Gratefulness and Metanoia
Seeing Patti Smith in Concert Last Tuesday Inspired Me, Sparked Gratitude and Unearthed Metanoia. This Week We All Must Be Grateful to Break the Cage of Darkness with Light.
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Since seeing Patti Smith at The Chicago Theater last week, I've been on a Patti Smith bender. After first listening to her in college a quarter century ago, I've listened to her songs and read her writings since last week over and over.
Today’s post is more personal than my usual posts. I hope you will indulge me. If so, thank you. Smith’s recent concert hit me differently than the last times I saw her live in a positive and much needed way.
Smith had not reentered the rock music scene when I first listened to her in the Spring of 1990. She was still living in Detroit with her husband MC5 guitarist Fred “Sonic” Smith as they raised their two children Jackson and Jesse.
Articles in Rolling Stone, a magazine I had read religiously in college, mainly focused on current stars and pop culture events. Janet Jackson, R.E.M. Madonna, Twin Peaks, The B52s ,Tom Cruise, Mick Jagger and Keith Richards, Paul McCartney were often Rolling Stone cover stories. Smith’s Rolling Stone cover happened in 1978.
I could only find information about her at my campus library or a special Rolling Stone issue or book. Through microfilm and bounded paper copies of consumer magazines, I located profiles, reviews and articles from the 1970s to learn more about her.
Like Erica Jong, Smith is my main literary and artistic inspiration. She and Jong produced works that touched and impacted my writing and me. They lived the life I dreamed of and desperately wanted to cleave to. I wanted an artistic community. Creative and critical. Literary and artistic. A life surrounded by art, creative writers and visual artists that inspired and encouraged each other.
Deadlines did not drive Smith. Only the act of creation and using her dreamworld for her literary and visual art did. I wanted that existence and creative routine. I longed for a relationship with a fellow writer and artist like Smith had with Robert Mapplethorpe and Sylvia Plath had with her husband Ted Hughes.
From some of those past articles about Smith and three of her albums’ cover photos taken by her late friend Mapplethorpe, I learned about the man who had been in the news after my high school graduation for the controversy engulfing The Perfect Moment. I learned his photos were not solely pornography that corrupted viewers.
Many of his images were beautiful, and these album covers for Smith showcase his best work. They mirror the beauty and boldness also found in Smith’s lyrics and activism.
For more than 15 years, beauty and boldness have been missing from my life. I love my daughter beyond description. I would give my life for her. What parents say about sacrificing themselves for their children is true. But while the severe postpartum depression I experienced in 2010 did get a little better, it has never fully left.
All the creative inspiration and production that had washed over me during my pregnancy didn’t just leave me after my daughter’s birth. They vanished. I fought to write and create but have struggled ever since. I was surviving but not thriving. My writing and art along with motivation for life itself have taken the deepest blows from my darkness.
Multiple sclerosis and migraines on top of caring for my newborn then infant then toddler then pre-school-age then elementary- school-age then middle-school-age then high-school-age daughter while juggling a harsh and busy teaching schedule suffocated my creativity and artistic identity. They have suffocated me as a person and a woman.
Grading a rushing river of college essays and writing assignments along with doing my best at motherhood—and always failing at it—made my own reading and writing impossible. My frequent tears have now become emotional numbness and anhedonia.
No longer did I feel inspired or driven as I had been in college or in my 20s before my MS diagnosis at the age of 27. Right after the diagnosis, people I once considered friends exited my life. Several no longer invited me out or called or emailed me. I became more and more isolated.
That isolation grew and intensified after I gave birth to my daughter. Since isolation worsens it, my clinical depression also grew, taking up new space opened by disappeared friendships and a non-existent literary community.
The only time a person I once considered a friend from a literary community I thought I belonged to reached out to me was to ask questions about a medication. After her own husband had a bad reaction to the same medication I had taken for MS that he was taking for another condition, she reached out to me in panic and sadness. After I answered her, she again disappeared.
To help inspire and lift me out of my frequent depressive episodes, I turned to the art I loved. I viewed the paintings of Frida Kahlo, the sculptures of Camille Claudel, the fine art photographs of Diane Arbus, Carrie Mae Weems, Robert Mapplethorpe, Sally Mann, Gordon Parks, Man Ray and Francesca Woodman. I read and reread Erica Jong and my other favorite poets and novelists like James Baldwin, Anne Sexton, Toni Morrison and Sylvia Plath. And I listened to a lot of Madonna, Tori Amos, R.E.M., Depeche Mode, Halsey and Patti Smith.
More than Madonna who I also love, I turned to Patti to galvanize me like she had in 1990. I “got that feeling in my stomach . . . “Mapplethorpe mentioned that I too wanted to “bring . . . into art.”1
In her essay that opened Flowers: Mapplethorpe, Smith also acknowledged that “stirring and the desire to stir” in Mapplethorpe.2 The photographer and godmother of punk were life and artistic soulmates. She too felt that same “stirring” she wanted to ‘bring into art.” At the end of her poem and first recording “Piss Factory” she declares
And I got something to hide here called desire
I got something to hide here called desire
And I will get out of here--
You know the fiery potion is just about to come
In my nose is the taste of sugar
And I got nothin’ to hide here save desire
And I’m gonna go, I’m gonna get out of here
I’m gonna get out of here, I’m gonna get on that train,
I’m gonna go on that train and go to New York City
I’m gonna be somebody, I’m gonna get on that train, go to New York City,
I’m gonna be so bad I’m gonna be a big star and I will never return,
Never return, no, never return, to burn out in this piss factory
And I will travel light.
Oh, watch me now.3
But not even Smith could break my maternal loneliness and creative isolation and devastation. Her music and words just helped me survive.
I wanted my loneliness, isolation and depression to evaporate like the people I once considered friends, like the literary community that actually never was a community for me. I wanted to have hope and motivation again.
None of that happened. I feared it would never happen. I feared this would be my life until I left our earthly dimension.
The ugliness and wickedness that has drenched us all for the past decade made shattering my malignant midnight infeasible. The day before Smith’s concert, my co-worker and friend, a prolific writer on top of being an inexhaustible racial and social justice activist. mentioned to me how anger, lack of empathy and cruelty are now part of people’s daily diet. People these days, she said, are just nasty and uncaring.
Because of her moral compass, Smith herself has not been immune in detesting these times and Dump, calling him “one of the most horrendous people that I ever met.”4 Yet she keeps doing her work looks to younger generations for hope. Like her, I keep doing my work though it feels like my writing does not making any difference to society or my fellow human beings’ lives. Especially mine.
Though weighed down by sorrow and melancholy, my friend and I bought tickets earlier this year for Smith’s latest tour marking 50 years since Horses’ debut. Though I felt flat when I purchased them for us, the pull to see and hear Smith live again was stronger than my anhedonia and gloom.
Though a migraine prevented me from enjoying Smith’s concert last week with all my might, the pain did not prevent me from becoming lost in her mystical lyrics and mesmerizing performance. As she and her band went deeper into Horses, my depressed spirit to my surprise started to elevate. Later when she sang “Pissing in a River,” one of my favorite songs of hers, something began to shift within me.
Once I arrived home after midnight, I took two Baclofen for my MS spasticity and tense neck muscles that contribute to my chronic and intractable migraines. I drifted off to sleep and slept in the next day. I used the time I had taken off from work to rejuvenate.
After waking, I felt my usual exhausted and unhopeful mindset starting to retreat. I began reading my used paperback copy of M Train that had arrived from Thrift Books the Friday before Smith’s concert.
Five years after she won the National Book Award for Just Kids, Alfred A. Knopf published M Train. I had not read it after its publication because of the aforementioned clutter of life and work along with the misery and despair dominating my life.
As I continued reading M Train, the calcification of depression and anhedonia cocooning my blood started to crack a bit. On Sunday, an urge overcame me to head to the newly opened Kurdish cafe Nubar Cafe down the street from my condo.
I went there not just read more of M Train but to also write more in my journal. The bustling cafe removed me from the chaos of home and family life. I ended up writing by hand (illegibly) seven pages.
Following through on my therapist’s assignment from last week, I began my Sunday journal entry with a list of things and people I am grateful for. She said recognizing what and who I am grateful for would start creating new neuropathways to change my mindset and break my depression and pessimism. One of the people I mentioned in my journal that I was grateful for was Patti Smith.
Yesterday out of curiosity, I looked at the web page of Nubar Cafe to learn more about its mission and background. It’s About Us section reads,
At Nubar, a charming Kurdish Cafe, we believe in the beauty of fresh beginnings. Inspired by the Middle Eastern and Kurdish meaning of ‘Nubar’ — symbolizing spring, renewal, and rare beauty — our café offers a cozy space where earthy flavors and delightful coffee, pastries, and brunch come together. Whether you’re savoring your morning coffee or indulging in a sweet treat from the Nubar Cafe menu, we invite you to pause, connect, and embrace the simple joys of a new day.5
As a writer and artist, I know words and visuals hold multiple meanings. I too felt a “renewal” happening. I did not write anything of merit in my journal, but at Nubar, I did “embrace the simple joys of a new day.” My Catholic spirituality and belief that nothing in life is an accident also played into why I think I suddenly decided head to Nubar Sunday to start afresh.
During her concert, Smith discussed the inspiration for and creation of her song “Break It Up” on Horses. I don’t want to spoil her song’s backstory for my readers who may already have tickets to see Smith. Instead I will leave you with the song. I feel like her inspiration is starting to break up the sadness and hopelessness that have personally and artistically plagued me for far too long.
For her and for her inspiration, I am grateful.
Questions for comments:
What are you grateful for this week?
What are you grateful for this year?
What do you plan to approach or do differently for the rest of this year and in the new year?
What has inspired you? How has it inspired you?
Patricia Morrisroe, Mapplethorpe, New York: Random House, 1995, 26.
Patti Smith, “A Final Flower,” Flowers: Mapplehorpe, Schirmer/Mosel, 1990, n.a.
Patti Smith, “Piss Factory,” Genius. genius.com, https://genius.com/Patti-smith-piss-factory-lyrics, Accessed 24 November 2025.
Lucy Harbron, “When Patti Smith Met Donald Trump: “One of the Most Horrendous People that I Ever Met,” Far Out, faroutmagazine.co.uk, https://faroutmagazine.co.uk/most-horrendous-person-patti-smith-has-ever-known/, 28 July 2025, Accessed 24 November 2025.
“About Us,” Discover Nubar Cafe, Nubar Cafe, thenubarcafe.com, https://thenubar.com/, 2025, Accessed 25 November 2025.\