Healing My Inner Child

One book launch at a time.

All’s Fair in Love and Pickleball is out in the world! My latest book came out yesterday, and with it, all my nerves, excitement and glee. I cried, I celebrated, I played pickleball, I ate my favorite breakfast burrito AND In-N-Out, I laughed, and I hugged so many wonderful people.

Thanks to everyone who came out to the Ripped Bodice last night!

I’m so grateful to everyone who has showed up for me in all sorts of ways through out this process. Even simply opening this newsletter is a part of that! So thank YOU.

I’m not sure why, exactly — post-book release emotions, perhaps? — but today I dug out my elementary school poetry book, which was published when I was in fifth grade. (Copyright: Hunnewell Elementary School, 1990.) Every kid in the school had a poem shared in the book. That year, the school also had a poet-in-residence sponsored by the PTO, and I was selected to be a part of a small group of 4th and 5th graders who got to work with him.

I have not looked at this poetry book in decades, but the second I flipped it open, a lot of memories came flooding back. Most of them pretty painful.

For all of elementary school I couldn’t bring myself to do my school work, but also couldn’t explain why. It was like my brain had this invisible block over it when it came to certain things. I wanted to be able to do it, but I just couldn’t, and I certainly couldn’t offer any reason for it. For most of my childhood, I’d been able to mask and hide this. But it finally started to catch up to me in fourth grade. (My fourth grade teacher loathed me because I talked a lot and never did my spelling workbook.) By fifth grade I had two teachers — Ms. Dickey and Mrs. Lane — who made a point of showing me the row of zeroes next to my name in their grade book, while constantly threatening to hold me back. They’d make these pronouncements in front of other kids, too, which was utterly humiliating. I assume now that they thought threatening me with repeating fifth grade while all my peers trotted off to middle school would motivate me, but all it did was send me spiraling with shame and horror. It has helped to understand, as an adult, that this was my ADHD, untreated and unsupported. But at the time, this context didn’t exist for me.

The first day of fifth grade.

Getting chosen to be one of the students in this exclusive poetry workshop was a real point of pride and relief for me back then, because it allowed me to hope that maybe I wasn’t a total failure, even if I was, at the time, failing fifth grade. The poet in residence was not a fan of my work. The only feedback I remember is that he called some line in my final poem, titled My Castle, “clichéd,” which stung badly, because I’d been so proud of it. But I also still recall the absolute buzz I got while writing it; that something about putting those words together in a specific way felt like magic. During a time when I couldn’t do my school work, I somehow was able to write. And for me, that was everything.

Every time I publish a book now, as an adult, I do so in honor of fifth grade Kate, in her acid-washed jeans and Keds, so deeply lost and unsure of herself and filled with a self-loathing she couldn’t understand and frankly, did not deserve. I’m proud of her, and I think she’d be proud of me now.

And for what it’s worth, I still fucking love using clichés.

---

xoxo,

Kate