journals that I kept in my closet.

Then, as life sometimes does, it beat me up a little. Actually, it beat me up a lot.

2012 for me had promised of new beginnings… a new romantic relationship was blossoming, and that summer I had just graduated from night school after four years of studying (some people do it in less than a year) to obtain my paralegal certificate, while working full time in a law office, with the hope of enhancing my career as a trust and estates paralegal.

Instead, right after graduating, and while on a visit to my parents to celebrate, my mother revealed she had cancer. That news was a blow, but then, a day into my visit, just as I was trying to process the information, the vacation turned from a planned visit to the beach into an emergency hospital visit. Priorities shifted quickly.

I stopped my immediate search for a new job to focus on supporting my family. And then, at the very beginning of the new year, in 2013, my former boyfriend of many years (and still a very close friend) suffered a stroke and heart attack and was hospitalized in a coma, which he ultimately never came out of. He passed away two months later.

I had my first opportunity to sit alongside someone I loved, keeping them company, while they were dying. I can say now that it was one of the greatest privileges bestowed upon me, but also, the most devastating. I had never had much experience visiting people in nursing homes and hospitals, let alone experiencing this intimate and inevitable part of life - the act of dying.

A few months later, I repeated the experience with my mother, sitting by her side as she rapidly declined into her final days.

A few short months after losing my mother, I experienced a medical crisis of my own, narrowly escaping my own death. I exited the hospital diagnosed with type one diabetes, an incurable autoimmune disease which requires intensive learning in order to keep one’s self alive daily and healthy for the long term.

Then a few weeks after my hospital stay, still recovering from my health crisis, and right before Christmas, I lost my job. I had just been laughing and crying with my new boyfriend… “There’s nothing more that could go wrong this year! Thank God it’s over! Good riddance to 2013!” — I was wrong.

The following months were filled with hospital visits, hours of research in learning how to care for myself with diabetes, and the endless administrative tasks in dealing with things like job searches, the state unemployment office, hospital billing departments, and learning how the healthcare system and how its insurance plans work (two separate experiences - I had not had healthcare before my hospital stay, so knew little of either).

Phew! Recovering from illness would have been enough, thanks!

Writing, which was once a solace and a joyful, playful time to explore language, my inner thoughts, and observations of life, became a chore. I was focused on survival, filling notebooks not with poetry but with medical notes and blood sugar readings.

When I finally returned to writing, somehow all I had to write about was sad. Unlike in the past, when writing about hard experiences had eased my burdens, freeing me to find my way forward, during this period, recounting the challenges (and feeling like I wasn’t finding respite or any solutions) only cemented my depression into my experience. I stopped writing regularly.

When the pandemic hit in 2020, the next round of losses came.

Another romantic relationship ended, more loved ones departed this world, more job losses and more financial and health crises arrived. Lifting my head off the pillow every morning was becoming unbearable. I was exhausted.

But then something happened. I lost yet another job. I was given zero severance pay from the company despite receiving five years of good performance reviews and performance based raises. Financially it was not a good situation, and should have been causing me anxiety.

Instead, something had changed. Instead, I felt relief. I felt a weight lifted off my shoulders. My health started to return, almost immediately. (Type 1 diabetes is a chronic condition - my body no longer makes insulin - so I still had that, but other symptoms, such as chronic fatigue, did improve).

I realized I had been thrown out of a place where I was not meant to be. That my current declining health was a direct result of living to someone else’s expectations, not mine. And that I didn’t need to do it anymore.

I started getting my happy back, despite the continued challenges in daily life management. I started remembering who I was, and who I still wanted to be. And I realized it was not too late to be that person.

Ultimately, when the dust finally settled, I realized this:

• I am still alive.

• Connection to the world (to nature, to community) still matters - and is central to my being and my well being.

• I am still both an observer and an active participant of Life.

• I still love language, music, poetry, art, dance, nature. (My childlike loves have not dissolved or dissipated.)

• If my loves have not dissipated, and I am still alive, I can still pursue them - even if it means redefining and updating the ways in which I do this.

• Who needs conventionality in reaching the goal? It’s not too late to experiment.

• If I am a poet (and I am), I can reconnect to my poet heart, and write again! And in public!

And so, here I am - writing in public - hoping to share with you (via poetry, essays, vignettes, and even podcasts and interviews):

• The beauty that exists despite all that is grotesque;

• The joy that exists alongside sorrow;

• The whimsy that exists next to all that is serious and solemn.

Hence my tag line for this newsletter Life is a Poem:

“Each moment a gift, a poem to be born. Living day by day and finding joy in the now.”

Will you join me in witnessing these daily gifts, these moments of connection and joy that come when we make space for them?

I will share mine. And I welcome you to share yours.

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Until soon!