How to Survive

Rob Macaisa Colgate
| poetry

 

  1. Stop doing it just because it is all there is to do,
    though this does not mean there will be other
  2. Things to do: Choose a part of you to let rot
    so that you may lovingly call it rotten. Try not to
  3. Panic. That’s part of this. Come have a soda with me
    and panic. Let’s talk sleep hygiene, why you tend to
  4. Romanticize your survival— it’s ok. That’s actually also
    part of the process, except for when it can completely
  5. Work against the cause. You can microdose depression
    to activate care, which sounds insane, and it is, still try it,
  6. Be just sad enough to recognize that if you are going to love
    being alive, then those knots inextricably tied to your life
  7. You must love: illness, devastation, malaise. Think of this
    less as living a life and more as a silly challenge to
  8. Outlast yourself with yourself. Decide to not always be ok—
    you are a creature. You need rhythms. You need to
  9. Dance anywhere that forces you towards
    company, or dance alone, dance even when you can’t
  10. Leave the house. As you walk to the mini-mart, allow
    that small tickle of mundane detachment so you might
  11. Cling to life more tightly. Remember that every
    Doesn’t feel good exists in the same world as every
  12. Feels good— let it. The wrongness never leaves your side,
    it loves you, it stays, how could you not do the same?

Rob Macaisa Colgate (he/she/they) is a disabled bakla poet and playwright from Evanston, IL. He is the author of the poetry collection Hardly Creatures (Tin House, 2025) and the verse drama My Love is Water (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2025). He received an MFA in poetry and critical disability studies from the New Writers Project at UT Austin and is currently a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Alberta and poet-in-residence at Tangled Art + Disability.

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