'For My Lover Returning to his Wife'

LIFE HACK!!!!

I don’t think I’m alone when I tell you that I’m often hijacked by my emotions. Sometimes a burning furnace of sulphuric anger will explode in my chest during a work Zoom. Or an oceanic wave of sadness will pin me down during a fight with my husband. It’s hard to not be held hostage to ‘big feelings’.

Mindfulness is chic and you might have some tricks to wriggle free of your worst self: breathing, curling your toes, chanting, meditating, microdosing, etc. For me, I lie down, close my eyes and listen to a recording of Anne Sexton reading her poem “For My Lover Returning to his Wife.”

Sexton was one of the ‘mad poets’ from the Robert Lowell confessional school (here's my fave by Lowell). It’s all guts and viscera hanging out. I’m a huge fan of her writing—suicide! affairs! motherhood! psychiatry! the works!—but also of her performance style. Here, her smoky voice, her resigned air, the dignified compassion she has for ‘the wife’, so subdued and powerful. I suppose the content is also calming. People break their promises and giant feelings pass. Every time I listen to it my heart rate drops and I can go back to being right about everything, all the time.