Last night, I saw a concert at /////////////// and, unexpectedly, in those two hours spent in the dark, I found myself confronting my own human fragility. God, that really sounds dramatic, I know, but it’s real. As the reflector spotlights funnelled a rose-tinged glare onto stage, I not only felt breakable, but like I had, in the past, already been broken.

There is something building up in me – in us? – and calcifying into a hardness. It becomes an unmovable something. I can feel anxiety spread throughout my body in solid deposits of uncertainty. And when done with my literal body, anxiety finds its way into my dreams, into my dream-body, bringing together a slew of real-unreal memories in an eddying haze. How many times do I – do we? – wake up feeling agitated, nervous, confounded in and with our skin? It feels utterly impossible some days to go through the motions of a socially accepted existence, crawling our way numbly along the map set out for us by Western modernity.

I keep writing me/I and then inviting you in. This is because, under today’s capitalist society, under the canopy of an ongoing subliminal entrenchment in horrifying news, how can something not lodge within all of us and make us hurt? Collectively. Perhaps some of us don’t acknowledge it, not regularly and not with truth, or not until we find ourselves in the front row of the /////////////// Room at ///////////////, listening to ///// /////////////// pause, suck in a sharp breath, and say in a tone riven with undetectable emotion that I somehow know I have also felt, the body is an idiot.

There is something built-up in me, as hard and rough as metamorphic rock, the kind of rock that forms under intense pressure conditions. Something in us. ///// /////////////// is still and silent on stage for perhaps a full minute. Then she takes a sip of wine. Her laptop screen flickers above her keyboard, on which she has just performed an instrumental piece. It flickers as if it is just as uncertain as all of us who are made up of fragile biotic matter. This is her first performance in four years, she says, and her honesty is in itself as enticing as a perfect, everything-contained-and within-the-lines, kind of concert might be.

The body calcifies, and this is the thing. All the harrowing news, everything and everyone endangered, all those times I see my phone blink with a message from someone I love, a message that I’m afraid to check because there is a high chance it will trigger something … painful. All of it accumulates. That energy has to go somewhere. The body is so very good at collecting, and then, it is so very good at adapting around the fissures and shapes made from its gathering. If it wasn’t, would we then realise that the twists and knots forming within ourselves are untenable? The body adapts to an ecosystem that, for a previous self-iteration, would be entirely unliveable. This is survival, so we move on. We wake up from our nightmares and wash our faces and walk onto our stages.

Two and a half lines into a song, a song which sounds gorgeous sung live under those rose-tinged lights, with lines that are poetic and enthralling, ///// /////////////// stops. She laughs ironically. It’s closing up. My throat is closing. And that song, existing in my memory forever as its two and a half lines, fades into the audience’s collective love. In this act of witnessing, of all our witnessing, I know I’m not the only one that connects to her faltering, her locked body. Anxiety collects. We feel this bodily response, this bodily resistance, this lack of bodily agency, collectively.

In my case, trauma is rarely a slow release. It is sharp, a flare of anguish; it is the sudden evisceration of a solid deposit into hot liquid, filling the capillaries right near my protective skin barrier. It is a low thudding in the ears, then seconds later, an assemblage of ringing. It is the throat closing.

I’m not great at performing and if I perform well, it’s because I feel safe. I don’t really understand what safety is for me, still after all this time, but after exposure to face after face after face, I’ve learned that safety depends as much on physical environment as it does on who is in the room. And it depends, also, on what is going on in my own mind and body beforehand. How hardened am I?

Last year, I performed as part of a show at a comedy club among comedians and musicians. I walked into that space expecting my poetry would slither out of the club’s seams, that all the poems would remain unheld and untethered, with no place to go – because who there, from those who had come to laugh, would collect my small, serious, poetry. But how else to make a living in a world that doesn’t value the hours of labour it takes to write a poem? Or how else to exist in a world that doesn’t really value a thing that has assigned to it no monetary value? So, I said yes to this reading, even though it felt like a jagged fit even before I arrived.

It’s September now, which means my book has been out for a year, and for that entire year, I said yes to everything. Even when it caused me emotional and physical misery, I said yes, because I felt lucky for the opportunity, because readings translate to (low) artist fees and possibilities for the next book, and I’m very much caught in the ongoing trap of productivity and capitalism and guilt and selfishness. Even when I pause and reflect – often lately while walking – I find myself returning to this whir. After all, the weather will turn soon, and then my pragmatic self asks: what of the energy bills?

My poetry isn’t very funny, but I hope you like it anyway.

That one night, there was no real reason for it to happen – the crowd was perfectly fine – and yet, I felt my fingers go numb as I held up my book, still quite new in my hands then. Against the ringing in my ears, I couldn’t hear myself any longer. I, still to this day, don’t know what volume I was speaking at into the microphone. My lips, my mouth, felt impossibly dry. Unmovable. I tasted the unattractive creaminess, the sludge, of every syllable. My throat was closing. I couldn’t speak, my mind was telling me I couldn’t speak, but still, somehow, my body persisted. With lips barely moving, and with a tongue that was hot, velvety, and heavy, I read, and read, and so, so clumsily read. I remember thinking to myself at one point that I didn’t even understand the language pouring from me – the language that I myself had strung together on that very page in front of my eyes.

Last night, watching ///// /////////////// on stage, I thought to myself, what if I had allowed myself to lift up my own veil in that very public space? What if, instead of reciting Meditation While Plaiting My Hair and losing my breath on the last line, yet still carrying on soundlessly, I stopped like ///// /////////////// stopped. What if I took a step away from the mic stand and said, I’m sorry. I’m so nervous. Or, I don’t know what to do. Or, I think I need to stop. What if I faced the audience, perhaps apologetically, and admitted that I didn’t think I’d get this far.

That concert was transformative. It made me feel more deeply than many concerts have or ever will. When ///// /////////////// throat closed, when her voice broke, and she couldn’t go on, I felt so many different, difficult, things. And I felt admiration for her incredible transparency, for her very real subversion of the culture around us. For the shedding of performativity that I – we? – have normalised.

I wonder: how long can we go on as our shapeshifting selves?