#3: Em Brill

"There is absolutely no substitute for living the kind of life you want, and you have to do whatever it takes to get there."

Em Brill is a New York-based poet and curator with a taste for the romantic and a healthy disdain for contemporary psychology. I implore you to check out her work (some favorites: Turkish baths LA Fitness, Dream, come true, Cross-legged in the grass with my plastic angel)…or, you can just keep reading.

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At a glance…

Location: LES

Big 3: Cancer/Cancer/Scorpio

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What does health, or being healthy, mean to you?

Feeling free and at ease, dynamic, vivid, and joyful. In repose, truly relaxed. In action, sprightly and charming. Present. Emanating life. Able to connect with the world and what’s beyond the world. That’s what healthy means to me, and health is the set of practices that nurture that state.

How would you describe your current lifestyle? 

In its ideal state: calm, aligned, attentive; open to dreaminess, joy, reverence, rapture; rhythmic and good-humored. From a phone note written in a period of ill health: “My goal is to be stable, calm, productive, and happy. Always learning always growing quietly inspired and engaged and alive.”

How do you start and end your days? 

Start: Wash my face, brush my teeth, brush my hair, feed my cats Lu and Lila, clean their litter boxes, take supplements, drink water and coffee, eat breakfast. End: Read or write in my journal if I’m staying in; take a bubble bath if I’ve had a rough day; light candles always. If I’m going out on the town, I have a good time and stay out as late as I can.

Was there a specific moment in life that made you change your approach to health? If so, what happened—and what changed?

Yes, I stopped drinking on May 1, 2020. I’d interviewed for a prestigious job the previous day and poured myself a glass of champagne. I sat alone in my parents’ garage, took a sip of it, and thought, “Why am I doing this? Who is this for?” I dumped the rest of the glass out and that’s the last drink I had.

I’d been interested in sobriety for a while. I’m a sensitive person, attuned to feeling and energy. I believe sensations are enough to get you high. I mean, have you ever listened to “Time to Pretend” by MGMT in your headphones while walking down the sidewalk on a sunny day? Come on.

The day I decided I wouldn’t be drinking anymore, I wrote in my phone, “it’s for mystical purposes that i don’t want to imbibe. i do not want to take the universe out of alignment.” I think clarity is important, and I believe in God, and in trying to be good. It’s connected to all that for me, too.

As far as what’s changed, I became a lot happier and started accomplishing the things I’d been wanting to for years. It’s not a cure-all—I still have my little assortment of emotional problems—but it’s been great for my life. If you’ve been thinking about it, I recommend going for it.

What's your relationship like to death?

I developed a relationship with death in May 2022, when my mom, grandfather, and I sat with my grandmother while she was dying. It was an incredibly moving experience, characterized by silence and patience. I remember the hospital room quite well: the silver IV stand with its starfish legs, the moss-green walls and the beeps of equipment, the stuffed lamb atop her chest slowly rising and falling as she breathed. The click of the door-latch. Her baby blue blanket. That room felt like the entire world, the bright Georgia sky and puffs of clouds outside like outer space. I wasn’t thinking about anything.

She moved through periods of silence and noise. In the most harrowing phase, she called out phrases that suggested she was having to reckon with what had most troubled her in life. I envisioned her hacking through branches in a dark, misty forest, trying to get to the other side. And though we couldn’t see the branches, the mist was so total that it enveloped the room. Then it finally cleared—she made it out. It wasn’t at this point that she died; she simply quieted, and she died later on, the next day or the day after.

Though this experience didn’t bring me to total peace with death on a personal level, it gave me a reverence for it. I believe that souls don’t disappear, they just change form. And I believe people are formed in part by energy absorbed from our loved ones, so our continued existence is theirs. In this sense, we don’t really die.

Do you have any recurring dreams?

Yes, for years I’ve periodically dreamt that I’m standing in a mid-century sunken living room, mostly brown and tan in tone, lit only by the distant sun through the window on a dim afternoon, feeling airy and open, when I realize there’s a room behind the living room. I walk toward it and realize it’s a library, filled with plants, shelves and shelves of books, forest-green couches. I wander around in a state of wonderment. This dream visits me rarely but I am glad to have had the pleasure of experiencing it more than once.

Do you believe in the concept of self-healing, or that one can heal oneself?

I believe deeply in the process of transmuting energy through art production. I heal myself through this. Whenever I write a poem or make a piece of art, I feel better. If I couldn’t do this, I would die, and it would be a terrible, horrible death.

By way of example, I’ll point to these poems, written at the end of summer 2021. That summer was pretty explosive for me, as I think it was for a lot of people—the world was reopening in full after the pandemic, and the vibe shift had just happened (the one recorded by the Angelicism school and Lana Del Rey in “Violets for Roses,” not that New York magazine girl. I’m sorry to bring it up because I know we don’t talk about it anymore, but I do believe in it. I felt it). I was a mess by the end of that summer, and when I wrote these poems, I felt I had passed through the labyrinth, come out strong and whole on the other side.

Where do you look to for information or guidance on matters of health/wellness? Do you work with anyone on a regular basis?

I read spiritual texts. Some favorites are Teresa of Avila: The Book of My Life, Julian of Norwich: Revelations of Divine Love, and the Tao Te Ching. Spiritually enriched poetry helps me, too, like that of T.S. Eliot, HD, Adelia Prado, and Rumi.

I also pray, talk to my family and friends, and try to engage with beauty as often as possible, whether that’s by going to an art museum or simply putting myself in a beautiful situation. Energetically, that gives me information and guidance.

As far as practitioners I see regularly, at the moment I have a psychiatrist and therapist, but I’m not a proselytizer on the virtues of these fields. It’s actually the opposite with me; I stand with Wernor Herzog when he says that the emergence of the psych- fields has been such a disaster as to render the entire twentieth century a mistake. [Ed’s note: read the full interview here.]

I’d prefer not to go into detail about why I’m engaged with these professionals despite this belief, other than to say, I guess, that life is not perfect. And that the main situation that’s causing me to go to them is going to change soon, and with that, the people I meet with to care for my health will change.

Fuck, marry, kill: three health trends of your choice.

Fuck: Veganism (a grounded yet exalted practice; it’s worthwhile to try to limit the suffering you partake in and to be mindful of what goes into your body. I’m a longtime vegetarian who reintroduced occasional seafood in 2022—I come from a line of fishermen, and I want to be part of my family’s culture—but I was vegan for a few years). Marry: The cold plunge. Kill: Psychoanalysis. Sorry everybody. “Psychoanalysis is the disease it purports to cure.” - Karl Kraus </3

You have $300 to spend at your favorite health foods store. Where do you go, and what do you buy?

I’d love to give a different answer here. But truthfully, due to a need for convenience borne of time constraints, I’d go to Whole Foods :/ :/ :/ I’d buy the Balsam & Cedar candle from Illume, the Santal candle from Brooklyn Candle Company, marine collagen, Traditional Medicinals Dandelion Tea, Yogi Honey Lavender Tea, Yogi Detox Tea, Herb Pharm Lemon Balm tincture, lavender bubble bath, lavender epsom salt, a CBD tincture, ashwaganda capsules, magnesium glycinate capsules, Nature Made gummy multivitamins with omega-3, and lots of organic produce and fermented foods.

What do you think is the most pressing health issue of our time?

I hesitate to launch into this (if anyone wants to give me a million dollars, I’ll never talk about it again), but my honest answer is: the conditions that comprise what academics have taken to calling “late capitalism.” The fact healthcare is tied to full-time employment and wages have been largely stagnant in America since the 1970s has created the disgusting situation wherein anyone who wasn’t lucky enough to be born into wealth needs to devote most of their precious time to wage labor. The psychic and spiritual damage this inflicts is astounding; it’s difficult to contend with. We need to have the time and resources to think and to be and to live the way we want, to do the things we need to do to survive and thrive. The fact we don’t have it is the cause of nearly all personal and societal health issues, I believe. When I think of all the great art that’s been lost to this system, I want to cry, and often do cry. I struggle with it a lot.

What advice would you give to the person reading this?

That there is absolutely no substitute for living the kind of life you want, and you have to do whatever it takes to get there.