HONOURABLY MENTIONED | I stopped submitting creative work approximately twenty years ago. The why is easy to remember, hard to remember, and boring to talk about. Why does anyone do anything in their mid-twenties?

Once upon a time, I was a very young person with a freshly-cooked frontal lobe, an unsafe “partner” and an extremely heavy life-imitating facade, a couple of unidentified disabilities, Rejection Sensitive Dysphoria (RSD) that I thought was just me being “too sensitive”, and a raging restrictive Eating Disorder. I was also unconsciously dragging around an already-over-full old suitcase of rapidly-compounding traumas at all times.

I was exhausted and pretending not to be. Of course I checked out of trying.

But twenty years is a long time and 45 is a long way from 25. I’m still exhausted much of the time, more exhausted than ever, really, but I’m also …

Not hopeful. That would be taking things too far, but I am tentatively making small efforts to try again. I am trying to remember what I used to like in an effort to figure out what I like now. I’m revisiting old things. I’m just … trying. A little. It’s like whispering into the void. Not shouting. But tired of that. But a void is a void is a void, except when it’s not.

So today I bring you news of my latest tiny validation: In November 2025, I entered one of the League of Canadian Poets’ Cold Moon contests (specifically the one for Spoken Word). And today, I was announced as the recipient of an Honourable Mention for my Spoken Word piece, “Smile Less”.

I’m not a winner. Not even a runner-up. But it’s a little something, right? Today is World Poetry Day. It’s also the day after the spring equinox. Both feel appropriate. In 2026, twenty years after the Great Quit, I’ve been endeavouring to pull the worst, heaviest things out of my perpetual, forever-more, aforementioned suitcase in order to replace them with lighter bits.

What I mean in this heavy-handed, banal, cliched metaphor, what I’m really trying to say is that none of us will ever be free of our baggage. We keep carrying it forever, but both the weight allowance and the weight itself are fluid, amorphous, shifting things. They change over time.

I wrote “Smile Less” specifically to make one of my heaviest things lighter. Whether I will ever actually perform it live, or be that brave, remains to be seen, but just having it out there helps. Love ya.

Find more from me on YouTube where I am Will&Bequeath, and sometimes a potato. As ever. YT is yet another experiment. Bit of trying. Bit uncomfortable and outside of my wheelhouse, but here we are.