To not be fine.
That was the first one and the hardest one. The permission to say, without the immediate qualifier, without the but-I-am-managing or the it-will-pass or the I-know-others-have-it-worse, that I was not fine, that the not-fine was real and was the size I was saying it was and did not need to be justified against a scale of greater suffering before it was allowed to be acknowledged. I gave myself that permission and it felt, the first time, like a small illegal act, like taking something I had not been offered, and it was not illegal and it was not taking, it was just the truth, and the truth does not require permission, but the speaking of it without apology did, and I gave myself that.
To take the long way.
Not as inefficiency. As the understanding that the long way is sometimes where the actual things are, that the direct route is the route of a person in a hurry and I have been in a hurry for most of my adult life and the hurry missed things, missed the particular quality of a morning that only happens when you are going slowly enough to be in it, missed the bird and the light and the conversation that starts because you have time for it to start, because you took the long way and the long way had room in it.
To write the things that might not be good.
This one was specific to the writing and is the permission that makes all the other writing possible. The permission to write the thing that might not be good without that possibility being a reason not to write it, to get to the good thing by writing through the not-good things without stopping at the not-good and calling it done. Most of the bad writing I have written has led somewhere. Most of the good writing was reached by going through something worse. The permission to write badly on the way to writing better is the permission that let the poems happen.
To be glad.
This sounds like the smallest permission and it is the largest one. The permission to feel good in a life that still contains hard things, to be glad in a season that is also the season of watching my mother diminish, to let the joy be real even when the grief is also real, to not require the resolution of the sad before I allow the glad. Both of them are true. Both of them are allowed. I gave myself that and the giving was the whole of the turning, the whole of the arriving at this morning, which is good, in which I am, improbably and actually and with my whole self, glad.
