A Suit or a Suitcase

By Maggie Smith

I've been sitting with this book for a little while now. It feels fitting to follow my thoughts on Pollan, as Smith seems to have been in her own exploration with consciousness and the body, several pieces centering the theme. The title poem is a beautiful reflection of inhabiting the body more fully and the intimacy with self, other, and life as a whole that comes from doing so.

In "Beside Myself," Smith succinctly captures typically esoteric, metaphysical feedback from an energy worker: "I have been crayoned outside the lines I think." This may be my new favorite way to refer to traumatic impact in the body.

As always, diagnostics can't hold a candle to poetry, and the modern treatment models of our psychiatric and medical texts are shameful poverties of language. If you explore old biological/anatomical literature, you'll find a penchant for the poetic was very much commonplace until the last handful of decades. This medical (hierarchical, patriarchal, often lagging behind the times) model was then nailed into place by insurance standards that further reduced us from diagnosis to reimbursable criteria. If someone could consult the poets before the next roll out of the DSM, I would greatly appreciate it.

Language is, at its simplest and most effective, a form of recognition. Yet formal treatment settings have surrendered much of that function. If the only language we offer people is clinical, they are left trying to see themselves in labels that were never designed to hold them, and so we overpathologize by necessity, grasping for the closest available container. The limits of diagnostic language have been noted for some time now, but we aren't making much progress toward expanding the lexicon. I want us to be able to resist pathologizing and still have access to witnessing. And if providers are the ones handing people the language from which they will go on to make meaning about themselves, we ought to be armed with something far richer and more nuanced.

Now, I can't speak to whatever work Smith has been doing in her own life, but the poem "I Call Them Back to Me," rang for me as a beautiful representation of parts-based work. When I introduce IFS concepts to future clients, I may just lead with this poem. No offense to Richard Schwartz, but Maggie’s got you beat.

I call them back to me-

flimsy selves of the past,
some vellum-thin, clearly

unfinished. Not fleshed out,
not fully — only children

really, stopped in time, still
tottering about in their

mother’s high heels,
meaning mine?

I didn’t know them,
their little plots forgotten

just as they began
to rise. I didn’t know

what any of them,
any of us, would become

in the end, which is not yet
where we are.

I call them back.
I’m ready, I tell them.

I think I know now
where we’re going, all of us,

together. I think I know
where the story is going.

Come back, come back,
I can finish it.