Why Waking Wildflowers? The Backstory
I’ve always loved flowers, especially wildflowers. In 7th grade I had a little garden outside my bedroom window with black-eyed Susan’s, daisies, and alyssum. (This was also the season I swore I’d name more daughters Love and Daisy and wrote ☮️❤️🙂 on everything.)
Wildflowers have always spoken to me of freedom, beauty, and determination. They grow often where they’re not wanted or expected, in conditions that aren’t ideal, and still bloom proud and radiant.
I wanted to be beautiful, to possess a determined resilience, and be free to be my whole self.
The poems in Waking Wildflowers were written between 2018 to 2023 and reflect the last five years of my life. Years that not only held the covid pandemic, but an unraveling of myself, past traumas, and my community.
While I’ve struggled with depression and anxiety since middle school, after the birth of my last child (and multiple miscarriages) I spent years living with generalized anxiety and regular panic attacks not realizing it (aren’t heart attack symptoms multiple times a week normal?) all the while still attempting to live my life as a mother, wife, writer, educator, and person of faith.
When my faith community began to unravel in 2018 and continued over the next three years, I found myself alone and rejected on multiple fronts—both by people who left the church and people who stayed. I was not enough, said the wrong things (was too strong/not strong enough depending on who you asked), strayed from polite topics and had opinions on race and police reform (none of which were new if you actually knew me), thought I could protect those who stayed while an unhealthy leader still reigned all the while having to maintain an exterior of normalcy and managing my day to day life.
In 2020, as lockdown began, I realized it was time to step back from all my commitments. After nearly twenty years of nonstop work, church ministry, loss, and multiple big life transitions, it was then that burnout hit. It felt like a train coming to a stop only to be hit with ricocheting cars that never slowed. I spiraled into a deep depression, at times wondering if I was sane.
In the fall of 2020, after some particularly dark and disturbing weeks, I started counseling. It was scary and intimidating to let this stranger into my life, but it was necessary. My counselor became a safe space I could share all these experiences and parts of myself.
If my life was a tangled ball of yarn, counseling felt like untangling one portion to find it lead to another tangled mess.
It was a period I look back and see as waking, death, birth, and rising.
Why now?
I knew I just had to do it. If I waited for it to be perfect, then I'd never do it. I'd always find something to tweak.
But even more than that, on a transformative level publishing Waking Wildflowers is just one more step in my healing journey. Every few people will ever know the turmoil that upended my life in the last five years. The pain of lost friendships, place of worship becoming unsafe, the burnout from twenty years of overwork that hit like a ricocheting train with the pandemic, and me thinking I was healed, sturdy, that I was no longer seeker my worth in what I did, performed, or how I was perceived (I’d handled that in my early 20s), but—
It was there all along. And it all happened within a year or two of each other.
There's this line in the book, "It was necessary for me to fall apart."
It was hard, lonely, despairing, and ugly with splotches of light and beauty, but it was necessary.
I'm not at a place where I can say I am healed and whole, but I am healing. I am being reborn again and again. I am pulling back the carcass from years' past and reaching to the light.
So, yeah...that's why it was time.
Or as Emily Scott Robinson sings,
"On the edge of something wild
On the edge of something free
On the edge of something reckless
I get down on my knees
If you don't recognize me
When I come back around
It's 'cause all the things I thought I'd be
I let 'em all burn to the ground"
- Let ‘Em Burn
Jessica, thank you for sharing these raw, vulnerable things. I see you. Your poems are going to meet readers in unique ways and I can’t wait to read them.