your please love me at my worst questions answered
plus the first poem in the book
before we begin, i want to acknowledge that today is the first national day for truth & reconciliation.
today, we honour the children and survivors of residential “schools” as well as their families and communities. (schools in quotations because though that’s what they’re commonly known as, they stole children from their families and caused the genocide of thousands of indigenous children)
sharing posts here if you want to learn more about the significance of the day, why we wear orange shirts, and the significance of every child matters.
please join me in donating to phyllis webstad and the orange shirt society to help raise awareness across canada about residential schools and their continuing impacts on individuals, and to the indian residential school survivors society who create programs and initiatives for the cultural, spiritual and physical well-being of not just former students of residential schools, but to the multitude of those adversely impacted intergenerationally.
today is an extremely small step towards truth & reconciliation, and i am committed to continuously educating myself about the ongoing atrocities that we as settlers commit against indigenous people, paying reparations to indigenous people, and amplifying indigenous voices.
there isn’t a good way to transition from such an important topic to talking about the moon, so i’m just gonna do it.
the moon
the moon is in cancer this morning and will move into leo at 8:53 pm ET tonight.
as i’ve said in a few pitter patters, moon in cancer is feels time. if there are feelings you’ve been avoiding, now’s a good time to confront them. if you need a cry, get crying.
as the moon moves into leo tonight, the mood will lift. cancer to leo moon is one of my fave transitions–i always feel like it brings a lot of relief. over the next few days with the moon in leo, it’s a great time to put yourself out there! do your hair or get your hair done (i swear the moon in leo brings the best hair days). use this energy to do things that require confidence. imo, the sun in libra and the moon in leo is really beautiful (literally and metaphorically)!
your please love me at my worst questions answered
if you watch my insta stories, you know that this week, we’re doing a please love me at my worst q&a.
(shout out to olivia witzke for this gorgeous pic)
i asked for questions on instagram and y’all delivered, which i’m honestly so happy about, because i was fully planning on making up questions if i didn’t get any.
if somehow you don’t know (i feel like i promote it every 3 seconds), please love me at my worst is my newest poetry collection coming out october 12 (in 12 days!). if you want it as soon as it comes out, you can preorder here:
let’s get into the q&a!
q: how many pages does it have?
a: starting off easy haha, it has 146 pages.
q: does it have different sections?
yes! it has four sections: please love my inner child, please love me at my worst, please love me for who i am, and please love who i’m becoming.
please love my inner child has poems about inner child healing, the mother wound, nostalgia and grief around my nana’s passing.
please love me at my worst has poems about loneliness, reminiscing about past love, and unrequited love. fun fact: i wrote a lot of the poems for this section in a cottage alone at night where i discovered an elderly man had passed (it turns out the cottage was his house that his adult children turned into an airbnb), and i feel like i was really channeling his energy for the poems. especially this one:
please love me for who i am has poems about accepting the worst parts of myself and coming out as bisexual.
please love who i’m becoming has poems about self-acceptance, body neutrality, and hope for the future.
q: how did you plan out/organize the order of the poems in each section?
i love this question! and i know you’ve already read the book so i’m gonna be pretty specific.
i had a bunch of poems everywhere, in journals and in my notes app. i came up with ‘please love my inner child’ first and it was probably the most straightforward section to choose poems for.
i made a google doc with the sections (i don’t think they all had names right away, but i generally knew what the themes were), and then dumped in all the poems i had already written. this is generally my process so i’m not staring at a blank document–i put in all the poems i’ve written and then figure out what themes or topics i want to write about more.
in terms of ordering the poems for ‘please love my inner child’, i wanted to start off with one that i wrote when i first recognized that my inner child needed healing (more about that under the poetry prompt in this edition of pitter patter) and end on a more hopeful note. (ed: i included the first poem under the poetry prompt section of this letter just for fun)
everything in the middle was kind of just ordered by vibe and length–i generally try to mix it up so there aren’t a ton of full page poems in a row or a ton of two line poems in a row. and this section is probably the most chronological in terms of being in the order i wrote the poems in.
the other sections were a little less methodical–i always try to order things so that it kind of tells a story (like putting the moon poem about choosing how you reveal yourself next to the poem about realizing i’m bisexual). i also like putting poems that contradict each other one after the other (like ‘they always come back when you learn to stop needing them’ next to a poem asking someone to come back).
q: what inspired you to write your book?
i think it’s kind of funny that i wrote the title poem (please love me at my worst, which is also on the back of the book) when i was in tulum, mexico, in february 2020 before the pandemic. i had no idea that my worst was about to get even worse 😂
i didn’t know right away that it was the title poem or that it would end up being the main theme of the book, but naturally, as quarantine started in march 2020, i started writing about loneliness, and with loneliness, started thinking more and more about past relationships. there are a lot of poems in the please love me at my worst section that i wrote a few years ago–if you’re on a healing journey, you might relate to a big part of healing being that you need to accept and love past versions of yourself.
2020 was a huge year for me: i survived a pandemic, stopped talking to my mom, came out as bisexual, quit my job. there was a lot to write about!
q: how long did it take you to write?
about a year (if you don’t include the poems i wrote a few years ago).
q: what did the process of getting a book published look like?
it was actually really similar to self-publishing! my publisher (andrews mcmeel) trusted my vision since one of the reasons they signed me is that i had a successful book already. the cover is the exact one i designed (with maybe a little larger font for the title), i drew all the interior illustrations, i decided the order of the poems.
the biggest difference was that i had a few rounds of edits with a few editors (which i definitely appreciated)! they got me to remove my canadian u’s (like in colour), pointed out word orders that were a little confusing, and added hyphens where it would help. they definitely improved the readability of a few poems.
i also wasn’t very picky with the formatting other than the font (gotta love adobe garamond pro). and if you’re not anal retentive it will probably seem like it has the same format as my other books. but… i think if i had self-published, i would’ve made the margins bigger 😂
another difference is that i have a mini marketing team to help me promote the book. they got advanced digital copies to reviewers, helped me come up with ideas for a promotional box and reach out to influencers, and of course did a lot behind the scenes for in-store distribution!
though my self-published books did end up in a few stores mainly due to demand, please love me at my worst will be much more widely available because of my publisher.
q: how did it feel writing as an openly bi person vs. the other books?
i love this question!
the more i’ve come into my queer identity, the more i’ve realized that my queerness has always come through in my writing, even if i’m not specifically writing about being bisexual.
even before i fully accepted my bisexuality, i always gravitated towards art created by LGBTQ+ people. it’s hard to explain (if you’re queer you probably get it), but i think there’s a lot of universality in the queer experience that comes out in poetry, even when it’s not about sexuality.
and even though there are only a handful of poems in please love me at my worst that scream “i’m gay!”, it was freeing and exciting to be able to include them.
if you left me a question, thank you so much! these were awesome and i really enjoyed reflecting on them.
if you missed my story and have questions about the book, leave a comment and i’ll reply!
poetry prompt
you know what time it is! grab your pen and journal or open your notes app 🖊 this week, the prompt is inspired by the first poem in please love me at my worst, which i’ll share below.
prompt: write about how it feels to need space
give me space
for a second
stop blowing dandelion seeds in my face
i need a field of sunflowers
showing me which way to look
your weeds aren’t welcome anymore
i am done facing down
give me something greater than the earth
give me wide-open water
i’m tired of this stream
please let me have the ocean
i need to swim for a while
i need to let the waves carry me
i need salt
i need healing
please just give me this space
tiktok time
this tiktok relates to a topic that i think i’m going to explore in next week’s pitter patter: the inner critic.
as always, thank you for reading ❤️
if you have a question about the book, want to share your poem, or just wanna say hey, leave me a comment!
if you want the next exclusive new moon edition of pitter patter in your inbox on october 6, along with a personal astrological reading in the comments, you can subscribe to the paid version of pitter patter here:
and if you have a friend that might be interested in this q&a, feel free to share this letter with them!
xoxo
m
when i realized it was 10 i knew i had to jump on and read this weeks Pitter patter. so excited about this new moon and the energy its about to bring.
the prompt hit close to home this week.
eyes squinting i see it in the distance.
a cage
the light against its gold exterior sparkles with amber rays
i take a step back and examine the cage i am in.
trapped is all i feel.
that new cage must be perfect.
this old one is too small.
this space i am craving
does it exist at all?