“Somatic practice for those who wake up afraid”

Griffin Epstein

Artist Statement: As both a mental health practitioner and a person who has consistently utilized therapeutic and psychiatric resources, I explore the concepts of madness and the ways contemporary language and discourse around mental health and healing can be both personally transformative and profoundly reinforcing of / entrenched in / further entrenching interlocking forms of social oppression. As an educator, researcher, and a poet complicit in systems of white supremacist, capitalist, colonial, heteropatriarchal and ableist violence, I am always also interested in accountability, agency, and the need to both acknowledge and work beyond the fiction of the individual self.

Don’t move / too fast

Listen to the wind 

Which could dismantle the house brick by brick 

if it wanted

If the wind had wants 

After years of being told get up get up we have to go  

It’s hard to remember you can take your time 

You’re grown 

No one in this world is peerless 

or pristine

Unfuckable or 

Completely Fucked 

Nothing’s for sure except 

you are stuck 

With this life

In this sharp corner of the universe 

So breathe, breathe in 

Make a coughing sound 

Like an old computer starting up

Grunt 

into the day 

Until the day 

Grunts back 

 

Griffin Epstein is a non-binary white settler/occupier from NYC (Lenape land) working in education and community-engaged research in Toronto (Dish with One Spoon/Treaty 13). They have been featured in Glad Day's Emerging Writers Series, and their poetry has appeared in CV2, Grain, The Maynard and Plenitude, among others. griffin is the author of the chapbook so we may be fed (Frog Hollow Press, 2021), and member of the experimental videogame collective shrunken studios. They also make music and develop multimedia work.

website: https://griffinepstein.com/

twitter: https://twitter.com/whyputer