To Infinity and Beyond!

True to form, I’m running late for work. With today’s direct deposit pay-out, I was reconciling my financial situation before getting started for the day.

Seems like if I can manage to gain steady employment by December, I don’t have to touch my savings. If not, I have until January. But, who wants to touch their savings, especially if it’s modest?

I have a third interview with the private high school in Walnut Creek on Monday, to be their Homework Tutor/Student Mentor. Seems like a good sign, but I’m not counting chickens; I’m still looking around for sure.

But, I gotta say, not having a full-time job as of tomorrow, I feel like I’ll have more time to look – but also to focus. To get clarity and not just fire off resumes willy-nilly.

I won’t write a maudlin blog about how much my place of work has meant to me over the past 2 years – I’m going to see most of my coworkers frequently, as I’ll still be teaching there on Tuesday and Thursday afternoons. There was a nice send-off snack at our staff meeting on Wednesday with my favorite snacks. And my boss wrote a really warm blurb about my departure for our weekly e-newsletter.

There have been more hugs this week than before, mostly from members of the synagogue, who I won’t see as often. But I do feel like I’ve become a part of the community, not just worked in an office. And for that I’m grateful, and it’s something that won’t change. I’ll still be there at our big events, probably.

But, I’m also immensely grateful that I won’t be sitting at that desk come Monday morning.

I won’t leave my newbie replacement alone too long this morning, so I’ll sign off now. Perhaps there’ll be another more sentimental missive about the place with time and distance, but, for now. It’s just a change. And, right now, change is good.

Trick or Treat, muthafuckas!

Recalibrating the Bar.

Surely, normal is relative. I read some of my blogs about my past, and I think, Jesus, this is not what “normal” people have dealt with. I listen to some of my acquaintances share their histories, and I think, “Thank god things weren’t that bad with me.”

In some comparisons, my life has been saner and pretty charmed; in other comparisons, it’s been dysfunctional and tragic.

Yesterday, I came home from hearing tell of someone’s tragic past, “worse” than mine. Then I picked up where I left off in Autobiography of a Face, because surely the story of a little girl’s jaw sawn off through cancer is “worse” than my own story.

And I decided then, it is time for me to recalibrate my bar for normal and dysfunction.

I was feeling activated by the story I’d heard earlier in the evening. I was feeling protective of the children that story was being told to, and I was experiencing a hardening in my chest, made of anger and self-protection against the terror of that story.

And despite the fact that things in my life have been on the plus and minus side of well-being, I think it’s time for me to start marching toward those people and experiences that don’t trade in trauma.

There tends to be a uniting force among those in my crowd, knowing that we’ve, most of us, come from some kind of trauma. Wherever that may fall on the spectrum of horror. But, we feel an understanding with one another on the basis of a shared experience, and sometimes this unification posits us against more “normal” folk, folks who perhaps didn’t come from that seething primordial ooze.

The problem, and I’ve contemplated it before, is that when you trade in trauma, there’s no value in happiness. When you bond over tragedy, how do you boast your success?

Over the last few years, my threshold for violence and gore has lowered dramatically. Even “silly” crime t.v. shows that used to be my favorites, I’ve had to eliminate from my visual diet. I just can’t stomach them anymore.

As time has passed, I’ve become more aware and attuned to when those shows or images are getting to me – when I’m cringing, or closing my eyes – and I’ve taken note of those cues, and begun to drop them from my cue.

It feels the same to me with these stories that are around me.

I read Autobiography last night, despite knowing that I didn’t want to read it. The language is beautiful, the plot is compelling; by all counts, it’s a well-crafted book. But I don’t think I want to read any more – in fact, I know that, and I’m going to have to decide if I heed that information or not.

The same is true with some of the stories I hear around me. It’s going to be up to me to begin either seeking out or attracting into my life people, not who don’t have those stories of trauma in their past, but who don’t feel compelled to broadcast them. Who don’t feel compelled to do so inappropriately.

I am not saying that I will only surround myself with “normal” folks, or that the stories of our pasts are not important. I am, however, saying that my trauma meter is full, and I need to back away from media or people who will put it over the edge because of their own hemorrhaging boundaries.

I am, of course, an advocate for sharing of ourselves, as you've read over and over in my blog, but I stand behind the knowledge and hope that others click to read this on purpose, that this blog is chosen as a media source for them, that I'm not dumping it on anyone. I also think perhaps it is time for me to begin walking farther away from the retelling of these stories, as repetition keeps them powerful.

I don’t know what the line of balance is between honesty and appropriateness. But I do know there is one.  

The Writing on the Walls.

After yesterday’s heaviness, let’s talk about something lighter: gratitude.

You know, there are a lot of things as I look around that I have to be grateful for. It is always easiest for me to start with my apartment, because, small though it is, and however much I’d love for my bed to not be the main prominence of my studio apartment, I love it here. "Warm" is consistently the response I get from friends and visitors who come in. It feels warm here.

Someone just said it recently, and it’s precisely the phrase I heard from a friend when he left one of my parties in my San Francisco apartment: I felt warm when I left. How many parties does one leave feeling that way? It was a thrill, and what I love to hear. Inviting, warm, cozy, artful.

The art has been culled over a few years, and recently, in the re-organization of my closet, I pulled out the enormous oil pastel lips with flower, created for one of my Pre-Val Hearts & Stars parties in SF. I think I’ll put it up again, but even if I don’t, it reminds me of what I can accomplish when I set my mind to it.

I’d started with an idea. I made some sample studies, small two-inch colored pencil drawings, and then I asked my artist friend if she had any super large butcher-size paper. In fact, she did. And I stood with a pencil hovering over this expanse of 5 foot wide and 4 feet tall paper laid on the floor of my apartment, white, untouched, and daunting.

How do you start, where do you make a first mark? What if it’s wrong, and you’ve ruined this enormous (and only) page you have?

I remember that moment, the taking of a deep breath, and the creation of the first mark. And wherever it was on the page is now well-blended into the rest of the drawing, and you’d never know where it began with a brave and tentative mark.

You drew that? Yep. I’ve been drawing since I was a kid. I’ve stopped often. I thought I couldn’t anymore, as a 40 oz went hand-in-hand with my art for a while. I also tried again and so out of practice, was not so great, and put it away, saying this wasn’t for me anymore.

Then, the parties began, and they were the impetus to draw again, to paint, and make art again. With an aim and purpose, with people to create an environment for, it was simple. It was enlivening, and it wasn’t perfect. Yet it was fun.

I spoke the other week to my property manager about the upstairs abandoned 4th floor room with the two work sinks, northern light, and great ventilation. They’re happy to rent that space out to me for 25 bucks a month. … Once I settle my account.

When I was sick, my landlord said about my rent, “Don’t worry about it.” Which I thought meant, We’ll waive it. I found out later, several months of not paying rent later, that in fact, what he meant was, “Pay it when you can, and we’ll be counting every cent.”

So, I became over $4,000 in debt to my landlord, and even though it was great that they held my rent for a while, it sucks that it wasn’t clear that’s what was happening, as maybe I’d have begun paying sooner. But, it wasn’t. I didn’t. And I’ve been paying $50 over my rent each month for over a year now to help pay down the debt, because that’s truly what I can afford.

I have more than $3,000 left to pay back. Before I can rent that art space. FOR TWENTY-FIVE DOLLARS!! God, I want that space! But, first things first, I suppose.

In the meantime, maybe I do unroll those lips and put them up, proof and inspiration once again that I can do what I fear, that I don’t have to be perfect, that I love producing things, and that I have talent when I focus.

Who doesn’t need a reminder like that?

There always had to be a fly...

...in the ointment.

If things were going well, there was always the knowledge that my father’s parents were shut-ins and deleterious hoarders. Or that my mom was manic-depressive. Or that my brother had a horrible stutter.

There was always the reminder that my clothing was bought at discount stores, that my father had an awful temper, or that my mom’s parents had died under circumstances that ripped her family apart and isolated us against them.

If things were going well, there was always a skeleton or two to whisper in your ear about not believing good things were for you, about being dragged down, about not being allowed to be happy.

Today, those long-quieted skeletons, imagined they’ve been exorcised for years, have begun their murmurous palaver again.

Yesterday, I had a phone call with my mother. She is sick. Again. It’s the same or similar cold/sinus infection she’s been struggling against for over a year. And when it came up last year, when she didn’t know why she kept getting sick, when doctors didn’t immediately know why either, I called my psychic.

Because at the time, all roads led to cancer. Did she have it? What was going on? What can I do?

No, said the woman on the phone. It’s not cancer, but whatever it is, if she doesn’t deal with this, with what’s underlying it, it could be the beginning of a long road to the end. This could be the thing that takes her out.

Whatever your thoughts about intuitives aside, I’d worked with her enough that she knew of what she spoke. And from all indications since that phone call over a year ago, it’s proving pretty accurate. My mom is still sick. Healthier, Sick, Healthier Sick.

And I’m dragged immediately back into a curtain-drawn bedroom where she’d curled up against the light, fighting another one of her chronic migraines. I’m dragged immediately back into being a child taking care of her mother, telling her to get out of bed. Leaving her there, and getting my brother and I out the door for school.

My mother is a woman of chronic ailments. And this newest one, whatever its cause, reason, purpose, is dragging me down again with her.

What is love, comes the question? What is equanimity? What is detachment, enlightenment? Fate? What is the caustic, oxidizing rust that others’ baggage leaches onto you and your own path?

And what is my responsibility in helping them through their pain?

Especially if they don’t recognize it as such.

So much has come up lately about codependence versus interdependence. About leaving others to their experiences and feelings, and letting that not affect what I’m doing and how I’m feeling. Even something as simple as the play, and trying to not let the audiences’ reactions sway my mood.

I feel angry. I feel angry this feels like it’s happening again. I feel angry that I’m powerless about how she cares for and treats her body, about how she schedules her work in the 12-hour days without lunch breaks. About how she spends her off days flattened, recuperating from her over-working.

I’ve had to do so much work on letting her have her experiences, despite my opinions, and yet. And yet. I’m human. And I love her, and I don’t want her to be in pain. And I don’t want her to deteriorate.

And moreso, I don’t want her life to affect mine.

When does a child grow up? What is the role of a loved one? How can you, and can you, let someone crawl along the bottom of their own experience, while you make strides in the direction of your own fulfillment?

Because that’s what’s at stake here. Callous as it may sound, it doesn’t matter, ultimately, what happens with my mom. What matters is what I take on about it. How I allow it to affect me. And mostly, can I continue to make my life what I want it to be when there are still murmuring skeletons?

My whole life, I’ve been distracted by the flies. I’ve allowed my attention to be derailed in fishing them out, or I’ve simply allowed them to decree that I cannot be happy because they exist. That I cannot find success because there are flaws in the tapestry of my surroundings.

Obviously, I write about it today because I’m upset and I don’t have the answer to these questions. Because I don’t know how to move forward when there are tendrils threatening to draw you back.

So, for today, I’ll leave it both as an open question, and as evidence of a success. Because, today, I get to tell you about it. And darkness can’t live in the light. 

The Dailey Grind

So, here I am, back to my Monday morning shift at The Dailey Method exercise studio! My 5:30am Monday morning shift...!

I arranged to have a sub for me during the weeks Addams Family was in performance (and then an extra one last Monday, since, hey, I was tired!). Now back to a 5am Monday morning wake-up call again. But I do think it's worth signing people into class and folding towels for three hours in trade for the free unlimited classes I get. Granted, I've been so tired and busy lately, I haven't been able to come at all. And my muscles feel it. But I'll be back soon.

In the meantime, I get to use this time (despite the thumping music in the studio room) to do job research, ... and do a little line memorization. Today will be the first run-through of Act 1. There's a lot more for me to learn, but I'm glad I decided to take it (more) easy this weekend.

I still didn't get done all of what I wanted, or study my lines as much as I'd have liked, but progress. I feel like I'm staving off the cold that I was about to succumb to. I got to clean some things up in the apartment, and I cancelled the non-necessity engagements.

Interestingly enough, I was approached yesterday after rehearsal with some potential work opportunities, but until there's more conversation, it's all ethereal. That said, it was gratifying to see that people notice what assets I can add and what skills I have. More will be revealed on that part.

It's also time to work on the final (for now) section of amending relationships that don't sit well with me. Third and final is, huzzah, work. Specifically my current employer.

Funny to me that I wrote this list back in the summer, and now as it's my last week of work there, I'm getting the chance to work on this now. There's nothing in specific that I need to necessarily "make amends" for; it's more about attitude. It's also about showing up on time(!), which this week will be harder, as I flit from dentist appointment to interview to... another dentist appointment.

Did you know that Covered California doesn't cover dental? I didn't! Until I was reclined underneath my dentist's light last Friday afternoon, and she said, Yes, you do need these fillings -- and then dropped the "not covered" bomb. Hence the several appointments this week.

So, that's more information as I continue on my "looking" path. In fact, my dentist had a great recommendation for an alternative private school, and I just applied to them a minute ago.

I have my second interview tomorrow with the alternative private school I met with last week -- whom I told I would only be available to work 30 hours per week. And that seemed to go over fine. With the wage I asked for (which I've been regretting I didn't increase), I'd be able to make the same amount as I do now working 40 hours a week. I have my fingers crossed -- but if it's a good fit, it'll happen, and if it's not, it won't.

The school is also located in the middle of an industrial park, office-building wasteland in Walnut Creek. Which is quite the far cry from the verdant landscape outside my current office in North Berkeley. But, sometimes you make compromises!

In the meantime, I'm going to focus on what I can do at the job I'm at now, watching my attention, (my facebook time!), and how I'm interacting with my coworkers. It's not any of their faults that I am not fulfilled at work and therefore it's not fair for me to seethe toward them, or show up late as a petulant rebellion.

I have no doubt that part of my amending my relationship with my current job is, a) to leave, and b) to understand what it is that got me into that relationship to begin with so I don't end up here again with another employer.

All of those on my list are relationships I have stayed in too long, out of fear, out of scarcity, out of an idea that I can't get what I truly need.

(I hope) I am taking action and self-inventory that will help me to move forward differently. That I'm gaining a semblance of understanding that I don't have to sell myself short; that with work and vision, I can get where I want to, and be the person I want to. I can have the life I want to live, and I don't have to demonize those who are not behaving how I want them to.

The only person's behavior I can change is my own -- and, well, I believe I am. (Come what may!)

Don't Freak Out: A How-To.

When I was sick, I became extremely diligent about my spiritual practice.

Despite, or perhaps including, the conversations I had with a few select friends about the nature, existence, purpose, and questionable benevolence of a Higher Power, I knew that my safest and surest course through all that uncertainty, fear, and buzzing activity around me was to touch base with my center.

It really was only after the first month, though, that I was able to write. I found my first journal entry in a notebook friends had brought me in the hospital just days after I was diagnosed. It begins Saturday, September 29, 2012. There’s one on the 30th, and then it stops. Until after my month of chemo and recovery in the hospital.

But, thereafter, I made it a huge part of my practice to journal, meditate, and eventually write my near-daily blog. I even made the nurse put a sign on my hospital room door that read, “Meditation in progress; Come back in 20 minutes.” (I personally loved that this meant people would continually be turned away without a firm time listed, and I could have some solitude in that busy and anxious place!)

But, I think about this practice now (journal, meditate, blog), one that was common for me before I was sick, one that was essential to me during my treatments, and one that still needs to be a part of my daily life.

Meetings, Movement, and Meditation are my recipe for sanity. And most recently, with all the hubbub, I’m lucky to get even one in there.

But I know very specifically and with assurance that it not only works, it also helps to light my way through.

I am in another place of uncertainty, fear, and buzzing activity. And my only way through is to have the anchors of my practice.

There’s a phrase I’ve heard, “Most days I meditate for thirty minutes, but on really busy days, I meditate for an hour.” Not that I’m doing that! But the intention is there; the intention to give myself even more time and space to coalesce, to touch down, to get grounded, and to listen.

I have less trouble listening as I do heeding. It’s all well and good to listen, and I can do that, and sometimes get answers or guidance; but if I’m not following through or up on the information I receive, what’s the point? Then I simply know what I’m not doing and get to beat myself up for it!

And, I guess that’s not the point either.

I get to remember this morning that I have been in more dire straits than the one I’m currently in: Job ending Friday; uncertain income sources; uncertain path toward fulfillment. I get to remember that I’ve been here before with previous job changes, and I’ve emotionally been here before because of cancer. Nothing puts things in perspective like cancer!

And if I could have gotten through what I did, using the recipe I know works every single time, then I am bidden to use it again. Journal, meditate, blog. Meetings, movement, meditation. Heed the information I’m given.

Rest.

This career shift is all about buying myself time to see myself more clearly, to see my future more clearly, and to create the space and time in which to build toward those goals. This isn’t about busy work, or a brain fogged with anxiety. This isn’t about despair or hopelessness.

This isn’t even about simply “getting through” this time. This time is important; being in this transition space is important. It’s not simply, Batten down the hatches til the storm passes. This isn’t about ostriching my head into the sand. It will be important for me to be aware through all of this time, to listen through it, and to be aware.

To not hide from my own change, because then I won’t know where I’m going or what I’m doing. I have to stay present with this change. I have to acknowledge that I’m uncomfortable, and that I’m taking positive steps. I have to acknowledge where I’m neglecting myself and acting out my anxiety in less than healthy ways. And in order to know any of these things, I have to be present.

And that’s ultimately what each of these “recipes” does for me – they help me get and stay present.

So, yesterday I did cancel that modeling gig. I went to meet up with folks I hadn’t seen in a while. I got my vacuum cleaner fixed, went to the farmer's market, put that bookshelf into my closet. I bought dish soap.

The more I engage in my recipes, the better I feel. The better I feel, the more able I am to take care of myself and to take actions that support me. The more I take action, the better I feel.

It’s a continuous positive feedback loop that has carried me through the most atrocious and trying of circumstances. With grace.  

And if I can remember that -- I am voraciously confident, it can carry me through this. 

A word, if you don’t mind?

Dear Molly,

First of all, congratulations on closing the Addams Family. I heard it was a fantastic run to packed houses nearly every night. And brava on finally getting that one song that was giving you trouble. Fist pumping is highly appropriate!

But, I’m moved to write to you today because I want to make sure you realize how many irons you have blazing right now, and ensure that you’re taking the proper time for yourself. (Although, I must say, I wouldn’t be writing if I thought you were!)

As soon as the show closed, you began a new one the next day, yes? Rehearsing almost daily with a dozen monologues to memorize by next Friday? You’ve been searching for a new job or jobs, as well as having interviews or coffee dates with folks several times a week. You’ve been sitting on weekend mornings for a portrait artist in order to make some cash, and you’ve begun teaching on two weekday afternoons after work and before rehearsal.

Forget about your dishes, we’re way beyond them now! Have you seen your car? Your apartment? Where is the calm space you so crave at home? How about that outstanding parking ticket you need to dispute at the Berkeley parking office? And the fellowship meetings you are barely attending and the crispy, crackling nature of your office interactions right now?

Is it fair to say that you’ve got a few things on your plate… AND that you’re not taking the normal care of yourself that’s necessary for your health? Is it true that you’ve been feeling tired and coming down with something?

Something’s got to give, my friend, and I don’t want it to be you.

Yes, I know this is an uncertain and shifting time, and your home is always a reflection of your mental state. I know it feels like there’s no time for meetings, but doesn’t there have to be? It’s terribly uncomfortable for you and those around you when you’re this wound up.

However, I do want to come back to say, I am writing all this because I am in support of you. I want you to achieve your best in all you do. I just want to remind you to set first things first. Weekends, which have been your farmers market and cooking-for-the-week days, as well as nesting and organizing days, have been robbed by all this new work.

Maybe -- and I’m just throwing this out there -- you tell the artist you can’t sit with him until after your show opens? I mean, the worst he can say is no, right? Maybe you ask a friend to help you with the enormous bookcase you inherited from your upstairs neighbor that’s been standing, disassembled, in the center of your apartment for a week? Maybe you really schedule that time to go to the parking office, and don’t blow it off this time because you’re running late for work?

Look, the bottom line is you’re in a huge amount of transition right now. You’re taking a leap of faith that you’ll land somewhere new and different than where you’ve been. You’re doing this to support your art, and to support the idea that you have more to give to the world than a well-crafted spreadsheet. I am in awe of you for taking the risk.

In truth, both ways are risky: to stay is a risk to sanity, to leave is a risk to livelihood. But, I do have faith that things will turn out well for you (Yesterday's interview was promising & the second interview is set.). You are doing all the right things… you’re just not leaving time for the rest of the “right things,” and that’s where I’m concerned.

So, take a minute to consider my suggestions. See if you can come up with your own solutions, and talk to your friends to help you through this quite chaotic but exciting time.

As a friend once said, The only difference between anxiety and excitement is breathing.

So, breathe, Molly. And I’ll see you when you land, safely.

Yours, 

Shel.

Author, Poet, Artist Shel Silverstein played a significant role in the formative literary lives of myself and many people my age. 

Who didn’t have a copy of Where the Sidewalk Ends or A Light in the Attic, with his line drawings of a man who forgot his pants, or three children flying in a shoe? Who doesn’t remember a few lines here and there of that one about being sick but then, “What’s that you say, You say today is Saturday, Alright I’m going out to play” or “Pamela Purse Yelled Ladies First” and then ends up in a cannibal’s stew?

Shel’s poems are inventive, clever, imagination firing. And yet. It’s his two “full-length” books that I’m considering today. Books whose premise I simply don’t agree with, despite having heard others’ interpretations and admiration: The Missing Piece and The Giving Tree.

In The Missing Piece, we follow a Pac-Man-looking pie as he looks to find his own missing piece, the piece to complete him. Like Goldilocks, some are too big, some are too small, but in the end, he finds the one that’s just right.

In The Giving Tree, we watch as a small boy enjoys the bounty of an apple tree, the tree offering him fruit, a branch to swing from, its trunk, and then finally, simply a stump on which to sit.

Both of these books, to me, reek of codependence. ! And, yes, you might roll your eyes at me, analyzing a simple children’s book or reading too much into a story. Many people have told me how lovely and generous it is that the tree continues to give and give of itself until there’s barely anything of itself left, and then finally the boy, now an old man, comes to appreciate it.

Isn’t it a beautiful story of self-sacrifice and loyalty and steadfastness?

Erm…

How about the Missing Piece? All Shel’s trying to say is that we all walk around the world feeling slightly unwhole, slightly missing. We are all trying to fill in a place within us that feels empty. Sometimes we use things that we think will fit that place – sometimes we use people who we think will fit that place. But we continue to go through our lives looking for our missing piece, and when we find it, we are complete and we are happy.

Isn’t it a lovely metaphor for life, for our human striving for fulfillment and satisfaction?

Well…

As I said, I have a hard time appreciating these messages as they’re written, if they’re written with those intentions at all. I have a hard time integrating the message that we ought to divest ourselves of our needs in order to satisfy others, as the tree did. Or the message that we none of us are whole, and need someone to fulfill us, as the piece sought.

I recognize I may be being a little heavy-handed with my interpretation of these stories, but as someone who’s loved so much of Shel’s work, I bristle at the messages I glean from them.

In fantasy land, yes, it would be nice to have someone around who would give me everything I needed without asking anything in return except my eventual appreciation. Yes, it would be lovely to find a human who would complete me. But that’s not the way it works in reality land. And that’s not the way I think it should work.

I think it’s a strange message to pass along to kids, and an unrealistic vision of relationships that’s being set before us.

I was trying to explain “interdependence” to a friend of mine recently, and I sort of failed. But in the world of these stories, I guess the best I could say is if I am a piece rolling about the world, whether I feel whole or not, what I’d really want is another piece rolling alongside me, looking to make themselves whole, just as I am. And, in the end, mostly it’s about seeing that we already are, and discarding the skewed and broken glasses we use to view the world and ourselves.

If I were the tree, I’d hope to get to say the to boy, you know, I love you and all, but I could use some mutuality in this relationship, if that’s something you’re available for. And if the boy really needs to row a boat made out of my trunk, I’d hope for the strength to tell him … he’s barking up the wrong tree.

That all said, I will continue to pull out my copy of Where the Sidewalk Ends and read a random poem. I will hope to read it to a new generation of readers, and I will hope to be an iota as creative and ingenious as he has been. But, I also hope to learn the lessons I would have liked these books teach. 

Oh, The Places You’ll Go!

October marks 10 years since I left New Jersey to teach English in South Korea for 18 months. Having barely finished the icing on my 23rd birthday cake, I rolled my newly purchased suitcases onto a JFK flight and was off to I didn’t know where.

The process felt almost instantaneous – register with an ESL teaching recruitment site; have an informational call with them (when they told me you’d make more money in Korea than, say, Thailand or Taiwan); have an evening interview call with a pre-school in a town on the outskirts of Seoul on Tuesday; board a plane on Friday.

I didn’t know what I was getting into, and despite all the good parts, the landing was a difficult one. If I did have it all to do again, my life to live over again, I wouldn’t have gone.

I know people say not to regret things, and that each experience was for learning, and certainly this one was: I met great people, had unusual experiences, got to travel to places I’d likely never have been and endear myself to a classroom of wide expectant faces.

But. It was not easy. And, yes, if I could do it again, I wouldn’t go. I was too fragile when I went. I was too lost to be uprooted. Yet, I don’t know what would have happened if I’d stayed. Korea was where I eeked along the bottom of an alcoholic lifestyle, and I’ve often said that if I hadn’t been in Korea, where there was little access to drugs, and mainly only to booze… that if I’d still been in the States and on the trajectory I was on, things could have gone a much different way.

As bad as alcoholism is, add drugs into the mix, and it quickly becomes a 4-alarm fire.

That said. It was rough. There was a half-hearted suicide attempt, gang rape, alcoholic stupors. There was racism and sexism and a feeling of alienation from everything you recognize.

There were antidotes, or places of brightness, for sure. I met some of my best friends there, ones who I’m still in regular touch with. I dated a very charismatic Canadian who went on to work for the U.N., who'd put me and my coworker up at his great aunt’s place in the orangutan paddock in a zoo in Jakarta, Indonesia. I hiked up ancient Buddhist and Hindu temples; ate dog stew, which was actually very good; planted my feet in the Pacific Ocean for the first time.

I traveled to Osaka, Japan to renew my work visa and still remember the glint of the flat rooftops outside the city as the train barreled us from the airport to the city center. I spent a New Years in a cabin on a dock in the warm waters of Malaysia and partied in a sprawling, palm-encased home in Singapore the following one.

I went to Korea because I didn’t really know what else to do. And to quote Carroll's Cheshire cat:

"Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?"

"That depends a good deal on where you want to get to," said the Cat.

"I don't much care where –" said Alice.

"Then it doesn't matter which way you go," said the Cat.

"– so long as I get somewhere," Alice added as an explanation.

"Oh, you're sure to do that," said the Cat, "if you only walk long enough."

I'd walked long enough, and I'd found something. I didn’t know where I wanted to go, just somewhere else. Yet, despite the intervening years and nearly a decade of sobriety, as I begin now to set out again to simply go “somewhere else,” I’m tempted to recall what happened last time I didn’t know where that was.

B’reishit: In the Beginning…

This week in the Jewish calendar, having unscrolled and read the whole Torah throughout the year, we come again to rewrap it all the way back to the beginning to read the very first word: B’reishit, “In the beginning.”

We’ve come to the end of something, and we wind it back to the beginning to start again.

I can’t think of a more appropriate coincidence and parallel for my own life.

Yesterday afternoon, Addams Family The Musical closed to a full house, once again. We said our final jokes, we emphasized things a little more. We cried at that one “Happy/Sad” song that reminds us that most things in life are a little of both. And when the final bows were over and the final patrons thanked, we came back to the dressing room for the last time, finally and pleasingly and thank god-ingly taking off our sweat-soaked costumes. The last time getting someone to help me un-pin the dress, the last time taking off the long and elaborate and hot wig, the last time returning my mic pack to the sound designer.

And when this was all done, and most of the makeup had been removed from our faces…

We began tearing down the set. The set that only a handful of weeks ago we’d built, and painted, and staged, and seen evolve right before our eyes. The same stage that only a few weeks before that, we’d all stood on for auditions in the remnants of the set from the previous show.

And now, here we were, making this, our set “the remnants of a previous show.”

Because To Kill a Mockingbird opens in 4 weeks.

I asked some of the old-timers if they got a little wistful breaking down something that was like another character in the show, if it was sad to have put it all up, just to take it all down? And each of them said, No. It’s part of the gig. They’re used to it. To the turn-over, to the letting go.

I’m not, yet! It was happy/sad for sure. It will be strange tonight to come to the theater for Mockingbird rehearsal and see the bones of our Addams set on the stage, picked clean of the character we’d built. And yet, if this isn’t a great lesson in the constant ebb and flow, creation and destruction, then I don’t know what is.

In the beginning, we were tentative and perhaps shy, getting used to one another’s personalities, contributions, moods.

In the beginning, we created something out of nothing, out of a few words and notes on a page, sitting in a small room with a piano, laughing a little, tense a little.

In the beginning, we didn’t know about the tech problems or the extra rehearsals. We didn’t know the petty arguments we’d have, or the number of times we’d have to control rolling our eyes.

In the beginning, we didn’t know the kind of joy and laughter we’d create on-stage or back-stage. We didn’t know the relationships we’d form, and the singular role each member of the cast and crew would take. We didn’t know that we’d come to love each other.

And now that we’ve unscrolled to the end, and we’re about to bring it all back to the beginning again, I am sure that we have learned something, something critical to the nature of life and love and joy and experience, that we didn’t know we would and that will carry us forward as we start once more with new words and notes and castmates.

In the beginning, we were strangers. We’ll never be that way again. 

“Just What I Needed.”

I was just telling my co-worker that nearly every item in my apartment came off the street or handed down. What typically happens for me is I notice a need in the apartment, say, I want a new waste-paper basket for my bathroom. And, more often than not, within a week or so, I’ll pass the perfect one on the street.

Most of the items in my house happened this way. Including the new kitchen table I just acquired and am typing on today. Because as point of fact, I’d just been saying and thinking how I want a new, less rickety kitchen table. And lo, yesterday, I ran into an upstairs neighbor who is moving and getting rid of things, and I asked to see what she had left, and there’s that Ikea table I’d admired but didn’t want to buy. And now, it’s here, in my home.

The reason I bring it up today is that I have recognized that when I have clarity of vision, I tend to get what it is I want. The perfect semi-matching bedside table, the pull-out couch that nestles perfectly in the alcove, a set of new colorful bowls and plates to replace the staid gray ones I’d bought at Goodwill.

Each of these I envisioned before they appeared. And so, I feel, will the job.

I do know how I want to structure and spend my day. I do know the kind of routine I want and the kind of impact I want to have.

And yet. It’s the waiting, the focusing, the action, the getting there, the pause.

With each newly acquired piece in my home, I am reinforcing the belief and faith and trust that if I dream it, it will come. If I am particular and specific, it will come.

It’s time once again to write a job ideal, and perhaps a relationship ideal while I’m at it, as I continue to release relationships that don’t serve me.

In fact, I’ve noticed as I look at my list of relationships to amend (people I’ve fallen out of touch with for self-preservation [but feel guilty about it], men I intrigue with even though there’s no possibility or desire for more, and the third category, my job that I haven’t wanted that’s been the same one dressed in different clothes for decades), each of these categories can be boiled down to: Molly staying in relationships she doesn’t want to be in.

Molly staying for the crumbs, the guilt, the fear of emptiness. Molly staying because it’s the “right” and “good” thing to do. Molly staying because she believes she can’t have what she really wants.

Each of these amends boils down to believing I’m worth attaining what I really want.

It’s so easy to believe and reinforce this when it comes to kitchen furniture! it’s harder to believe I can have what I want when it comes to people.

It is a sad and lonely habit to continue to hang on to relationships that don’t work, that aren’t fulfilling, that aren’t meeting my needs because of a belief that something is better than nothing.

It’s funny. My voice teacher had me practice “As long as he needs me” from Oliver the other week. Did I know the song, he asked? Yes. Yes, I know the song. I live the song.

I will stay on as long as he, she, they, it needs me. No matter how it’s hurting because “if you’ve been lonely, then you will know, when someone needs you, you love them so.”

So, I guess I should correct it to say I have lived the song. But I don’t really anymore, or I don’t want to anymore. I don’t want to settle, I don’t want to stay small, I don’t want to be scared of what may or may not come to me.

I want to believe, that just as I knew my kitchen table would arrive when it was supposed to, that my job and my healthy relationship will as well.

With a little visioning, of course. And perhaps a new theme song.

Someone will be with you shortly.

In the absence of more information, we fall back on the marching orders we know: Chop Wood, Carry Water. The Golden Rule. Look up, around, and away from yourself.

This morning, in an attempt to cull more information from the universe about where I should be focusing my energies with regard to career and income, I went into a meditation via a shamanic journey.

I didn’t get much. I asked other questions that I got some answers or insight to, but as to What on earth should I be doing next, who should I talk to, where should I focus, I got a whole lot of nothing.

And, in my own experience of meditation, the absence of information is itself information.

Stop trying to force yourself into a path, into action. It will be available when it’s supposed to be. The whole, "God is slow but never late," adage comes to mind. – One that galls me most of the time.

Because, often in my experience, slow but never late translates as “the last minute,” which really means, when you’ve given up all your plans and designs and have thrown your arms down, and said, okay, god/universe/soul/fate, whatever. Just whatever. I’m here, I’m done. I’m here.

It’s usually in these moments of surrender that I find information, that opportunities open up, that more is revealed.

Funny, as I think of it now, the play I’m in right now is a result of that “Whatever, here goes nothing” tack. The second audition of a day, after I’d pretty badly bombed the first, I decided, Whatever, I’m going to pull out (most of) the stops, and just throw it all out there, be as funny and into it as I can be because I have nothing to lose. I tried my controlled, “I want it to be this way” way, I tried working from the place of true terror and fear about what others would think of me, and that didn’t work out so great.

So, whatever, god, whatever you want. And lookie-loo what happened. It’s not to say don’t take action, it’s just to say, let go of my hold of the way I think things – me, mostly – should be.

And, with regard to other information I got in my meditation this morning, one of my questions was how I can stop stifling myself onstage? Because I do. I’m nervous and judging myself, and I want the audience to like me and my peers to esteem me, and I want to do a "really good job." And in that attempt, I’m so in my head that I’m not in my body, in my heart, in the moment, in the fun. And it doesn’t turn out how I want it.

It seems to me that the answer to most of this is, Be where you are, be who you are, and let it happen how it is.

That is so hard for me. And for most people, I imagine.

I want to know what to do next. I want a simple path from A to B. Or even a map to a complex path – I don’t care, just give me some coordinates! This, “be where you are and love yourself in and through it” thing is amorphous and feels ungrounded.

And yet, basing my actions on what I think I should be is as ungrounded as anything, because it’s not grounded in reality or the truth.

It is obvious to me when I reflect that taking actions out of fear, out of imagined people-pleasing, out of a panicked desire to “do the right thing” cause me more harm than good. And take up more time than it’s worth.

So, I will wait until more is revealed, as people often says it is. I will remember that there are no mistakes, only misinterpretations. I will try to embody the … no, I will try to let loose the confidence I know is stifled beneath the surface of my posturing and planning, and I will see what comes of it.

This whole transition for me is about embracing and sharing who I really am. It doesn’t work if I keep on trussing this person up in the shackles of my own expectations and a habit of low self-image.

Hello, Seattle, I’m listening. 

Icarus at the Bus Station

There is an adage I’ve heard: A new bus can’t pull into the station if there’s one already there.

The point being, unless you let something go, you can’t grab hold of something new.

This often comes up when people are talking about relationships, but it can be sagely advised around anything. Today, though, it does mean relationships.

There’s a second category of folks that I need to amend my relationships with, after those who I’ve fallen out of touch with for self-preservation. This is a category entitled: Men I intrigue with but don’t want a relationship with. ("with whom I don’t want a relationship," yeah, I know.)

But. This list, when written earlier this year comprised of 6 or 7 names. Now, there are only two left outstanding. The rest have fallen by the wayside as I’ve changed the electrically charged way I interact with them or have expressly stated I want to change the nature of our lovely, but ambiguous flirtation.

It’s exciting to flirt. It’s exciting to know that with a few taps on my phone, I can spark the interest of someone. It’s a boost to the ego -- and it’s totally unfair to us both. It’s a lie, really.

Sure, it’s fun, and I’m not saying that it’s wrong; it’s just not truthful for me, when I know that these are men who I don’t want to date or pursue a relationship with. For whatever reason.

Some, I just “don’t feel it.” We were never more than friends, to either of us, but there’s something nice about that extra “like” on your status update or the comment posted somewhere down your page, where you know they’ve had to dig to find it. Yes, most of these “intrigue” relationships (meaning, flirtatiously undertoned interactions) are acted out virtually, and that enhances their ease, their prevalence and the reluctance to “break them off,” since, who are we really hurting? Everyone “pokes” each other, right?

But, for me, I know it’s not right anymore. It’s distracting from what I really want, and using someone else as a tool to bolster my self-esteem. Neither of which get me to the healthful relationship (with myself or with someone else) that I’d like.

Some of the men on my list are simply fucked up and/or unavailable, and strangely(?), the last two remaining are in this subset.

It’s not that they’re just my friends who I flirt with; it’s not as innocent as a few extra “likes;” these two are possibilities in relationship-land, except that they’re not. At all.

And these are so hard to let go of, because they’re the most ambiguous, the most possible, and the most delicious. Delicious Evil: the curl of the lip when you think about them, your flirtation with them, what you’ve done with them, because these are not Rated G acquaintanceships you have had.

You like the thrill, the quickening of the pulse, and the slight tensing of your thighs.

Who.Wouldn’t?

But.

Here is where my current work comes in. I don’t want to stop these flirtations/more than flirtations, but I know this bus is not going to get me where I want to go. These are not available people. And despite the purring coo my body radiates when I consider them, my brain and heart can’t really take it.

I do want a relationship, with someone available to me. It’s nice to get the milk for free, but I’m ready to invest in a cow.

I’ve spoken to a friend of mine who has similar patterns with men and relationships, and I asked her honestly if there was the same kind of Icarus-style pull in her marriage. If there was that same forbidden, lustful quickening. If there was that, We’re going to blot out the sun with the heat of our passion. 

And, she told me, Honestly, No. It’s different.

You’re not going to get a cocaine high when you’re sober. That doesn’t mean it’s not worth being sober; it just means, No, there are some experiences that won’t be replicated in a healthy relationship.

Sure, it’s just one woman’s opinion, but I trust her, and I understand her analogy.

No, you won’t blot out the sun, but you won’t go down in flames either.

It’s up to me to decide which life I’d rather live, and which course I’d rather take. I know where this current “intriguey” bus leads – right back here, again.

So, I’m going to have to make a choice to be brave, and let this bus drive on without me, and trust that if I do, there will be a different one coming. (pun intended.)

forget frida.

When I was sick (that phrase again!), I wrote a blog entitled Frida. I was questioning why I wasn’t putting into action all of the passions I was saying I’d staved off for so long, asking why I wasn’t engaging in music and art during those long swaths of empty time laying in bed. Why wasn’t I being like Frida? Creating from my place of weakness and also of determination?

Of course, the feedback a cancer patient gets when they say something like this is, Molly, be gentle with yourself. But, it’s hard to do that when you feel riled up in the manic thrall of fear and impending death. You want to do everything right now. You feel you have to. And yet, of course you can’t. Because you’re sick.

It’s nearly two years since I wrote that blog, and the patience I wasn’t able to give myself then, the compassion and forgiveness of being in a situation that didn’t allow for movement like that is finally arriving – because I am and have changed.

I, of course, couldn’t change so much then; it was a “hold onto the ropes and try not to fall overboard” moment and series of moments. But, the storm has passed, and I have, despite any chiding I may have toward myself and judgment about where I am in life, I have moved to someplace different – I have implemented the changes I begged myself to take.

Of course, too, it’s hard in its own way to show up for yourself differently, to put yourself on the line – to put your dreams and goals out there, in black and white and in the real world. It’s nerve-inducing, it’s uncertain. As you’ve read recently, it means that I battle self-questioning, and “compare despair,” and still a nagging sense of “You’ve got to live your best life NOW!”

Well, in retrospect and with perspective, I get to see that I am. I am on that path I longed for. It’s become a bit more clouded (for me) since I’ve made the decision to leave my steady job at the end of the month. But, I have to trust that these actions and decisions are the outcome of a woman who started walking out of the dark when she wrote a critical, demanding blog about needing to be like Frida Kahlo, and who has taken impetus from that by engaging in those things she thought were too late.

To quote Galaxy Quest: Never Give Up; Never Surrender.

If I can hold the compassion of acknowledging where I am in comparison to where I was, I have to celebrate myself. Hard as that is for most of us.

But how many times, too, have I written that we never give ourselves the chance to acknowledge our successes? We climb and grapple and trip up a mountain, and once finally to the top, we pause for maybe a millisecond to look around and take in what we’ve just accomplished before we charge up the next mountainhead.

So, I take this moment to look around from the top of this place, at my bass I sort of know how to play now, at the script sitting on my kitchen table, and I thank myself and the opportunities around me for allowing me and helping me to get here.

The only person I can rightly compare myself to is myself. And today I whisper through the veil of time to that woman in a hospital bed – demanding she be something different – that she is. We are.

Pumpktoberfest

I’m sure I write about it every year, but as the wafts of pumpkin spice glide out of my coffee mug, I’m moved to write about it again.

Fall. Fall on the East Coast. Growing up where Fall means a certain smell of chill and decaying leaves. Kind of wet, sometimes, the piles you’ve helped stuff into enormous black plastic bags that I’m sure are illegal in California by now. And heaping them into the street, spilling off the curb, where you and your little brother will take a bounding head-start and leap into the center of the pile, the slightly moth-eaten leaves enveloping you up to your shoulders, softening your fall and bathing you and your senses in its musty, alive scent.

I noticed the leaves blowing last night, and here, they sound different as they tumble across the pavement; they sound dry and tired, each one brown and curled up on itself. Back East, they’re still half-alive when they fall, some of them. So they lilt and are soft, and … colored. How many people must write about the color of the leaves, the ombre fade of red and orange and gold. There’s something about their display that radiates joy and change and marks something miraculous, something that we, as humans, have the unique privilege to recognize and admire.

Pumpkins start popping up on doorsteps. We hang Indian corn, the same set of three tied to our front door for as long as memory serves, and three small palm-sized pumpkins decorate our own stoop, before squirrels begin to bite chunks out of them, and a jack-o-lantern we've spent all day carving.

Fall begins the part of the year when I felt and feel most loved and normal and inviting and, again, loved. It begins with Halloween, and follows through Christmas (celebrated at my dad’s folks house, who are/were vaguely Christian). The time of year when we feel swept up in something, in something communal, town-wide, Jersey-wide.

We celebrated, we decorated, we invited, and we lit fires in the fireplace, and ate my dad’s pumpkin pie. Our one time of year when my family could gather together in a semblance of normality, and put on the most average and happy face we could, and it was all decadent. The feeling of it was.

The change of the season with its scent and sights, and the length of the days, the incoming dusk approaching like a secret to encase you. Creeping slowly closer and closer, but welcoming, the cool still amenable, coaxing and gliding you home in the dim light, toward a mug of hot apple cider perhaps. Maybe one of the gallons we’d picked up from our annual apple-picking trip, harvesting hoards of apples, plucked in those wire basket poles that my brother and I would wave menacingly at each other, slipping on fallen rotting apples in the orchard, filling up woven wooden baskets we could barely carry out.

It’s the change of the light and the scent that’s been my indicator these California days. It’s not the same as Back East, but there’s still the aroma of crispness and an excitement.

I will begin to buy all things pumpkin, like the rest of America. Like the pumpkin pancakes my friend treated me to yesterday, and the abomination of flavored coffee that I’m drinking right now.

I will use the pumpkin ganache cookie recipe that was given to me by a college roommate and make the pumpkin pie that my dad’s passed down through trial and error – a recipe that would never, ever, include “Pumpkin Pie Spice,” but itself includes about 8 individual spices, which I own expressly for the pie’s creation.

Fall is a time of coming back to center, of reigning in the resources. Of whittling down excess and getting the necessities done in the light of day. It’s a time that rings with good memories, full, warm, joyous memories. Fall reminds me of the earth, of how the natural world has shaped my experience. And it tastes like the release of a constriction you've held the whole year, the exhale and inhale of a breath you haven't dared relax to take. 

To me, Autumn tastes like love.

Can I get a Witness?

You want it to be done. You want to stop referencing cancer, or marking time as “before I got sick,” “when I was sick.” You wanna stop the pang of knowing that “sick” was more than a bad cold. You wanna stop remembering what it felt like. And you want it to stop being dramatic, and making you feel dramatic.

You want the, “Oh, you cut your hair” comments to not sting as much, since no, you didn’t cut it, it fell out. You wanna feel neutral when you see a t.v. show where someone’s diagnosed with it, and stop silently commenting, No that's not at all what it's like. You want to stop gagging every time you smell Kaiser hand soap. You want to stop feeling the fear and the grief and the heartbreak you’d felt when you were sick.

The feelings you couldn’t really feel then because you had to just soldier up. When you were told, You could be a poster child for cancer. When you had to be braver than you wanted because you needed to not scare your friends.

And, there were the few friends you knew you didn’t have to be brave with, or braver than you'd felt. There were the few who let you cry the Ugly Cries, and the one who laid in your narrow hospital bed with you while you napped, all wiped out from chemo. The one who went to three health food stores to get the right kind of protein drink, since you couldn’t eat solids. The one who bought your own bejeweled reusable cup in which she brought you green shakes, and who packed and unpacked your hospital room with you every single chemo round, and stayed overnight at home with you the first night after your first release.

You want to remember the witness, and you want to forget why you needed one. You want to offer the deepest gratitude and you want to stop feeling gnawed by the uncertainty of that time.

You want to love the witness, and you want to stop being reminded of what it was they held you through.

There is no forgetting, there’s only fading. And I don’t want to forget it really; I just don’t know how to process it all still. Though it seems I am nonetheless.

I was on the phone with my mentor yesterday, talking about this one friend who showed up for me then and how, post-cancer, our relationship hasn’t been as strong or connected. That somehow it’s almost like cancer, or acute trauma, was the foundation of our friendship, and now that it’s passed, it feels like there’s not much more to go on.

I told her how sad I am that we’re not like we were, but that I don’t know that I can or if I want to be otherwise.

It reminds me of a quote from a movie that will make you groan. But. In Speed, Sandra Bullock tells Keanu Reeves that relationships based on intense experiences never work. (She later jokes, they’ll have to base it on sex, then. And that’s not really an option with my friend, cute as she is!)

So, what do you do? I told my mentor that my friend was a witness to that hardship, and about my pattern of how difficult it is for me to let go of certain things because I’m afraid people won’t believe me. That my experience of something will be called into question, without someone else to verify it. My friend is my verifier and my witness. Without a current relationship, who will remember? Without the reminder, who will believe me?

So, it’s about more than her, isn’t it? It’s about more than needing her continued friendship as a point of reference of truth in my life. It’s about my own ability to hold truth and facts for myself without outside validation.

And that, is a lifetime process.

But it brought up a lot of grief yesterday on the phone (which is why there was no daily blog). The star-pupil cancer patient. Who wore bright colored socks and leopard print chemo caps. Who had her own stash of organic herbal teas and would walk into the hall to fill her own ceramic mug from home. The star cancer patient who worked so hard not to be one, now processing what it actually felt like underneath all that “Chin Up” posturing that was half-posturing, half-I’m totally awesome, and cancer can fuck itself.

But the friendship has suffered since I’ve been healthy. And I don’t know how or what to do on that. I think releasing the attachment of my friend as witness, of needing a witness is a good place to start.

I don’t want to remember and I don’t want to forget. And until I find a place of peace with “what went down,” that division will always cause me unrest. 

Are you coming?

Yesterday was finally the day. I’ve been with this cast for a month in performance now, and once, even twice, a weekend, they’ve shed their wigs and sweat-soaked costumes and gone out to the bar.

I haven’t been. Partly because I don’t drink, partly because it gets so late, and partly because I’ve just been kinda shy about it. And last night, when the venue was gonna be a gay bar to dance, I decided it was time.

Sure, it’s a Friday night, I’d worked all day, rehearsed and performed all evening, and I had to be up this morning to sit for a portrait artist at 10am. … but you know what? Yesterday was a good day, and I felt invigorated.

I found out that I got cast in another production at the theater where I’m currently running. I got the large important work project done, with a few hiccups at the end of the day. And I finally felt like I beat the solo song that’s been beating me all run.

It was a good day. And dancing sounded perfect. I dance like a white girl, but I have fun doing it. Though, granted, there were other white girls there who definitely don’t fit into that “white girls can’t dance” model! But just the vitality and joy and jumping and ear-wide smile and circle of friends who are together only for a brief period. It was awesome.

I used to go dancing once or twice a month. Then maybe every other month. And now, I’m lucky to go once or twice a year. I would never listen to the music in real life. I know maybe one of the dozen songs that gets played. But it doesn’t matter.

I toss my growing-in hair around, I bounce on the balls of my feet, and I pump my fist in the air when it feels like time.

And it does. 

Blood Brothers

Yesterday morning I had coffee with a cancer friend, for lack of a better term.

He’s someone who reached out to me when I returned to work last Spring, who was 15 years out from his own similar cancer diagnosis, and said if I ever wanted to talk, he was available.

Since then, we’ve had coffee about once every 6 months or so, and we get to talk about walking back into a life that sort of looks the same on the outside, but has completely changed. We exchange the requisite, “Everything’s okay with your health?” question early in the conversation so we can continue on.

We speak mostly about work and fulfillment.

At the time we first met up, he was in a transition of his own, and now, about 18 months later, is again. And so we spoke about meaningfulness, about intention, about the often tipped balance between the checkbook and joy.

I love talking with him. Because he is my cancer friend. Because, it’s different than the first coffee date I had even earlier yesterday morning (a Jewish holiday and therefore a day off work), when I met with the home stager about potentially working and apprenticing with her.

With her, I only said things like, I’m just looking for a change and to instill more creativity into my every day life, to engage more of my heart in my work. With him, the whole conversation is built on the understanding of why that’s so. It’s not just because I’m a flighty 30something; It’s because I’m a fighting 30something (if you will).

I left the first coffee date with the home stager feeling mildly despairing and depressed. And I left the conversation with my cancer friend feeling uplifted, supported, and understood.

I know what he’s talking about when he says how it wrecks him that he has been so wrapped up in work again that he hasn’t had time for his outdoor hobbies. He knows what I’m talking about when I say that we have the privilege and curse of not being able to run on the hamster wheel of life without questioning what we’re doing.

I never wanted a cancer friend. I never wanted to be part of a cancer support group, and tried a few times without going back. Therapy isn’t the same thing either, though that helped. But talking with someone who also had their next breath marched up to the guillotine… it’s different.

It’s not "all cancer all the time." Our conversation wasn’t even about grief or anger. It was barely about cancer at all, except that of course it was. It is the reason we met, became friends, and can share with one another on a different level what our life paths are looking like and what we want them to look like and the struggle between just going along as planned and taking the time to question it all.

I imagine in some ways, it’s like war veterans’ ability to have an instant understanding of one another: You’ve both seen life and death; you’ve both fought bravely and been terrified; you’ve both come back to civilian life and are attempting to make sense of it all, while still paying your cable bill and buying groceries alongside every other citizen.

But you also know that, conscious or not, you both make every decision in reaction to and on top of your experience at war. You can’t not. It’s part of your DNA, now. You’re blood brothers.

I never knew I needed a cancer friend. And I sit here writing with tears of gratitude that I have one.