Gung Hay Fat Chance

(*have no idea if this will go there, but I had to use that phrase!)

I didn’t graduate college “on time.” All my roommates and classmates were getting their tassels aligned and family convened, and I was lining up for Seroquel, my family convening in a sterile hospital cafeteria.

So, when that episode was over, I got a rinky-dink job at a local drug store, and when that was enough of that (and my hair had grown back somewhat), I got a job as an admin in an insurance claims company, finished my degree with night classes, and graduated in May of ’04, instead of ’03.

That summer, I applied for the Birthright program—a program which sends Jewish teens and 20s to Israel for 10 days for free if they’ve never been. I applied and was accepted to the “graduate” program, the older group of folks, between 22 and 26. I spent 10 days in a dusty bus gaining some of the most incredible experiences, and information—nearly all of the people on the bus were “doing something” with their lives. One worked at a magazine in New York City; several were in law school; one taught high school English in a Catholic school. I… was a claims adjustor.

When I got back to my cubicle, under the fluorescent lights, I decided it was time to call this episode over, too. Incredibly, my dad had met a woman on his commuter bus who was an editor at a New York magazine, and through a short interview process, I was hired as their Editorial Intern.

It was amazing. It was probably the job I’ve enjoyed most of any I had. The differences were drastic: although I was working longer hours with a much longer commute, I was coming home more “happily tired” than simply exhausted, as from the claims job. I loved the work. Writing copy, coordinating with off-site editors, proofreading & editing. I even wrote my own article about Bill Nye The Science Guy’s endorsement of a new brand of contact lenses.

I loved the pace, the investment I had in the work, the creative input I was able to have. The respect I had of my superiors for my intelligence and ideas. I loved working at 6th and Canal, walking the street vendors at lunch, earning real dough, even for an intern.

But, summer ended. It was a post-9/11 market still, and small optical trade magazines didn’t have much of a budget for an editorial assistant. So I went back on the market.

The market was bare.

My aunt suggested I go teach English abroad. She’d done it in Taiwan, and there were plenty of recruitment companies to choose from. I found one, and in conversation with them, found out that although there were plenty of South East Asian jobs, the most money was to be made in South Korea.

So, after a 9 pm phone interview with a school director outside of Seoul, two days later, I’m buying my first real luggage at Target. Two days from then, I’m on a plane to a place I’d never been to work with people I’d never met in a country whose language I did not speak, to remain for the next 18 months.

Sure. Why not?

My experiences were wide and varied and not always pleasant in that peninsular country. I won’t engage the story here (I’ve got to leave for work), but the school year always ended and began around the Chinese New Year, a.k.a. today.

Today would be the day you would be assigned or reassigned to a classroom of sometimes wily, sometimes endearingly shy 5 year olds. Today, as the cherry blossoms bloomed outside and streets were hung with red paper lanterns and students’ parents handed you red envelopes full of “thank you” tips, you listened to the 5 year olds who had cried at the start of the year, “Teacher! Water!,” ask you, “Molly Teacher, I’m thirsty. Can I have some water, please?”

It was more beautiful than the blossoms. 

"I hate it when you call me, 'Bro.'"

(*a line from face/off we invoke often)

I dreamt this morning that my brother Ben and I were jumping around while singing this really funny camp song in the kitchen where we grew up. It’s this Hebrew song called “Ochel,” food, that starts with the word, Hummus, has the word Pizza in there somewhere, v’Steak – “YEE HA!”

I don’t know all the words, but somehow it’s stuck in my neurons all these years. We learned most of these songs at sleep-away camp in the Poconos mountains growing up.

Working in a synagogue now, I get to see parents of nursery school children, Hebrew school-aged children, summer camp children, and I get to notice something that as a child of course doesn’t strike you: Parenting costs a lot of money, and our parents shelled out.

We did all of those things. "Growing up" was a mixed bag, always, but when it came to our education, our extracurricular activities, paying for summer camp, they did. Granted, they were both full-time working parents, and needed us to be somewhere. But, you don’t realize til you’re older that all those things were value judgments for our parents, and they valued us in that way, the fostering of our education, our fun, our play.

I was the kid with the off-brand Troll doll, and got made fun of for it. I was the girl who in 6th grade was told that there was a bet for what I’d wear the next day, since my outfits were so few. We did shop at the discount mall.

But, I also was the one who played Gin Rummy with my dad, and my brother played chess with him. I was the girl who used the round white plastic things they use in pizza boxes as Barbie tables with my best friend from next door. And I was the girl who got to go away to camp, even though none of those summers was perfect (teasing, breaking a tooth, waking up with a spider on my face!).

But my upbringing was American, I guess. With “American values,” and the striving to provide me and my brother the kind of life that they envisioned as successful.

And in so many ways, they did.

Besides gratitude for knowing that song and its nonsensical joy, knowing that flailing around loudly in our kitchen is totally something my bro and I would do, as I woke up this morning, I also felt a little wistful, wondering if Ben and I would really ever get to do that again. He lives a life on the East Coast; I see him maybe once a year if we’re lucky. Will we get to sing camp songs, exchange movie lines, wallow in the hilarity of our non-sequitors?

I remember one day, sitting on the couch with him in the house where we grew up, we were in our tweens. Somehow we began making up a non-sequitor story that included the phrase, And then the tree crashed through the window, scattering the gnomes.

How much fun would that story be to continue?! and it was.

I know I write about it often, the distance from my family, and how hard it is for me. And these are the reasons why. It’s not just about “getting to see one another;” it’s also about getting to share the one relationship that you are likely to have the longest in your life, getting to share memories, laughter, and change with one another.

I instant message him sometimes during the day. They’re usually short conversations, since I’m usually at work. But, I get to float a balloon of humor and love in his direction and he gets to tell me how he’s adjusting to his move to Baltimore. We each text one another quotes from Back to the Future or Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure, to remind us both that we have this network, this shared history and connection.

I’d tell you, “It’s enough,” but it’s not. But, maybe just like feeling grateful for the way our parents raised us, warts and all, I can feel grateful that we have the relationship we do. I know neither of these things are commonplace. 

Progress, Not Perfection...

When I have clarity of vision, pretty amazing things tend to happen.

About 2 years ago, when working my way through the Calling in The One book, I decided it was time to get that 2nd bedside table to “energetically” be more inviting to a partner. The one I had on my side is sort of shabby/chic, wooden, painted white, with a little storage and soft, almost country structure. Very soon thereafter, I wandered into a garage sale down the block – and wouldn’t you know, there is the perfectly complementary bedside table – different shape, but same country feel, wooden, painted white, same height too.

Over last summer, I decided it was time to upgrade my ever-chipping, ever-depleting plateware and bowl collection. I had one bowl left. And a stack of gray, unappealing plates that I'd bought for cheap thinking they’d be “sleek,” but were instead just… gray. Very soon thereafter, I was in Cole Valley, waiting for my band to play at the street fair, and lo, there was a stack of multicolored, almost Fiesta ware bowls and a stack of bright blue plates to go with them—for free.

Within the last two months, a man was crossing the street in front of my car as I drove home from work. He was dressed “smartly,” wearing a sweater over a button-down shirt, well-fitting jeans, and real shoes, not sneakers. I said to myself, I want someone who wears clothes like that. (Though, sure, I would have barfed at such a preppy [pulled-together??] look in the past.)  This wasn’t the first time I’d thought that, as I noticed men milling about the world recently. And, you guessed it, very soon thereafter, I met this new boy, who wears smart clothing, fitting the above description to a T.

So, point? Well, my coworker would smirk at my “manifest-y” meanderings, but my point is more that when I have a vision of what I want, more often than not (and so often with housewares!), I get it very quickly and with much ease.

I took a personality test about a year ago, the Meyers-Briggs, with a friend who actually processes these tests for a living. Part of the reason for my wanting to do this type of test was to find out what I “should do” with my life—if there were places and arenas in the world that would benefit most from the assets I already have, the things that come easy to me. And wouldn’t you know, for “appropriate jobs,” my particular personality type listed all kinds of artsy things (writer, painter, actor), also counselor and clergy, all of which I’ve contemplated in the past.

What it also told me about me about my “type” were the pitfalls, and how to counter them. How to counter idealistic, magpie, not detail-oriented leanings? 

“Focus, Prioritize, Follow-through.”

Eesh. Yuck.

But, see all my above Manifesty moments? These were ALL born of something called “focus.” I had clarity. I knew what I wanted, and made myself open to receive it by participating in the world.

One of the final meditations at my annual meditation retreat in Napa a few years ago left me with the following directive: Use Your Time Efficiently.

I’ve been SO F*ING BUSY, it feels. I’m doing and going and participating, but I’m not focused or prioritized, so I don’t get done the things I really want to do; I don’t move forward in those places.

Be it career advancement, monologue learning, song writing. Gardening.

There are areas in my life I want to deepen. I want to strengthen the roots of these priorities. I want to make forward motion with them. Which means, I want to make time for them, real, expansive, focused, invested time.

Running hither and thither is great. My life is FULL. So freaking full, I don’t know my ass (non-essentials) from my elbow (essentials), and, as example, I spent way more money on take-out food this month, since I haven’t had any time for food shopping and cooking—something which actually does feed me, in all the ways.

Focus. Prioritize. Follow-through.

If they came naturally to me, I would have honed them already. They don’t. A personality test, and 32 years of knowing my own personality have proven that these are not inherent.

However, if I want to live the life that is more about quality than quantity, I need to (strike that!) – I would like to encourage myself in learning how to do this. I know it’s possible. My free amazing couch that I sit on right now is proof of vision equaling results. But, in order to even have time to let the dust settle in the glass, I have to sit still, listen closely, be open to asking for help in how on earth one "focuses, prioritizes, and follows-through," and most of all, allow myself progress, not perfection. 

So??

So, what is happening with the boy (in real life, not in my brain)?

Well, instead of sending my crazy text on Saturday morning, I sent instead, “Brunch tomorrow?” Luckily my journal, you, and my friends get the brunt of the crazy, so by the time I get into interacting with human beings unaware of my brain functions, they get something resembling “normal.”

So, there was brunch on Sunday. During the course of conversation, without blasting a fire extinguisher of mania at him, he said of his own accord, “We're dating; that’s what we’re doing.” Oh, Okay. Good to know.

So, then... Dating. There’s another one planned for this Saturday evening. And, I am unsure if there will be more, and unsure if I want there to be, but want there to be this one, at least, so I can figure that out – that’s the whole point of the dating thing, isn’t it? To spend enough time with someone to figure out if you want to spend your time exclusively with them? (Not like all your time, just your romancy time.) I’m honestly not sold, which is as it should be – we’ve been on three dates. Not enough to know much, except we have relatively good conversation, I am still a little stiff and breath-holdy around him (though I measurably relaxed once he said, "We're dating"), and really enjoy his roaming hands. If there’s more than the roaming hands that I enjoy, only time can tell.

So, that’s the story. I am honestly still tempted to “put on my love light” and get back in the ring (to mix metaphors). I don’t know the strength of this one dating situation, so why preclude myself from others. What that will mean to “get back out there,” I don’t know at all. Maybe just a frame of mind. I am still single after all, and I’m not racing to lock it down with this one dude, cuz I’m not sure yet. Seems … mature, maybe? Realistic? Appropriate?

In much other news, I have an audition on Monday for a staged reading. I have a role suggested to me for my monologue by the 25 y.o., but haven’t yet read the play – this all means, … I’m not prepared, and unlikely to have something memorized by Monday. I need a contemporary 1-2 minute dramatic monologue, and all I have/own in my head is the Shakespeare piece I did the other weekend. So, … if, lord help me, I need to use notes for this, then I will. It’s just information, it’s just trying. I know now that I need to have/own more than one piece if I want to be in this auditioning game, which may one day, who knows, how-much-easier-to-let-go-of-the-results-of-this-than-dating, lead to the acting part – the part I actually want.

It’s interesting to me, getting to compare the way I was clinging to certainty around dating, and am pretty much just joyful to show up around acting. I actually did a fist pump when I left my audition the other week! Not because I thought I did awesome, but because I showed up. THAT’S awesome.

Of course, you know I’m going to say something like, “Now, if I can just allow the fluidity, joy, presence, confidence and love of self I hold around auditioning flow into the dating world, I’ll be much happier, and indeed, much more myself.”

Yes, I would say something like that, wouldn't I?

Step on a crack...

In meditation this morning, I went to address the fault line located yesterday. The one within me, upon which my foundational ideas of love and trust were precariously built.

There, I witnessed this deep crevice in the earth, not Grand Canyon-esque, but not fillable with some caulk either. So, per my shamanic practice, I asked my guides how I could fill in this fissure to be able to build love and trust on a firm foundation? No reply. Okay, how can you, guides, fill or heal this fissure? No answer.

I look back at the crevice, and notice that it’s like one of those holographic game cards, where if you turn the card one way, you get one image, and turn it the other, you see something different. As I looked, I saw that the fault line was both there, and not there. If I chose to see the crack, it was there; if I looked a little longer, it disappeared into the plain of the ground.

It doesn’t have to be there. This mistrust, this broken place, this doubt and fear.

I also heard that this doesn’t erase the events, it doesn’t invalidate or refute what my experience was growing up, but it doesn’t have to exist like this fault line any more.

What if I want to visit it? What if I want to pay homage to my pain, maybe dally in it a little? What if I want to soak in the sorrow of what happened? ~ Sure, that’s an option.

But, I got to see that, over time, even though I may now know precisely where the fault line had been--mapped its edges, named its outcroppings--since it is now just a part of the whole of the landscape, over time, I will forget exactly where it was. It was somewhere right around here, I know it was. And soon, I’ll walk right over the land where the pain had been and not even realize I’m stepping easily over once-hallowed and -harrowed ground.

I don’t have to heal the place where love was built. I just have to notice that it’s already healed. 

major malfunction

The quote from Full Metal Jacket came to me this morning as I was putting away my (clean) dishes (thank you, Homejoy, for your Facebook coupon!): What is my major malfunction? Why have I gone so far off the reservation with this dating situation? What is my primary malfunction? Primary...

That’s when the trap door opened, I fell through my crazy, into the heart of truth. And I began to cry. From realization and long delayed-grief.

Some of you may know by now that my mother suffered from manic depression as I was growing up—still does, but went on medication about 8 years ago, around the time I got sober, in fact. She told me a few years back that she was terrified of loving me fully because she was scared of the depths of her feelings, that they would overwhelm her. She told me that when I was growing up, she would spend 30 minutes locked in her bathroom crying every morning before emerging into the day. This, I remember. Staring at the closed bathroom door every morning, listening to her cry, and having no idea why, if she would stop, if she would come out, what I could do. She said that she just thought this was normal—this was her normal at least, and it was the only way of being she knew.

The way this manifested in our relationship was that I never knew when she would turn. When she would be the mom who was there for me, and when she would click into mania and be unreachable in her heights, or click into depression and be unreachable in her depths.

This, was not a recipe for trust.

My father, as we all know, was a volatile man, doing nothing to help the bonds of trust and love cement into something benevolent, supportive, and foundational.

What I saw this morning is that the ambiguity of dating targets right into that major malfunction with laser precision.

I don’t blame her, and have long since forgiven her. But apparently, I still haven’t really healed what it meant to attempt to establish bonds of love on a fault line. Not knowing what your feelings are about me… I get as crazy as you’ve seen me this week. Perspective, reality, confidence, hobbies, work, all get ousted as I try to figure out what it means, because if I can figure out if the fault line is about to crack, then I can get out of dodge. I can shut down, run away, shove you away.

That was my previous M.O. for sure. I will shove you away before you get close, before I have to “figure out” if you’re trustworthy. It was not worth the pain of waiting to see if I could. Better to bomb the whole base, just in case there was a sniper in there aimed at me.

So, shove you away. That meant any number of things, including not dating, only have casual relationships, going after taken men.

My other way of being was to fall quickly into a relationship, which is how my two long-term (read: 6 months) relationships began. Express interest, have sex nearly immediately, you’re now in a relationship.

There wasn’t ambiguity in that.

I didn’t have to figure out (then) if you liked me, if you were gonna hurt me—we were “boyfriend/girlfriend,” and had great sex. It only came later (read: by month 4, and certainly by 6) that I had to question something different: if I liked you.

So, it is believable, understandable, and more than a little compassionable that an ambiguous dating situation would set off an atom bomb in my head. Though, ultimately, it’s stemming from my heart, but more ultimately, it’s stemming from my head, and the recreation of an old story and an old way of coping with the uncertainty of human relationships.

I have very little dating experience past the first date. It has always either gone: “Ciao, buddy, thanks for the latte,” or “Which side of the bed is yours?”

People I know talk ALL THE TIME about “living the in the grey,” “not figuring things out,” “relaxing into the experience,” and I want to spit a poisoned dart into their over-eager eye. Fuck you people. The grey was a place, growing up, that was riddled with landmines and Blitzkreigs. The grey place was one where you never knew if you would be okay, ever.

And now, of course, how fitting, I’m being asked to once again live in the grey—or at least get a rental application—but to live there differently. To live there, visit there, try it out there in the grey, because that’s where most of life is lived, and I want to live in life. To be in the grey differently, means to call upon my own foundations of trust that I have established with myself and with the people I have chosen to love as friends in my life—Not all of these friendships went the distance, but they were worth pursuing. And didn’t cause any agida. So, it’s a deeper love and a deeper trust we’re working on.

And it’s probably not even with a person, unless that person is me. It’s probably about developing, deepening, cementing trust with a benevolence. And from the foundation of that relationship, will I be able to withstand whatever the Richter scale throws at me. Especially if it's reading 0, and telling me it's safe to stay put.

Drowning in a sea of pearls

It is unclear if things have devolved in 25 y.o. land, but I get the sense from his flirtatious texts that perhaps our intentions are not aligned. It is unclear yet if I will bring up what mine are, ask him his, and accept what comes of that. Sitting in the ambiguity is uncomfortable. It is unclear whether sitting in the ambiguity is supposed to be my lesson, or a lesson here. It is unclear if saying: 

“I don’t know yet if I like you but I would be interested to find out. If that’s something you want to explore, then it would be nice to go out again. If not, that’s okay too.” 

is too forward or just right. Is it pushy, clear, honest, forthright, demanding, off-putting, or too soon?

I get Goldilocks' dilemma.

And I have a hard time letting go of the questions. Even with my full life.

One of the things the male co-author writes in It’s Just a F***king Date is that not every date works out, and then asks, did I get my heart broken? Sure, but not as much as I would have [if I didn’t remember it’s just a date].

So, am I heartbroken? No. I don’t even know whether I should be – what this is. Which, perhaps, is an answer. But I don’t like that “perhaps” hanging out there like a scab of uncertainty. Am I sad? A little. But, like above, not nearly as much as I could be. I mean, it was two dates. I went a little bananas, as we all read, and then I came back to center, remembered I’m awesome, and went about my awesome life. If this is someone who wants to join me on my path of awesome, great; if not, as above, “That’s okay too.” Cuz it really is.

I JUST WANNA KNOW.

Should I erase that name from my date book, or not?

I mean, I have read He’s Just Not That Into You. I do know that if someone isn’t asking you out, that has a meaning. I do know that sexy texts (which I'm replying neutrally to) are not a pathway to romance. But I want him to fucking say it. If that’s the truth, if you’re not into me, if you just want to fuck me, then say that. It saves me a lot of headache. If, because we had a very intense make-out session, I’m now relegated to the “hook-up” file in your own date-book, that’s fine too. Just let’s me know, once again, that the heavy necking should be better left to a time when its earned itself.

There’s nothing wrong with heavy necking, making out, or having sex. Don’t get me wrong. But, having recently been very clear with someone what my casual intentions were, getting those casual needs met, and closing the casual door behind him as he left, I got to see that although I acted with integrity, asked for my needs to be met, felt proud of my behavior and was very happy with the result, I also got to see that what I really want is someone who spends the night. I want to be that person for you too.

So, hooking up is all well and good, and it is also not yet decided that if the 25 y.o. says 'I don’t want to date' if I will go forward with something casual, since the previews indicated a blockbuster movie. But, I want to find out first if there’s an art film playing here, before I buy a ticket for Bourne 17. 

Strike That; Reverse It

(*Gene Wilder as Willy Wonka [Sorry, Johnny, you ruined a classic])

In order to get ready to enter words that create and convey feelings onto a screen that I upload to you, I have to do a little centering first. Otherwise, you’d get --- well, I don’t know – it just never felt right to dive out of bed and onto the screen. Instead, I dive out of bed toward the coffee pot, and then to the journal, the Morning Pages routine picked up many years ago by working The Artist’s Way with a group of varied and wonderful folks in Muddy Waters at 24^th street (you can have 16^th street).

In fact, in order to prepare for you, for this, for reclaiming my daily blog, I began writing them again because I knew I needed to skim the top layer off my thoughts and onto a written page before addressing you. I haven’t been consistent with the Morning Pages, but, pretty much so. I probably have a dozen notebooks since we began in, what, 2008? 2009?

After those (and I don’t always get 3 full long-hand pages, especially when my Thursday night acting class keeps me in Berkeley til 10pm), I try to meditate for even a few seconds, if I’m honest. I have varied the time of these “sits,” even up to 20 minutes, but for now, it’s about 5 minutes, if I get that. If not that, I do one fully present breath. Like really present, not what I’m going to do after this breath present. Because it’s usually somewhere between and in concert of these two practices that I get the kernel of what I want to say to you here.

I’ve written from monkey mind, I’ve quieted it (hopefully), and from there, I can address you.

What I’ve found in a few of my most recent journalings is that when I write the words, “I should…,” I’m stopping myself, crossing out “should” and instead writing something like, “I encourage and support myself in doing...”

I need to send those photos to that agency. STRIKE

I support and encourage myself in sending those photos.

I should go back to the gym today. STRIKE

I support and encourage myself in going to the gym.

What a difference of manner and direction that provides.

I’ve heard people use the phrase “Shoulding all over your self;” and it’s true, you, we, I can shame and should myself all I want – but remember the “more flies with honey than vinegar” thing? I think it works with ourselves, too. 

And while we’re on phrases; Shame, I’ve heard it said, can be an acronym for Should Have Already Mastered Everything. ~ Back to shoulding.

I’m liking that I’m catching myself and changing the language to something more positive, even though I’m the only one who sees it, and because I’m the only one who sees it. I’m only retraining myself. Does it help? Did it make me—strike that—encourage me to send the photos? Not yet. But I did go to the gym. 

Look! SHINY!!

I downloaded the book yesterday, It’s Just a F***ing Date, by the same people who wrote He’s Just Not That Into You and It’s Called A Break-up Cuz It’s Broken.

One of the first things the introduction says is, you’re obviously stuck in something you don’t like doing, or you wouldn’t have picked up this book.

I love their books. I first picked up Not that into you when I was living in South Korea. It was a lark, there weren’t that many books in the English-speaking section of the bookstore, and I thought it would be more funny than anything to see the stupidity of these women who didn’t get that these guys just weren’t into them; that these women needed a book to spell it out for them in order to stop knocking on the closed, booty-calling door.

And yet. Of course, I got to see that I was one of those huddled women justifying all kinds of behavior (theirs and mine) in the hopes of romance. 3 a.m. text = he’s just not that into you. Not able to hang out sober = he’s just not that into you. Has a girlfriend? Sweetie, come on, where has your self-respect gone?

When I broke up with my last serious boyfriend in 2011, I was wrecked. Walk into the house and stand inside the front door empty for several minutes wrecked. It felt like every day I was hit by a Mac truck. And yes, I was the one who ended it. But that didn’t mean that there wasn’t love there, that I didn’t care about him, about us, it’s just, we weren’t meant to be an us.

My brilliant friend Katie once told me the following: The thing about grief is that something is broken, but you’re not, and you’ve got to keep going.

I had no idea how. So I picked up Cuz It’s Broken. It gave some practical advice, funny anecdotes, and a great dose of compassion. And in time, it healed.

I love their books. So, having read an excerpt from their new It's Just a F***ing Date book a few weeks ago, prior to this new dating thing, I thought to look at it again yesterday, considering that my manic phone checking was probably not what the gods of serenity have in mind.

And here’s some interesting intel I’ve gathered. One of their questions is, When was the best period in your life, and What was going on that made it great? My answer was surprising and heartening: the best period of my life is happening now, the last few months of my life. What’s happening in it? Playing in a band, signing up for acting classes, going on auditions, planning a trip to the sea shore with my cousins, buying a new (to me) car, upgrading my wardrobe, going on a meditation retreat, eating well, seeing live entertainment, working the steps.

Also, I was using the Gratitude Journal app on my phone that dinged twice daily to remind me to pause & write something in.

When did this change, it asks? When I was asked on a date by someone I’m interested in. That’s when.

Suddenly, my center of focus has veered sharply toward someone else, what they think of me, if I’m approved, if my life activities are good enough, if my success is enough, if I’m prudent but sexy enough.

In short, what changed is that all the things that attracted someone to me in the first place, all the things that were bringing me joy, and self-esteem, and hope, have been tossed in favor of what you think of me.

This is a terrible recipe for self-love!!

This is not the first time that my eyes have wandered off my own music chart onto someone else’s in the orchestra of life and dating. I’d explained to someone once that if life were an orchestra, the most important thing is that we stay on our own page, with our own notes, listening to what’s happening around us, but focusing actively on what’s in front of and important to us. It would be a disaster if the oboe began to play the notes of the viola.

But, that’s what has happened for me before; I get worried, I get crazed.

Not attractive to me. Or to you.

So, what can I actively do to get back to that place, the book asks next? Well, for starters, I can type some things into my daily gratitude app. I can choose two photos from my portfolio to send to this modeling agency that may be a dead-end, but I was stopped on the street for. I can go back on Theater Bay Area and find another casting call, and I can find another monologue and start on that.

There are PLENTY of things that I can do to get back to that place, because in that place I was simply doing what fed me, was important to me, was fun, and enlivening.

And one of the changes can be to remember, it’s just a f*cking date and was never meant as the end goal – the whole “meet you on the way to meeting me” DOESN’T WORK if I stop trying to actively meet myself, you know.

It’s time for me to allow the mass rush of thinking about this, the boy, etc., recede into just one part of the array of my life. I have so much else I was doing that created now as the greatest period in my life—and, really, it is. 

Synchronici-wha?

When I got sick, my friend Aimee brought a photocopy from a book she owned to me in the hospital. I told her recently how much this piece of paper changed my whole experience, and she said she simply didn’t know what else to do. How else to show up or help, or what to say; she didn’t know if I’d snarl at the message it had to offer or get mad with her.

It was a page from Louise Hay’s You Can Heal Your Life, though I didn’t know that at the time. I didn’t know who Louise Hay was, and certainly didn’t know about that sickeningly sweet title.

The page had on it a list of ailments and diseases and physical symptoms. Next to them was a column of negative beliefs that the author had associated with these symptoms. In the final column were a list of correlated positive affirmations.

She’d circled, “Blood Problems” and “Leukemia.” Blood meant joy; a problem with the blood meant, in this cosm of beliefs, “Actively killing joy,” a “What’s the use?” mentality.

During the time I was sick, another friend brought me an audio CD of Dr. Bernie Siegel’s Love, Medicine, and Miracles, which, in part, tracked the general life pattern those who develop cancer have had. As I listened, I tracked with it--to a T. The final period before cancer, he'd discovered, usually consisted of a period of success, a major disappointment, followed by hopelessness.

I had just graduated with a Master’s in Creative Writing. The photo on my graduation day shows me nothing short of radiant, beaming, joy-fueled. I spent the summer hustling from a temp job to job interviews, trying, demanding, aching, to get a job in a creative field. Grateful as I am for the job that I received and am currently in, I felt broken in the weeks following my full-time employment. I cried as I waited for the always-late bus to take me home to a dreggy existence.

Three weeks after I was hired, I got strep throat; four weeks after I was hired, I was told I also had Leukemia.

Call that whatever you want, but when Aimee handed me that photocopy, and I saw that my life and symptoms were spelled out by someone who saw this as a commonplace pattern, I also saw that there was a third column that could help me to reverse it, or to heal it.

I showed that paper to everyone who came in (well, those who were of the more witchy variety). Some people squawked that it sounded like I was blaming myself for cancer. But, that’s not what my understand was, or is. Simply, we are sending ourselves messages all the time. We can choose to listen and alter our behavior, our patterns, as best we can; or, we can, like me, continue to shove aspirations, dreams, life, underneath a mountain of I can't, it's not working, it's not for me. Who cares.

At any point along this path, we can choose to listen to what our heart is saying. And listen though I sometimes did, I didn’t heed. I was too scared. Too scared to fail, to trust, to try thoroughly, to invest, to change. This isn’t to self-flagellate, I don’t feel it that way; it’s simply to objectively look at how I was treating myself.

If we don’t listen, these folks’ theory is that our body will respond with physical messages. And sometimes, those messages will become billboards, and sometimes those billboards will become atomic bombs.

Thinking about my cancer this way while I was in treatment gave me hope. It gave me a foundation, a cosmology, a system of belief that I was already attuned to anyway. (I’d personally always thought that cancer was calcified resentment, and you can hate me for saying that and disagree if it doesn’t jive with your own cosmology.)

But this thinking gave me a life-line, literally. If these were just thoughts, beliefs that I’d harbored, a pattern of self-abandonment that I’d worn so deeply into myself that my self revolted, then … they could be changed. I could change. And, the theory could follow, I could get well.

I needed that so badly. I still do.

There wasn’t anything more scary that I’d ever faced, because there was no face on it. These theories gave me a name, a focus, a target. And the target was Love.

“New and joyous ideas flow freely within me.” “I move beyond past limitations into the freedom of the now. It is safe to be me.”

When I was home sick with a cold in October, one year past diagnosis, I needed something to do. During treatment, someone had given me a DVD version of the Louise Hay book, You Can Heal Your Life. I’d shoved it away, thinking it sounded like utter twaddle and too saccharine, and much too California woo-woo for my taste. But, I was sick again, and I was scared, and despite all the work I’d done in the past year, I needed to re-up, reinvigorate my life-line. So I watched the film. Which was a lot of twaddle-speak, and also a lot of what I believe. It was positivity on steroids, but, I watched, and I wished that I had the actual book they were talking about, since it had the full list of ailments in it, and I wanted to diagnose everything else, and counter it with love.

I walked outside my apartment building that day to go buy eggs. Outside the building next to mine was one of those moving-out boxes of free stuff people leave, boxes I love to sift through.

In it… was a copy of You Can Heal Your Life. Pristine, with the Amazon receipt still in it, ordered in 2011, likely, by some girl just like me who in a fit of, Yes, I can heal my life, bought it, received it, and shoved it away, thinking it twaddle.

I picked it up, bought my eggs, went home, and devoured the rest of it.

Again, you can call it whatever you like. You can agree, disagree, roll eyes, think I’m anything you might want to call me. But, I used those affirmations, and I survived a cancer that kills most people. It may not be causation, but as I continue to use the type of thinking prescribed, I am happier. 

Period. 

Cookie Monster

Otherwise, who would eat the blackened one?

This single line is the first poem of my first chapbook, back in 2010. The essence of its meaning is the idea that I must eat the blackened cookie in order to save others from having to eat it. In fact, it meant that I would choose that cookie above others on the savory plate just so no one else would have to touch it. I would throw myself on that sword before you even had to see it was there. I would do this for you.

That was 2010. I revisited this question a little while ago, and asked myself, if not me, then who would? No one, came the answer. No one had to eat the rotten, blackened thing. No one had to throw themselves on a sword. There is enough that we can all have a chewy, chocolate chipity experience. There is enough that none of us have to be a martyr and I can let others choose around the thing (or choose the thing) if they want.

Today, in my new dating world, I find myself, per metaphor, rushing to knock others over on my way to the hearty cookies. I am not patient to wait for the tray to be passed around the table—if there’s a way to get the good cookie, I will elbow your ribs to find one. In the process, I will annoy or anger you, or I will eventually upset the whole tray, and no one, including myself will get a cookie.

Because this way, too, the belief is there is not enough.

Call it cancer, age, healing, I am not willing to eat the blackened one anymore. I am not willing to drink the dregs, settle for less, diminish my worth, stand silently… or, apparently, be patient. In an effort to reverse years of sour cookies, I am finding myself clawing my way to the better ones. But only here, in this dating world. Only here, am I getting to see where I have long-harbored ideas of lack, and so perhaps one could call me “grateful” (gag, sputter, gasp) to have the experience now and the perspective on myself to see what is happening.

I WANT CONTROL. I am so attached to an outcome (the good cookie), I think that I can poke or wink or smile or demure or hearty laugh or intellectual conversation or sex or heavy or shared interest my way toward that outcome. Yet, see above: upset tray.

In many ways, it’s the same as diving for the blackened one. It’s a manipulation of the results. The belief follows that if I eat the blackened one, you are saved, and you are able to love me. The belief was that if I ate the sour cookie, I am the silent, steady rube whom you will reward for my sacrifice with accolades.

Both manners of being are born out of the fear of lack of love. Fear that I will not be taken care of.

It does not surprise me that a monolith of emotions and emotional backlash and predatory fear have arisen as I step into the dating world. It simply confirms why I’ve stayed away as long as I have. I know there is work to be done here, and avoidance is a great way to not have to feel those feelings. To not have to look at the monster and, perhaps, Hulk-like, calm it down until it reverts back to a normal, California girl.

If you stay out of the dining room, you neither have to eat the blackened one nor cut a path through to the full ones.

But, eventually you get hungry. 

My object now is to whisper in that girl’s terrified ear, There is enough (love). If you wait and allow the tray to be brought to you, you can have one. If you allow yourself to focus on the rest of the meal, the chicken and potatoes and brussel sprouts (cuz you know you love em), the tray will come to you. If, instead you focus jealously on GETTING A FUCKING COOKIE you will miss the bounty that’s in front of you.

Which is another way to say that my being so singularly focused on the outcome I want around this (or any) situation, I’m actually making myself miserable. I notice that calculating all the angles to my end-goal (through poking and winking and sexing and making you see me) is taking me out of the joy of the experience. It’s removing me from my center, my self, and from the fucking thing I wanted in the first place: to date.

I certainly am learning things! And I am going to try to eat my potatoes, and TRUST that I can be present in the moment, and let all the other moments follow in their own order and time. I will try to trust that I can relax into the moment, into the joy, into the newness and the awkwardness and the hilarity and the growth, because there is enough. 

And, who knows, if the cookies do run out, maybe there’s a Junior’s Cheesecake in the kitchen. 

Let.The.Horse.Pull.The.Cart.Molly.

One guy's profile on Tinder read, "Let’s just tell people we met in line at a coffee shop, and I said something charming."

Because (forgive me if you did) who wants to say, We met online.

My dad met his fiancé online. My mom met her boyfriend online. My coworker is happily married to a man she met online. To name a few. 

So, what’s the big deal? Will this stigma end? Is it a stigma, or is it just me and my highfalutin ideas of how people should act and meet and love?...

So, how did me and the 25-year old meet? Well, according to my highfalutin idea that I would “meet someone on the way to meeting myself,” in fact. Amazingly.

We met at the Theater Bay Area auditions last Sunday. He was an auditor (i.e. some kind of representative of a theater company who watched all the auditions--casting director, director, who knew), I was a volunteer.

We repeatedly caught one another’s eye during the day, but the day passed without a word and was ending. I didn’t want to let the opportunity to meet him pass by, because either he’s someone in the theater world I’d like to meet, or he’s just a cute boy I’d like to meet.

Everyone milled in the lobby at day’s end, and I simply walked up to him and said, “Hi, We’ve been glancing at one another all day, and I just wanted to introduce myself.” He replied that it was the red I was wearing that caught his eye. And, that I was very beautiful.

We chatted, we laughed a little, and in the end, I gave him my card, utterly ambiguous to either of us whether our intentions were personal or professional.

Then, his email later in the week, and the ambiguous Saturday afternoon meeting that turned into half a date. And last night into a full one. 

His beard hid the fact he’s 7 years younger than me, could have been anywhere around 30, til I asked on Saturday outright.

The agony I poured into my friends' text messages yesterday morning about the age gap! "He was in diapers when the Challenger blew up." "He doesn't know Corey Feldman before rehab." "He didn't suffer neon like the rest of us." Though born in the 80s, his earliest memories begin in the 90s. This is a Millenial. 

My friends' resounding response was: Just go on a second date, doofus.

You don’t even know if you like one another yet; stop manufacturing reasons to make this a no.

One friend in particular had good insight about the generational gap. About the desire for aligned frames of childhood reference. Her husband is from Germany, arrived in the States in 1995. His American pop-culture references only go back that far, even though he’s of similar age. She said she walks down memory lane with her friends. And that’s enough.

What are the need to haves; what are the nice to haves?

What about the "He's employed, attractive, intelligent, ambitious, Jewish, tall" part of the equation?

Then again. Your 20s are so much different than your 30s or any other years (that I’ve lived so far). There is a certainty about the world and your place in it that you have in your 20s that completely shifts by your 30s. There is a hubris about your knowledge. The development of those few years is drastic. I know. I’ve lived it, and watch others live it. I know that people who are 40 look at me and how I think I fit in the world, and smile good-naturedly at my naïveté.

Though, perhaps it’s my own hubris that I can know where another person is on their developmental path.

There is no definite here, there’s only exploration. More opening, more meeting, more laughing and softening. The part where you (I) feel comfortable enough to be silly--if that part even comes to pass. You can’t even know yet if you like one another, and so all the questions about how you met, about generational alignment, about maturity and Back to the Future references AREN’T EVEN RELEVANT yet.

For now, I, said doofus, went on the second date. And this one was unambiguous. 

Dance of the Cerebellum.

I usually don’t friend on the first date.

There’s still too much of the game to be played before you get to see my trivialities, my lols, my 8,000 vanity shots.

There needs to be order about the thing, this dating thing, this ‘I wasn’t even sure if it was a date until I asked you mid-non date about it’ thing. And you told me that you hoped it would be. And so it was.

I write everything here. I write about love and sex and alcoholism and family dysfunction and self -exploration and -derision and -love. I write about healing and change and acceptance. I write about banalities and wrap them in a coat of revelation.

I only just began writing again, and I won’t censor because you’re here now. Even though, that’s what the game is. That’s what the beginning is. It’s an opening, always by degrees. Here are my cards, the ones okay to be seen. Next hand, here are a few more—are you folding yet? Am I? Here, one by one, is the rest of the deck, a little coffee-stained and edge-frayed.

I had a dream about you the night you asked me to dinner. I dreamt you told me you were 18. And we kissed. And I pressed mine to your soft, full lips.

And yesterday, when it happened in real time, you told me you were 25. And we kissed. And you pressed your soft, full lips to mine. …

I usually don’t friend on the first date.

There’s too much to be known and unknown, to be veiled, and slowly opened. Too much trust to be laid down before I am willing to open myself and what I offer here. And too much I want to say here in this writing--to myself and my friends--about that process of opening. This is my platform, my cauldron of community, where we all get to dive in and find the pearl at the bottom.

And I need to dive, explore, create, and parse. I need to tease and relate and recall and make sense.

I am a Libra, after all. Communication is our oxygen.

If I friend on the first date, you’ll see that I know what a Libra is and does. That I talk to trees and ‘heart the 80s.’ That I argue with myself about every last particle of myself.

"Respond to Friend Request."

I usually don’t friend on the first date.

"Accept."

But I guess there’s an exception to everything. 

S/he had so much potential.

I want you to imagine yourself doing something you’ve always wanted to do, but you haven’t.

This could be play Frisbee golf, visit a foreign country, learn piano, plant a sapling. Anything.

I want you to picture yourself engaged in this activity, noticing your movements, your self, how you’re feeling, what energy you’re carrying.

Now, I want you to remove yourself, and in your stead, imagine your inner most power--the very greatest power you have thumping in your heart--doing that activity. See if you can sense or see or imagine the unmasked self, the soul part, your unharmed self engaged in your dream activity. Again, notice their movements, their feelings, what energy they carry.

Is it different?

Is there a difference between how you imagine yourself to engage in the world, and how, well, the world wants you to engage in it? Are you freer, larger, glowy? Are you lighter, uninhibited, unafraid?

Maybe, or not. Maybe you won’t do the above. But, this morning, I did. Just sort of made up the meditation, “thought exercise,” as I sat in my morning meditation, and I did see myself differently. I was envisioning today’s audition, envisioning myself onstage in the dress I’ve chosen, giving my monologue. And I felt the urge to see what would happen if it weren’t me, but the me that lives under all my cages. I will tell you, it was very different. The second one confident, unafraid to fill the space, to be big. Not hiding.

I’m going to try to remember that part of me, because it is always with me, when I go out into the world, and onto the stage today. That there is only a trap door of fear that prevents me from being her. And what if, for a few moments, I can pry it open, and let myself be and let you see what I’ve always wanted you to see: I am more than who I've been.

And greater than my obfuscation.

Owning Voice

Last Thursday, I began a class at Berkeley Rep School of Theater entitled, “Voice for Performance.” A short-term class of 5 sessions, lasting three hours each, I am getting a taste of the Linklater method (which I hadn’t heard of 'til recently, but apparently should know), vocal warm-up exercises, and where my own challenges are.

At the first class, we all introduced ourselves while our sprightly, mildly Cockney professor got up in our grill. She watched how our jaw moved, how we held our body, listened if we grated words in our throat or didn’t support our breath, and chided the modern world epidemic of ending declarative sentences with a lilting question at the end. Last night, she called me out again for it. It’s not, Hi, I’m Molly?, she laughed good-naturedly; It’s, Hi, I’m Molly. Of course you are, she said.

At the first class, she spoke a little about the messages some of us receive that cause blocks in how we speak. Were you told to keep it down, that your voice was too loud? Did you sit at a dinner table with loud people, and so learned to speak out the side of your mouth? 

There is a reason no one knows I sing. There is a reason this whole blog is called Owning Voice.

There are messages I received, and internalized, whether someone actually said something to me or not. I learned I had to be quiet to be safe, that a loud voice was the tool of the abominable. I have clear memories of “voice quelling.” When I was singing a poem at my Bat Mitzvah at age 13, there is this lovely harmony at the end that really makes the whole song, and changes it to something powerful. I got to the end of that song, and I made the choice, in my blue velour dress with puffy sleeves, to not go for it, to not try for the notes that would make the song whole because I wasn't sure I could reach them, and so I sang through it with the banal repetitive melody, sad for myself for not trying, and filing that experience away in, “I’m not good enough.”

I remember auditioning for a high school musical, practicing upstairs in my room, and coming down to ask my parents what they thought, if that note was too high. They told me that I better not go for it. So I didn’t.

I remember auditioning in college for the a cappella group on campus, Orphan Sporks, and not making it; for the college plays, and not making it.

And this is when I stopped. I believed that I learned that I wasn’t good enough, and to stop trying.

But, part of the reason I haven’t made the progress I could, is because I have those beliefs that I need to be quiet, that I need to not make noise, that I need to be something better than I am to do it, and so, I don’t sing, I don’t share from the heart of who I am, and therefore, I get to continue feeding the story that singing isn’t for me. And when I do actually sing, because it’s such a rarely used instrument, it’s not as well oiled as I know it could be, and again, I get to file this passion away in the “Not for you” category, or dismiss my voice as Not Good Enough, or tell others, Oh, it’s not really, I’m not really, …

I've taken singing lessons before, sporadically; I know I have a 4 octave range, I know the voice is in there. I know I'm not delusional & I feel like magic when I own it; I also know I hide it. Like a boy on a date once said to me about my eyes, that they are beautiful, but I am shy with them. Same same.

The class I’m taking right now isn’t about singing directly; it’s about voice, about your whole body—your ribs, your toes, your earlobes—vibrating to create sound. To drop the internal chatter and drop into your body, zen-like, drop into your power which is there whether you obscure it with rancid messages or not. The class is certain to help in the practicality of singing, but for now, it’s just about owning breath, owning voice, and owning truth.

Hi, I’m Molly.

Of course I am. 

Love in an Elevator – of Zeros and Ones

Long have I harbored, and still do, the idea that I will “meet the person on the way to meeting myself.” Meaning, that if I am engaged in doing things that ignite and enliven me, and I happen to meet a dude on the way, great – if I don’t meet a dude there, well, I went for me anyway. The other thing about that method is that you already know that you have something in common, wherever it is you are or what you’re doing – more than what you’ll know by internet dating, which the only thing you know for sure you have in common is that you both internet date. Or seek to.

So, that’s all well and good to “meet the person…yadda yadda yadda,” but, well, what if you haven’t, and it’s time to grease the wheels a little? Enter the internet. And, for me, most recently (as in Sunday) Tinder.

Ah yes, the new fangled, smart-phone app, where you swipe a photo left to reject and swipe right to approve. If you both “swipe right” on one another, you get the chance to chat. I like the idea of this better than my previous forees into internet dating, because there’s none of this “so and so winked at you” or “looked at your profile,” or even so-and-so messaged you and his photos are of him in a sports bar with five of his best bros swilling pints. In those situations, the most fun part is the polite decline. How to answer, if to answer the, “Hey hows it goin”?

Once, I politely declined a guy’s “advances,” and got a lovely diatribe on how all women were superficial bitches. That was fun. So, Tinder – you can only communicate if you’ve both agreed you pass the first gate.

Last night, I was supposed to have a coffee date with someone who passed the gate, but he got sick and texted to cancel and reschedule. About an hour later, I just took down my profile.

I’ve done it before. My second stint on OkCupid lasted 12 hours—from when I put the profile up at night, to when I woke up horrified in the morning, and took it down!

I was talking to a friend last night before my date was cancelled about my amalgam of feelings around the whole "internet dating thing": That I felt glad to get out there; that I felt loser-ish to “have to” date that way; that I was excited for the date, but also trepidatious about meeting a stranger who all I know is from two photos and a witty sentence.

And then the date was cancelled, and I was relieved.

It’s not to say that I won’t restart again, but I usually do internet dating only so long as I can stomach the concept. And it’s hard (for me) to quiet the nausea long enough to “get out there.” That’s okay. As Alanis Morissette says in her song “21 Things I Want In A Lover” (which may as well be my WSM Craigslist ad), I’m in no rush, ‘cause I like being solo…In the meantime I’ll live like there’s no tomorrow.

And though I agree with the second part, and will continue to go out to meet myself and potentially meet you too, my desire for dinner for two may bring me back to 140-character witticisms and culling my most swipe-rightable photos.

Remember What the Redwoods Told You

Two weekends ago, I attended the annual women’s spirituality retreat I’ve been going to every January for the last 6 years, since the group was formed. Last year, I asked my doctors to move my chemo treatment so that I could attend it. It’s a pretty important milemarker for me, and every year, I sit in the circle of twenty or so women, and I get to see where my levels are that year. I get to remember the crises or issues I was working on in previous years, and how they’ve fallen away, or if they’re still present. It’s my annual stock-check.

I still remember the first year when my big issue was around the food they were serving. Everything was homemade, delicious… and in buffet style. I found myself eating beyond capacity at each meal, and by the end of the retreat, I shared what I learned was why: I had no food at home. I was trying to gorge myself, as if that would satiate me beyond the 24 hours, and I could bring some of that fullness home with me to my empty fridge.

This was in the days long before I got a handle on money or my relationship with it, and I didn’t buy food. Sure, I ate, and it wasn’t an anorexia thing; I just felt that I didn’t have enough money, or enough care for myself to buy anything, so I’d eat popcorn for dinner, or cook up the 55 cent packages of asian noodles I could buy near my work. It wasn’t abundant for sure.

I shared this with the group, I cried about not treating myself well, about not prioritizing my needs. And, several years later, I can report that that behavior around food, though occasionally rearing, is pretty long past.

This year, however, I was eager to “get to the root” of several things—one thing in particular—and it was the last day of the retreat. We had our morning meditation session, we’d shared, and the closing meditation always took place after a walking meditation through the forest path and down to a lower outdoor chapel of sorts, with wooden slats for benches, right next to a trickling stream, in the center of a wooded bonanza of nature.

I didn’t want to do the walking meditation. We’d walked down the path silently yesterday, though not with intention, and I just wanted to GET there, so I could have more insights. I wanted to get to the real meditation. I even voted that we skip it.

But, I was overruled, and found myself walking about 15 feet behind another retreatant, with slow, purportedly meaningful steps. So, I walked slowly, and a little past the wooden bridge over the stream, I began to relax, to notice, to breathe, to see where I was, to be where I was – exactly where I’d been one year before, when I was chemo-bald, in the middle of treatments, and so very unsure of what was going to happen to me.

I felt that duality, the nature of being in two worlds, one in the present, one in the past, walking with my past self and experience, knowing that a very frightened but very brave woman had worn these very shoes on this very path one year before.

And I recalled something else.

After my first round of chemo and month-long hospital stay last October. After my esophagus melted in reaction, and I was told I would probably be infertile after treatment. After my doctors told me that even with treatment, my best statistics were a 40% five-year survival rate, I went for a walk.

I am lucky enough to live in a neighborhood where I can walk pretty close to trees, and I was taking a much needed walk, albeit slowly. Coincidentally, it was on this walk when I got a phone call from Stanford, looking to plan our intake interview for bone-marrow transplant. I hadn’t yet made my decision to pass on the transplant and go with straight chemo, believing that to be enough. I hadn’t yet heard all about the pre-transplant radiation that zaps you to smitherines, that I would have to relocate for 9 months to the Peninsula for 24-hour care, that even with the abominable treatments, I would only be given a 60% chance to live instead of 40. And this woman was calling to talk to me about it.

I told her I needed to call her back. I was taking a walk.

I walked up near a house where a large redwood grows next to the sidewalk, pushing the concrete out of its way, slowly and surely. I walked up to that redwood and I put my palm flat against its umber, striated flank.

And I silently asked the tree: Am I going to live?

(Did I lose you yet?)

And in my body, in my poor shop-worn blood, in the center of where we listen, I felt and heard the answer: Yes.

Yes.

I am going to live.

I get emotional writing about it. And, walking down that forest path in Napa just two weeks ago, I got emotional, too. It was there I remembered all that had happened, all the fear, and the relief, and the anger, and the certainty I felt (even though who can be certain) that I was going to live through my cancer. The trees had told me so, and I believed them.

I may have lost you with the tree-talking thing, but, meh, c’est la vie.

The point is, I lived. ‘Til today. I am healthy, besides this damn cold; my blood is normal and cancer-free, and I am alive.

Every single day is a relief, a question, an imperative question and invitation. I heard on NPR last night about a woman whose mother went into full remission for a year and a half, and then the cancer returned with vengeance and she died. But how important that year of life was, to her and to her family. It’s been a year and two months since mine went into remission, and stories like that turn my insides to ice.

Luckily, I was on my way driving to band practice. The band I didn’t belong to a year ago, couldn’t have conceived of, in a car I didn’t have or conceive of a year ago. I reminded myself that I, too, have made this year important.

And—for whatever it might mean to you, it means the world to me—I remind myself that the redwoods said Yes. 

Hunger Games

I attended the Theater Bay Area General Auditions on Sunday as a volunteer, which meant I got to see a lot of headshots, a lot of nervous milling actors, and some of the auditions.

What I got to observe was that I probably fit somewhere in the middle of that pack – I’m not worse than the worst person, and certainly not as good as the best, so that means… I have a shot, right?

The General Auditions bring together all of the casting companies from around the Bay in one room, like a cattle-call. There are about 5 auditions every 15 minutes, and it goes on for 3 days. I can only imagine what that must be like for the auditors! But, you never know – they can’t blink, because they might miss something, and if you falter, you’ve just faltered in front of everyone you’ll ever audition for. (all hail hyperbole!)

The other thing I got to see was how hungry all the actors were. It didn’t matter the age, or experience, there was a rabid manic energy about the whole place. The guy sitting in the lobby mouthing the words to his monologue, the slight look of lamb at slaughter of a few, and the general awkwardness of the others standing around their competition, sizing one another up, if even glancingly.

Because there isn’t enough. That’s the grand and great mantra of things like this. It reminded me of the day laborers who stand outside of Home Depot, waiting for someone to pick them. All they want to do is work. That’s it – just give these people an opportunity to do what they know how to do best. Just let them work. It’s a very different idea about the hungry artist, to me at least. The idea that the hunger isn’t necessarily about pride, prestige, fame, but just about getting the chance to do that which you’ve been trained to do – Let Me Work. That’s what these actors are saying, in their fidgeting, their primping, their priming.

And this Saturday, I will do the same. I will say the same thing: Dear CCSF Director, Please let me work.

It’s a strange interview process; so much more intense than “regular” office interviews, where it’s a dialogue (hopefully). This is just you, presenting what you have to offer, sans feedback. There’s no riffing, no improv, no charming self-depreciation or affable witticism. There’s just what you can give in 1 minute – what you can bottle and nutshell in one minute of the macrocosm of who you are and what you can do.

It is a lot of pressure!

But. I’m up for it. I have to be. I don’t really have the option to shirk my dreams anymore, or shrink from that which enlivens me. I mean... I do, but, “all things considered,” I don’t. Life is short, dearies.

I also am getting to observe my lovely monkey mind as it compared my list of acting credits to those on the resumes I was handing to the auditors. I don’t have an MFA in Acting. I don’t have a BA in Theater Arts. Hell, I don’t even have one legitimate credit at all. And, yet, (I’m talking to you, monkey mind) So, the, fuck, what. ? So what?!

Do you not make a new recipe because it might fail, and therefore never eat again? Do you not refuel your gastank because it’s empty and futile to continue refilling it? Do you stop talking to people you’ve never met before because your name hasn’t been in lights, on a program, on Buzzfeed? Well, I hope not.

Essentially, Life would be pretty awful if it meant only doing the things you knew how to do. Where is the joi de vivre in that?

So, I’ll own the joi. I’ll de vivre. I’ll feed my monkey mind banana chips and positive affirmations. I’ll practice the shit out of my monologue, and I’ll mouth words silently, and I’ll appraise my competition, and I’ll remind myself there is enough and I am worthy, and I’ll believe it and I won’t believe it, and I’ll try again next time.

Because, I woke up with Lose Yourself in my head this morning -- Eminem wants me to work, too. 

The Corollary

The thing about yesterday’s blog is there is a corollary between how I have felt about money and debt and how I feel about love and relationships.

I’ve surely written about “Romance and Finance” before, but it’s worth repeating, for my own sake.

If, as I stated yesterday, the belief has been, If I have debt, I can’t enjoy nice things, the (my) logic continues, If I have “work” to do on myself, I can’t enjoy relationships. The belief in both cases is that if I am not “fixed,” then I am not allowed to engage in the world. Or, another way, if I am not perfect, or my vision of what that ever-moving target of perfection is, then I am not allowed to receive or have good things.

Because, to the logic brain, it makes sense, doesn’t it? You have debt, you can’t buy the nicer shampoo that doesn’t fry your curly hair. If you have … let’s call it “intimacy issues,” you can’t be in relationship. BUT, as we saw yesterday, and I’ve seen in these last months, I’ve been eroding that belief around money, and allowing myself to enjoy things, even though I have debt. So… shouldn’t the corollary continue, that even though I have work to do on letting myself trust others, I can still allow myself to exist with them?

Eek. As a serially single person, I can’t tell you how hard that is to even hold on my tongue for a minute. Because it brings a challenge, a “put your money where your mouth is.” It means, that if I really am trying to believe that I can be imperfect and still enjoy life… it means I have to start … trying. Trying to be in relationship, not dating, not sex, not flirting, relationship. The kind where you say, You know what, I’ll commit to you for an undetermined period of time. I’ll commit that I will attempt to be as transparent as necessary, and as soft toward you as I can be. To me, to be in relationship means that I will not duck out at 2 in the morning, I'll be present during sex, I won’t throw barbs or use sarcasm to keep you away. To be in relationship means sitting through the discomfort of softening into another person --- and HELL if that’s not the scariest thing!!

I have and continue to do work that is helping me to soften into myself, and surprisingly, I’m actually having a good time of it – this “loving myself” thing. I’m actually getting the hang of it, and becoming habitualized to it. So, it follows, that I am situated to extend that love, that softness, that vulnerability outward. To someone else. Who I don’t know.

And trust that they won’t use this access they’ve been granted to my heart as a pass to do damage, to infiltrate me and plant a bomb, to establish trust and then usurp it, tragically.

Because it’s always been tragically. That’s the story, that’s the history, but it doesn’t have to be.

That’s the same with the money. I’ve always earned less than I’m probably worth. I’ve always worked in jobs that don’t fire my faculties. But, it’s meaning less and less to me; it’s goading less and less of me into self-flagellation.

So, just because my love story has always been one where I am left kicking myself for trusting someone… well, it doesn’t have to be. It doesn’t have to mean as much.

Letting go of the story doesn’t invalidate my past experience; but it doesn’t have to determine my future anymore either.

I am sure I’ve said it here – that with the pattern of awaiting perfection, which perhaps here may have meant perfect immunity to hurt, to betrayed trust, to love-- Ha! I’ve been waiting for immunity to love in order to actually let someone love me and vice versa. Nooot sure how that logic works!

But, if I have been waiting for some illusive “fixed,” and an ever-changing target of it, then I will never be “ready” for a relationship. (Strangely, most people [I hear] look for a relationship to fix them, whereas I look to be fixed before I get into a relationship.)

So, the idea, then, is to change the goal. The goal, now, is to not be fixed, but to be human. To allow myself to try to trust someone else with the soft content of my heart, and believe one millisecond at a time that they’re not a suicide bomber. 

Wanted: Nice Things

There is a Tarot card, a Pentacle, can’t remember which one, that depicts a gentleman standing with two figures crouched on either side of him. To one of these figures, he’s handing gold coins, to the other, nothing. One interpretation in my book on the cards is to see which one of these two crouching figures we identify with: do we think we’re the one who gets or the one who gets passed over? But lately, I’ve been looking at the third figure in the card: the one who has enough, that he gets to choose where he gives it.

A woman once told me that I needed to start “identifying with the ‘haves’ instead of with the ‘have-nots.’” I didn’t understand what she was saying, and our relationship as mentor and mentee didn’t last very long. But over the past year, several months, I’ve been beginning to absorb and even adopt that idea.

I earn what I earned last year; in fact, it’s the same as I was paid 6 years ago and far less than I was paid 4 years ago. But I said it to some friends yesterday, “My income has not changed, but I feel more abundant.” You can stop reading if that makes you mad, or vomit in your mouth, or roll your eyes – but if you’ve read me before, you know I say plenty of sweeping statements you may not roll with!

But, the statement feels true, today. Yesterday, I went to a stand-up comedy show at Cobb’s Comedy in S.F. I’d never been to see live comedy before, and I loved the comics who were performing. My coworker mentioned that the event was happening, and within minutes, I had a ticket. I bought myself a ticket.

I bought a car I actually can afford payments on; I’m planning a trip to the North Carolina shore with my mom and our two cousins this summer; I’m saving for the trip my mom and I are taking to Paris next summer.

That I can even conceive of these things, these trips, these “haves” is astonishing to me.

When my current mentor told me in the early months of last year that she saw me having my own car, that I would need one, that I had to get to band practice, I thought she was bananas – wishful thinking; for you not for me; there’s no way I can have…”nice things,” is the end of that sentence.

“There is no way I can have nice things.” Sound familiar? To me it does.

But she said it was true, and though I didn’t believe it AT ALL, I trusted her.

To drive my car now isn’t a sign to me of affluence or status, it’s a symbol of doing what I’ve imagined impossible for me – of attaining things that I had previously imagined, no, believed myself incapable of having, doing, being.

But, my income did not change. I have 80 thousand dollars in student loan debt, 4 grand in back rent from when I was sick and not working, and a few outstanding others. And yet….. here’s the joy part – I’m still having fun. I’m still enjoying my life.

I didn’t think that was allowed, or possible. If you have debt, you aren’t allowed to enjoy life. If you have debt, you can’t afford to buy comedy tickets, or the pedicure I shared with my friend this week, or acting classes at an actual acting school. If you have debt, you should sit in the dark under a blanket and wait for your soul to eat itself.

:P

Right?

But it sounds true, doesn’t it? It did to me.

I have payment plans for all of the above debts, and I have no idea how I’ll pay it all off. But I am no longer willing to deny myself nice things under a lash of shame and punishment and longing.

To watch this shift within me, the shift from No f*cking way to maybe, even just maybe, has been radical. I really didn’t believe my friend when she said about the car, and now it exists, in my hands, I drive it, it works, it’s not a jalopy, it runs, it’s safe.

If this can happen around that, surely the same shift can apply elsewhere. Hence the cousin reunion; hence the Paris trip (though really, it’s just my way to get to Barcelona, where I really want to go!). Actually, the Paris trip is way more than that, to me. It’s to be with my mom, assuming “all works out,” and I have to tell you how very much more aware, and… frightened… sort of, I am of the limited time she and I have left together.

She’s not old, she’s 65, but there are only a few more years of her and I being able to run around and do things together.

And part of my “Yes”ness shift is trying to believe that I can spend time with her without actually moving back there. That I was able to fly home to New York over Christmas, that I’ll be able to do it again this summer.

Because here’s my other landing realization: I want to stay in California.

The agony this decision has caused me has been massive. Particularly because I want to be with my mom, and my brother, and his girlfriend, and their probably-to-be-had kids, and my best friend and her new baby and watch all of them, all of us, grow up. I want to be there and witness it. I don’t want to parachute in every year and see that things are so different, and only have limited time to run around, and inject all the joy and events and activity we can into a few days. It’s horrible living so far from people who feed your soul.

And yet.

Coming home, coming back to the Bay, after that trip, taking the train out of SFO, and seeing the green green landscape—who could leave this either?

Compost versus Styrofoam. Mild weather versus Polar vortices.

California versus New York is Me versus My family and friends.

So, what about the abundant thinking, what about the shift in doing and being able to do that which I’d previously thought impossible? Well, my “you will have a car” mentor asks me if it wouldn’t be possible that I would earn enough to be able to get home twice a year. Radical thinking, I know.

And although it is viciously hard for me to stand in my decision to stay in California, and I may waffle and weave and dodge and balk over it, what I can do in the meantime, until I actually allow myself permission to be where I love, is to make those occasional plans to visit--because I can afford to identify with the haves. And haves go on vacation.