Welcome to unraveling, unmoored
A publication obsessed with stopping time featuring poetry and essays on practice, healing, embodiment, alignment, presence, and living an unhurried life by Libby Walkup and collaborators.
I don't believe in mid-life crises, I believe in mid-life awakenings, but still, they can be brutal, and mine followed a global pandemic that prompted a shift away from emotional and mental chaos and burnout onto a path of more ease and peace with no clear route toward getting to, and sustaining such slowness—and most importantly, being okay living such a slow life when everything around me and old patterns inside of me insist I must keep up.
I created this space initially to share my own experiences in slow practices, but have been called to foster a collective of voices and experiences.
Hi, I’m Libby
I am a contemplative middle-aged multidisciplinary creative and urban hermit obsessed with stopping time.
I have earned two graduate degrees in creative writing (MA at Bath Spa University and MFA at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago), book arts (UI Center for the Book), and library and information science (University of Iowa), and was aimed, however slowly, toward teaching or librarianship when the lock-down showed me just how overwhelmed, exhausted, and burned out I had become trying to be a human in the world every day even doing things I enjoyed with people I loved hanging out with.
I had pursued a career in academia with the same bright-eyed, bushy-tailed fantasy I first brought with me to undergrad. When I dreamed of university life, I imagined classes gathering under the autumn trees—it’s perpetually autumn in all of my fantasies—to discuss life, literature, philosophy, and love. I imagined meandering conversations with like-minded beings that created a beautiful ebb and flow of growth and expansion.
And most of all, I somehow imagined there’d be more autonomy, more self-direction, more freedom than secondary school and, though the reality rarely lived up to the fantasy—I found myself burned out at the end of every semester, rarely able to keep up with the assigned readings and writings let alone dive down rabbit holes of personal intrigue, and constantly in a state of brain fog—I continued believing it was a better fit than the alternative: the 9 to 5 in which I have always found myself much, much worse off emotionally, physically, spiritually and, somehow, financially.
In the middle of my fourth graduate degree having to do a full stop in 2020, I felt in my body just how harmful it was for me to move at a pace that didn’t belong to me. A pace faster than my nervous system could process.
So when that program ended in 2021 I embarked on a fumbling journey toward something—different. In one of his books, Cal Newport suggests that we shouldn’t be taking an hour or Sunday breaks from distraction and chaos by shutting off our phones, we should be taking short breaks from long bouts of focus and deep work.
I’ve been practicing applying this necessary principle to my neurodivergent life: instead of aiming for an hour of self-care in the evenings after burning the candle at both ends in environments that overstimulate or a Sunday in peace and solitude (neither of which have ever been enough), I’ve made peace my priority, I’ve made solitude my default mode. I come out from my little hermit hole for connection when and how it feels good to do so.
And in the process, which wasn’t as well defined as that, I sincerely didn’t expect to find myself going deeper and deeper into mind-body-spirit practices. I had only intended to write a lot and play with mark-making, but as I did those things and considered how to do them sustainably and slowly, I edged more and more into the mind-body-spirit practices, too.
And every time I thought I knew what the path looked like or where I was headed, I found the Universe sending me somewhere unexpected. The path continues to unfold before me, and I am learning to allow and not force. I am learning to listen and not assert. Very, very slowly I am becoming more consistently embodied in my truest self even when things seem bleak or hard.
I invite you along on this journey.
Share your own experiences
Submission guidelines.
Questionairre or Essays On Practice: I’m thinking more about engagement with practice itself rather than the outcome of said practices.
Poetry and lyric essays in the realm of embodiment, awakening, noticing, presence, in the moment poetic lingerings, and mind-body-spirit musings. I’m more interested in the EXPERIENCE than I am the telling of the experience.
To a certain degree most poetry is a spiritual connection with the moment. The act of writing itself can be.
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