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Jamie Lee Hodgkin | Writer

@msjalee

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Writer surviving a biblical-grade dumpster fire.
Therapist writing the long way through grief, love, and becoming someone new. Find me on Substack 🧡

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This May Gray 🌈 Kitten Surprise attack is dedicated to my friend @kevinsousaband. He was larger than life and fearlessly led the way to help too many people to count. The type of person who would grin through a mistake and keep going, and belt it out especially when it wasn't perfect. Also thank you @6enuine9oy for my 🎶 education. by @msjalee

Last night's Substack Live with @arbonne.us took a perfectly reasonable trajectory.

We began with staying centered in a compromised world, wandered into grounding beneath the redwoods, made a brief stop at psychedelics, encountered aliens, brushed shoulders with the KGB, and somehow arrived at the working hypothesis that corporations may simply be highly organized psychopaths with better branding.

Honestly, I've had less coherent therapy sessions. And yes, I did lose my arm in my shirt. Adulting on the fly is hard.

If any of that sounds like your idea of a pleasant evening, the replay is now available through the link in my bio.

Bring curiosity. Leave certainty.👽🌲 by @msjalee

Chosen family, right here. Singing, "Neon Stars", Joshua's favorite. I lost my bandmate, and gained a new one. 🥀👭🌹

#gbm
#tnbc
#cancer
#survivors by @msjalee

In these sacred hours, I am going back in time to reflect, to grieve what still sits like an elephant on my chest, and to praise the power we all have to heal, recover, and be redeemed.

I hope it touches you on a heavier day and offers some encouragement that change is the only constant, and that through reflection, through allowing the soft animals of our bodies to move, shake, cry, and love what they love~

we might remember that there is no one with a beating heart, and breath in the lungs here in my heart who does not deserve mercy, dignity, and a chance to become someone truly new.

I posted an older post in my recent note on Substack.

Link in my bio. 🖤 by @msjalee

I will be catching up on approximately 2–5 years of sleep deprivation over the next season. I am safe. I am well. And my wrist is feeling roughly 1,000% 🌈 better than it did while I was lugging four bags around the Hawaiian Islands, attempting to catch the last flight out ahead of some very dramatic weather, only to come home and take an unexpected little detour into wrist surgery.

By Friday morning at 8:04, coincidentally the exact time of my birth, I called an Uber to the ED. I still need to tip that nice man from Ertrea. Around 9:11, the time that appeared on the microwave when I knew my brother, and then Joshua, were really dying, I was informed that surgery was the best option to protect the nerve and prevent worsening carpal tunnel and neuropathy.

Actually, the great news was delivered more like this:
"I think, unfortunately, there is no option to treat this non-operatively, meaning that you definitely need surgery."

I elected to move ahead since...Kaiser failed me at ever possible turn to do it right.

A message I sent to my therapist tonight, as I may be stuck with the full out of pocket expense, which is unfortunate, seeing as Sharp, well, chemo, caused osteopenia (thus, six broken bones since Nov. 21, 2004, which surprisingly only my bone scan finally validated last April.

"P.S. Boundaries are crucial in the therapeutic container I know, but I had to cancel our last session on account of breaking my damn wrist. 🙄 Not one surgeon in the whole Hawaiian chain of Kaiser command could help.

In fact, not a single one of them even called me back to follow up on my six desperate calls to the travel nurse, who basically mandated I return to the Kona ED 3x due to fever and rapid onset infection, until TODAY at 4:09 pm." A very fatigued male voice called today.

So, apparently 8:04 remains an excellent time for major life announcements!

Surgery went well. The wrist already feels at least 200x better, I am resting, and there is truly no emergency here. Just me, temporarily operating with one functional hand and an increasingly impressive collection of plot twists.
Life is a trip. I continue to do my best not to take the whole thing too seriously. 🪷🫡 by @msjalee

Dear Sharon, Thank you. ❤️‍🩹 “Everyday hallelujahs” is such a beautiful way to describe him, and I knew exactly what you meant when I read it. I remember that about Joshua too. He could become completely delighted by something most people would walk straight past. A strange flower, a bird, a shell, a beautiful rock, some tiny thing happening in the sky. He noticed.

I love hearing your memories of him that I wasn't there for, like the lanterns on the beach. I hope you’ll keep telling me those when they come to you. There are so many pieces of him that belonged to different people and different parts of his life, and lately it has felt healing to me rather than painful to discover more of them.

I’ll pray for you too. I think Sunday will be tender, especially with it being Joshua’s birthday and Gregory’s service at the same church where Gregory and Jasmine sat beside me when I was trying to find my way back to God. There is something strange and beautiful about all of those threads meeting in one place.

And yes, brighter days are coming. Maybe noticing the everyday hallelujahs is part of how we get there.
Happiest of birthdays, Joshua. Today you are 42 and 11 hrs young. ❤️ by @msjalee

After three consultations with some of the best surgeons on the islands, I navigated myself back to San Diego just ahead of the next round of Hawaiian storms, and somehow landed in the deeply unexotic luxury of a city where the roads make sense, the weather mostly behaves, and I know exactly where to go when something in my body decides to become an emergency.

Hawaii was spectacular in the way Hawaii seems determined to be spectacular: volcanic coastlines, jungle, warm rain, impossible blue water, flowers growing out of everything. And then, sometimes within the same hour, biblical rain, flash flooding, thunder, power outages, slippery black rock and, in my particular case, one badly broken arm. 🌺🌋🌧️

There is something strange about leaving all that wild beauty and landing back in the peace and predictability of San Diego. I love the islands for their untamedness. I love this place because I can exhale here. My doctors are here. My history is here. I know the streets, the hospitals, the shortcuts, the people. Apparently there are seasons of life when predictability becomes its own kind of paradise.

And yes, I am still moving to Hawaii. That part hasn’t changed. I’m beginning to understand, though, that “home” may never mean one fixed dot on a map for me again. My health has made me unexpectedly mobile, sometimes by choice and sometimes very much not, and perhaps my life is simply becoming larger than one address.

More homes. More hearts. More love.

For now, I find myself back in a perfectly lovely state awaiting an 8:00 a.m. appointment tomorrow at Sharp with the best of the best to put me back together.

I’ll only be here for the next four to forty days (give or take). If you’re in San Diego and would like to reconnect somewhere between surgery, sleep, ocean air and whatever other nonsense the universe has scheduled for me, you know where to find me. 🐬☀️🌴 by @msjalee

A writer I know only through the internet, and now our sweet time spent communing on yesterday’s podcast, spent part of her evening looking through old photographs and videos of Joshua and me and then sent me a message about what she saw.

Instead of offering platitudes or advice, she dedicated her time to the simple act of paying attention, which may be one of the rarest forms of love we give one another now.

I lay there reading her words and thinking how significant it is that someone who never met him could still recognize the shape of what we had, years later, through a handful of images and songs and moments frozen in time.

The longer he is gone, the less grief feels like carrying a wound and the more it feels like carrying an entire continent. Not only for the size of the hole he left in the world, but for the multitude of travelers who have encircled it, throwing their coins into the well to keep all of mine company.

I miss him with a depth I still don't have language for, but every so often someone reflects a piece of him back to me and reinforces what I already know: love does not disappear when a life ends. It simply continues traveling through other people, and through their rooms of the living.

Thank you, @Lama El Hajjar 🤍 by @msjalee

Home sweet home 🪷🌿 🐬🥥🕊️
We're gettin’ there~

Somewhere behind this little tour of my room is James listening while I talk too softly about Steve, Joshua, dead children, old classrooms, “terrible people,” good people who did terrible things, the stories that have been told about me, and all of the other dead loves we keep dragging back into the room, if only so memory does not die alongside them.

At one point, after comparing notes on all of the violence we had each witnessed in our long teaching careers (his much, much longer than mine, of course), I finally tell him, after climbing into a near-manic rant, “You know, I overwhelm myself with all of this anger and intensity. I’m surprised that you can sit here and just take it, dude.”

He tells me, “It’s a lot, a lot of the time.”

I say, “Thank you.”

And then, a little later: “Have you considered? The possibility that I might like listening to you?”

That is more or less the soundtrack here.

Two people who have come from nearly opposite lives, generations, aesthetic preferences, and communication styles so polarized they are almost comical. Somehow, we agree that this rare friendship between two unlikely ships passing through one another’s night has been healing for us both. by @msjalee

Some stories don’t arrive as memories. They arrive as objects." A rock from Zion. A shattered CD.
The last recording I thought I had left in the world before an overly eager musician mailed it back from Alabama following a promise to promptly return it nearly a year before.

There is a moment in writing when the story stops being something you are telling and starts becoming something you are listening to.

Over the last few weeks I went back into this piece and revised nearly everything.

Not to change the story. But to hear it more clearly. Grief writes loudly the first time.

It spills.
It insists.
It believes urgency is clarity.

Revision is quieter.
Revision brushes away the excess sand.
Revision lets the bones of the story appear.

The breathing of the redwoods.
The small bird in the mine.

The songs arriving at 1:42 in the morning like oxygen through a cracked window.

This version is the one that finally feels true.
Not polished.
Just clearer.

Like looking at the same night sky and realizing the stars were never random. They were constellations all along.

This chapter now carries the threads of several nights.

• the redwoods and the philosophy of leave it better than you found it

• the canary that started singing long before the mine changed

• the songs that arrived like signals in the dark

Alaska. The Emperor’s Clothes. Mandinka. California Stars.

Each one a flare.
Each one a reminder that the air was shifting.

But there is another piece I have never shared publicly.

The first recording I ever burned to a CD of all of the songs my teenage self had written. And this, this I found in a box in my parents' garage in January.

Read the long-form version, and listen to baby Jamie echoing down the nostalgic halls of California, The Calm Before the Canary by @msjalee

Twelve weeks. When I found out, it was Sunday morning, July 21st. I had been working 17-hour days at a summer camp managing 120 adolescents from over 11 countries, 13 staff members, multiple payrolls, and hefty banking transactions. I had been responsible for every crisis, every urgent care visit, every teen who decided not to be in bed by curfew. Endless tasks, endless texts, eternal sleep deprivation. But beneath all of it, I think I already knew.

I had lost my appetite. I smelled everything, and everything turned my stomach. My breasts ached. I was late. Every waking hour, I felt like I was sedated with Ambien and lugging around a ten-pound bag of flour. When I was a week late, I walked out to my car with a double load of laundry. My assistant manager asked me if I was OK. I looked at him, then I looked at the sky.

“We’ll see...”

Feeling like probably I was not, I drove straight to Albertsons, bought two pregnancy tests and a ginger Kombucha, and walked directly into a bathroom stall. Both tests were instantly positive.

I wonder how many women have found out they were pregnant in a grocery store bathroom stall, staring at two pink lines while someone outside the door was deciding between oat milk and whole. How many walked back through fluorescent aisles carrying the biggest secret of their lives in a plastic grocery bag.

🤍

Continued in my memoir on Substack. The link is in my bio. Regularly scheduled live interviews with other artists, therapists, and transmuters. by @msjalee

I so enjoy the people I meet and the perspectives that grow my mind and world. In this interview, we explore consciousness, grief, and focusing on the fact that we always come back to joy though the suffering we endure can sometimes be so great. What we focus on expands, so we thank our troubles for how they crack us open to loving more, not less. 🤍

@pranav_4x by @msjalee