Who’s Next?

“Creativity requires the courage to let go of certainties.” ― Erich Fromm

This is the quote of the day relating to the daily meditation I’m doing through the Oprah/Deepak 21-day challenge.

Strangely or not, it’s what I was writing about in my morning pages before I logged into the meditation. The idea of uncertainty, of letting go of what’s known. And how very close to that I feel right now.

I found out yesterday I didn’t get the job I was in several rounds of interviews and mock sessions for during the last two weeks. And all for the better, I think. In fact, I’d reached out to an old schoolmate I’d seen on LinkedIn had worked there to ask her thoughts. And when I wrote back that they didn’t hire me, she wrote: You are better off. That place is a shit hole.

So there’s that!

But, this morning as I reflected on where I am, with the one avenue I was pursuing more actively than others cut short, I find myself without an exact destination. Which is where in fact I’ve been, but I've been distracted with the possibility of this employment.

What brought me to considering the question of Who’s Next was my bringing out an old reader packet of poems from an undergrad course I took. I’d brought it down a few days ago; I was 22 when I took the class, finishing up from the lost semester when I’d been otherwise engaged in a padded room.

The day after I brought the packet down, a friend of mine mentioned teaching again, putting together a C.V. (a teacher’s resume) and syllabus. I went online to higheredjobs.com yesterday to poke around and see. And again, I sort of went all blank about it. I see titles like Professor of 18th and 19th Century Romanticism or of Rhetoric, and I call myself uninterested and unqualified.

And then after a while of poking around online anyway, my computer overheated and shut down on me, which was probably for the best!

But, today I opened that packet labeled Twentieth Century Poetry II, and I read the names and poems of Robert Bly, Gwendolyn Brooks, yes, even the ubiquitous Plath. I read my margin notes, and was amused to see that my handwriting looked as it does now.

I was interested in the poems, but I wasn’t sparked. These were the dreams and longings of a different person. The person who ate these poems up, who devoured and analyzed and waxed prosaic marginalia.

I remember the classroom I was in when we read Spenser’s Faerie Queene. I remember being the one student who was really intrigued by his epic traitorous, political poem hidden in monarch-approved meter. I remember the classroom where the professor told us stories of the poets’ lives, who’d met who and exchanged letters, the relationships behind their lyrics.

I remember the room for my make-up semester, on a different campus, since my cohort had graduated. The computer lab where I wrote short stories and saved them onto the new smaller, square floppy disks that were actually hard.

This morning I reread the same works that meant so much to me then, a woman who felt she had no voice, and poetry was a quiet art that could conjure hurricanes, that could release those that were teeming in my body.

But, I don’t feel it in the same way now. I of course want new generations of students to hear tales of those smoky rooms where creativity was incubated and smile in camaraderie at Spenser’s thinly veiled subversion. But, I don’t know. Is it me? Is it me now?

There’s a quote from a Yogi tea bag I have taped over my kitchen sink, along with all the others I felt necessary to collect. It reads: Empty yourself and let the Universe fill you.

I haven’t ever really known what that meant, or how to do it. I haven’t known how to let go of all I know, of all my plans, of labeling what I know and feel and have done as relevant or useless. I haven’t been able to answer the call of that tea quote until today.

I do feel emptied. I feel emptied of direction, of specific ambition, of perspective on myself. But it’s not a negative feeling.

I feel like a student in a new class, but one I don’t know the course title to. I don’t know which of my skills will be useful in this new class, what of my knowledge will be relevant.

I don’t know if I'll need a paintbrush or a calculator, what I'll grow to learn, or who will be my teachers. I don’t know who else I’ll meet in class, and who I’ll never see again. I don’t know the iteration of myself who will be called upon to show up here, or who will be created from being here.

I only know that this nameless class is the only one on my course schedule for the foreseeable future, and that perhaps at the end of it, I may be able to answer what iteration of Molly is next.

Light in the Dark.

According to my pock-marked memory, my dad held at least 5 jobs, sequentially, during the time I was growing up. Every few years, he seemed to move on to a new job, eventually landing someplace he retired from.

My mom variously was engaged in the following classes or hobbies:

bread-making

cake decorating

special effects make-up

Mary Kay-style beauty product sales

crocheting

knitting

part-time make-up artist

The closet became filled with half-finished projects and tools of a trade long abandoned. 

My dad also told me a few years ago that he rarely finished projects he began around the house (the wallpaper all done, except for that spot there; the fireplace paint stripped, but not re-stained) because of his own childhood lesson that if you finished something it could be criticized.

And I wonder what of this I’ve “inherited” through observation.

I've realized the Fulcrum idea only works if I’m earning more per hour and working fewer hours. It doesn’t, and won’t work, if I’m only working fewer hours!

I feel a little afraid today. Afraid that the time I’m intending to “buy” for myself will be eaten up by odd jobs in order to cull a living.

I guess I mention my parents’ work habits because I’m afraid that I’m like them. And can certainly see the seeds and small shoots of their behavior in my own.

Molly doing theater. Molly doing all organic cooking. Molly in a band. Molly wanting to take math classes, tutor kids, fly a plane. Molly quitting another job. Again.

And.

I’m not sorry I’m doing this.

It’s funny. Last year, playing bass in a band, I said I was finally living out a teenage dream I’d never let myself have. If I were more honest with myself then, I would have studied theater in college or engaged in it then. I would have tried the magpie lifestyle then. I would have held odd jobs, instead of the immediate office jobs.

I would have been a mildly responsible but creatively engaged young adult.

But, I wasn’t. That wasn’t my experience, and that wasn’t allowed. Coloring outside the lines was not allowed in my house. Or so I understood it.

I thought last night about this past year+ since returning to work post-cancer. About how I’ve been doing the things that a teen and 20something would do. It logically does follow that my professional work pattern would change, if I’m sort of going back to live the kinds of experiences I’d aged myself out of then.

And perhaps I’ll do them differently than I would have at 20 or 25. Perhaps trying to live outside of the lines at 33 is easier, or more grounded. I don’t know. But I do see that I seem to be veering toward a life that a lot of young people live, as if I’m reclaiming a lost youth, a lost innocence and curiosity and naïveté.

Is it “fun” to about to launch into the unknown? Well, yes and no. It’s fun to feel engaged in the creative world and think outside the box. It’s less fun to know the realities of salary requirements and health coverage and car payments and also try to think outside the box.

I don’t know. I don’t know what will happen. I know I have more work to do, more actual sitting down and developing a plan to do. And I think I’m going to have to reach out for help from folks to help me hold the space to do that.

It’s funny. (I keep on saying that! But, this all amuses the observer part of me, I’ll tell you!) Over a year ago, I sat with two women who helped me form a game-plan for alternative classes I could facilitate.

About 6 months ago, I sat with a different pair of folks, who helped me develop a different plan for an alternative after-school program.

I’ve been dipping my toe into these waters, and have subsequently thrown my arms up into their faces and said, But I don’t know, I don’t know enough and it’s too hard and I don’t have the tools.

I’ve abandoned this line of thinking as many times as I’ve lit the fires in the eyes of my friends, who’ve said, Molly, this is totally possible.

So, I guess it’s time for me to dig my notes out of the closet like my mom's half-finished quilts. Time to breathe deeply and let myself live the life I’ve consistently told others I want to live.

It’s also time for me to call those friends back in and have them hold my hand as I sort through those notes and make moves in this direction. Because, as I’ve said before, Sometimes I need someone else to hold the lantern of hope. 

Having My Cake and Eating It Too.

(Yes, I’m gonna go there. Bear with me!)

In 12-step recovery it is custom to acknowledge lengths of sobriety or abstinence. Within the first year, we often acknowledge monthly mile-markers, and after a year, we acknowledge annual “birthdays” or “anniversaries.”

Why do this? Why stand up in front of others and say that you’ve accomplished something? Isn't that selfish and self-seeking? Why does it matter?

Well, the conventional wisdom is that it shows others that it’s possible. You’re not actually doing it for yourself, although that’s quite nice; you’re helping others to see that “one day at a time” adds up to months, and even years. You’re offering hope to others.

In our “belly-button birthday” world, why acknowledge our birthdays either? I have friends who eschew celebrating their birthdays. Why celebrate? It’s not like you *did* anything. You just lived another day.

And, just as with recovery, to me, that’s the point these days.

It’s to celebrate and share the fact that you made it. That you are alive. You did do something: You lived.

A former mentor of mine used to call this our “precious human life.” A Buddhist, her meaning is how rare it is to inhabit a human form this lifetime. We could have been a tree or a toad or a fruit fly, alive for 24 hours, unconscious. But we’re not.

We’re animated, active, Fate-affecting. And Fate-affected.

We’re constantly learning and changing and fighting and hoping and loving and hating and struggling and triumphing. We’re constantly forming ideas of who we are and who the world is; where we are and where we want to be.

We’re creating our lives with every breath we have the privilege to draw.

So when a co-worker the other day shushed everyone as we wished her a happy birthday, saying she doesn’t do birthdays, I did whisper to her, But imagine the alternative.

We do fight to be here, conscious or not; every day, we are making a decision to try. No matter what that looks like, even if it looks like stagnation or the mundane. Even if we are the tired, poor huddled masses. We try.

The celebration of a birthday is an acknowledgement of a year of living. A year of something precious and rare and teeming with uncertainty and, hopefully, love.

Today, I turn 33 years old. I have survived alcoholism, dysfunction, gang rape, and cancer.

I have formed and smashed relationships. I have melted and embraced. I have survived my own machinations. And become a metallurgist.

I, my friends, am an alchemist. And I honor us all today by showing you:

We live.

And how!

With love,m.

Baking a Life Worth Living.

“It was the fantasy made so real that I teared up a few times, wanted to pinch myself, and thought over and over and over, how is it that I am here?

How did this happen?

And I can trace the arc of it and still be amazed to be this woman[…]”

This is a quote from my friend Carmen’s blog today, or last night actually, the woman who began inspiring me to write a blog at all, and then a blog-a-day (or, almost a day. Self-care [aka sleep!] comes first during this month, sorry avid readers!).

Our paths have been divergent but so parallel over these few years, I once proposed we co-share a book based on our blogs: Her adventures in Paris, having moved there for her 40th birthday, and her triumphs and struggles there; My adventures in Cancer-land happening at the same time, as I turned 31, and the strangely similar triumphs and struggles.

Today, was no different: She was visiting New York City for the first time. I am in a musical for the first time as an adult.

Her words make me reflect and become present once again with the amaze-ball nature of where my life and energies currently are.

But, I also was very keen when I first found out I was cast about the words I used. I made sure to not say, “I can’t believe it.”

Sure, I couldn’t believe it! But, I wasn’t going to say that. I believe in the Law of Attraction-style woo-woo stuff, and in my readings on it, when you say things like, “I can’t believe this is happening to me” or “This is impossible!” or “This can’t be happening” – even though they’re amazing things – it’s my belief that the “Universe” hears that, that you hear that, and if that’s really your belief, then they can fade or change to support your belief that these amazing things aren’t actually happening.

Who knows? I don’t. But I’d rather be on the safer side of things!

So, when I told my mom, I said simply, "I’m so excited. I'm so grateful."

I do have to stop saying, "I’m so nervous." SURE, I am nervous. I had another voice lesson yesterday, and it’s helping me feel more comfortable in the lower register of my voice, but I won’t yet say I'm confident. It still feels like straining and yelling. But I’m getting more used to that discomfort…which I guess is another way of saying, “Getting comfortable”!

I am astonished by and pleased with the woman I am and have become. And I also know the places where I strive to grow and build and commit, and lay foundations for an even more “me” life.

I know progress is slow. My voice teacher said that it’s about first finding a place to build the house, before you even begin to think about what it looks like or furnishing it. You have to find the firm ground to stand on before you can build anything on it.

And, I’m doing that, slowly.

It’s strange sometimes to be the age I’m at. About to be 33 next month, and feeling so much older than some, and so much younger than others. Explaining to the 11-year old Pugsley what a revelation the cordless phone was when I was a teen. Even my new co-worker, age 22, fresh out of college, and so bristling with energy.

And then, there’s most of my friends, who are older than me, who hear me talk about the brevity of life and how there’s so much more I want to do, and give me the “You’re so young, you have so much time” face.

I get the feeling that this is the center (or the beginning of the center) of adulthood. When you know you’re not a child, really learning the world and who/how you want to be in it; and neither are you a middle-aged person, knowing that you are pretty well set in your personhood for the rest of your days.

It’s a period of final gelling that I feel. (Though I know learning and growing and changing is a lifelong process.)

But I sort of feel like all the ingredients have been gathered, have been mixed, and we’re waiting to see if what I’ve assembled is a sourdough or cupcake batter.

I do hope it’s cupcakes.

I am the woman who knows she eats 90 eggs a month (yes, really). Who knows she buys only Ultra Soft toilet paper, but the super eco-friendly paper towels. Who knows how to pay her bills on time, and knows she still won’t do her dishes until pressed by her own revulsion!

The woman I am looks for the hope, even in the desperate times. She relies on friendships built during the “ingredient assemblage” time, and knows they are in fact ingredients of this current and future life.

The woman I am struggles with self-doubt, and celebrates her moments of self-encouragement. Falls short of ideals, and laughs about it when she can, and shares about it when she can't.

“How did this happen? How am I here?”

I don’t have to pinch myself. I don’t think this is a dream. I do have to remind myself it’s a nuanced, challenging, changing, and ultimately precious reality. 

And the woman I am looks eagerly forward to licking the icing. 

Thou Shalt...

I’m always hesitant to share my meditations. Like listening to someone report their dream, which to the dreamer is a fascinating pursuit, and to the listener is … not. But. This morning’s meditation was too illustrative and too relevant to current musings not to report. So, bear with.

“What is blocking me from making this decision around the play?” Around quitting or staying in it. I can’t even get to a firm decision either way, get a spiritual “hit” either way – even after conversation, taking an inventory of my fears around it both ways, and even after regular old "getting quiet" meditation.

So, this morning, I plugged the headphones into my iPod, scrolled to the drumming meant for this type of meditation and went in on a Shamanic Journey to find out what the heck is going on since the “normal” pathways to clarity are so gummed up.

Standing, in my mind’s eye, at the edge of the cliff that overlooks all the land that makes up my self (occasionally I'm reminded of Mufasa showing Simba all the land in Africa that is his domain), I asked the above question: What is blocking me from making my decision?

Without warning, the sky turned black, the light sucked out of the land, and a voice stormed, “You have to do this play.” This was no gentle cosmic answer. This was violent insistence. This was, I don’t care whether you want to do it or not; you have to.

This, is not my voice. But, apparently, it’s there inside me, blocking my decisions. I certainly can’t even know whether I want to do the play or not, if there’s a damning demand to do it regardless of my desire. This wasn’t a request, this was an order. This wasn’t a suggestion, this was a decree.

And if you’ve read me for any period of time, you know that voice is probably internalized from a parental source of the masculine variety.

The fear, no, terror, I felt when everything turned black was so evocative of how I felt as a child, I’d forgotten what it feels like to feel so small, so unimportant. On my couch, in my living room, in 2014, I pulled my blanket tight around me and cowered into the cushions.

There are cases and circumstances when, certainly, we don’t want to do things. As you also know, I hate doing my dishes. But, I do them. I know I “have to.” I know that as a child, we’re required to do things that we don’t want to do, because it’s for the good of the family, the good of your education, the good of your health (who wants to get a teeth cleaning?). But, this isn’t that.

As I recorded in my journal what occurred during meditation, I wrote what came to mind after it – the counter, the compassionate response to this demonic, demanding voice: “Molly, You don’t have to do the play if you don’t want to. There is no wrong decision here: If you do it, you’ll have more opportunities to do things you love; if you don’t do it, you’ll have more opportunities to do things you love. This is an abundant world. Just keep honing your vision and asking for help.”

Because there is no right or wrong here. But I haven’t been able to get anywhere on this choice because there's been this internal override preventing me from making it. I can’t know what I want if I don’t think I’m allowed to figure that out.

This still doesn’t make my decision one way or the other ... yet. But, I suspect that identifying, addressing, and removing the block to making one will help. 

"Only Her Hairdresser Knows For Sure!"

I am likely not the only woman to tear up at the sighting of a gray hair on her head. But I may be one of the few who wells up with tears of gratitude.

Yesterday, during my morning primping, I noticed a gray hair. I usually don’t pull them out; this isn’t the first I’ve noticed. But this one, I decided to.

About 5 inches of silver, shiny, light-catching hair. 5 inches that have grown back since it all fell out from chemo in late 2012.

Call me crazy, but I’ve never been scared of going gray. I had none at all before cancer, and several now. But, even before then, I always thought of it as a rite of passage. As a crowning achievement, really. You’ve made it. You are alive to go gray at all. You are passing into the stage of life that is for richness, boldness, satisfaction, self-esteem and a greater degree of self-assurance.

If there’s anything I’ve learned from reading about aging generations, it’s that so much of our self-questioning begins to fall away once we reach “a certain age.” We begin to think less about how others see us, and more to question what we want to leave as a legacy. And this brings with it so much reflection and truth-finding.

Who wouldn’t want to age into that category?

Surely, you don’t have to turn 50 to begin to assess your values and your desires for the remainder of your years. Like me, and surely others, you can do that at most any age. But it helps to have some experience behind you to make those choices from a place of peace, not fear.

The first memoir I ever looked at, I didn’t read.

I saw it on a shelf in Borders (when it still existed) about 7 or 8 years ago. I noted the title, looked at the flap, and went on with my day. But I never forgot about it, and last year finally picked it up to read.

The title? Going Gray: What I Learned about Beauty, Sex, Work, Motherhood, Authenticity, and Everything Else That Really Matters. A woman’s exploration of what that means to “go gray” in our culture and society. A lifelong hair dyer, she made the decision to give up the illusion, and embrace whatever lay under the chemicals, for better or worse.

Author Anne Kreamer looks at the history of dying our hair; goes “undercover” as a woman trying to reinvent herself to re-enter the workforce to see if image consultants will tell her to dye her now growing-out grays (none do); and comes to discover that with her new look comes a new clothing color scheme, and a new confidence.

She also doesn’t purport the superiority of letting her hair grow out. She talks with successful women who do and don’t dye, and let’s them have their experience. All she can speak to is her own.

Surely, it helps that she goes gray in a “nice” way, with silvery and dark chrome strands. Which is much the way I anticipate I will.

With my dark coloring, I imagine that I will go silver, instead of stale gray, or as my mom describes her (dyed) fading blond: dirty dishwater.

So, that "beauty in the beast" helps my acceptance, I’m sure.

But what brought me to tears yesterday as I stood there, admiring this newly-found strand, now plucked and held like a precious object in my hand, was the reality and giddy reminder I feel every time I find one: I made it. I am alive to have gray hair.

I’m alive to see what will happen with it: if they’ll turn out all spidery texture and I’ll lament I ever praised finding them. If I’ll consider dying it after all. Or if I’ll love every single thread of life these gray hairs represent.

I tear up when thinking about this, because it’s true. Because, like someone admiring a sunset, or their sleeping child, or the taste of a food never eaten, it means I’m alive. Which itself means I have a chance and a choice to make my life whatever I want it to be.

My gray hair represents possibility, transformation, and authenticity.

Who wouldn’t rejoice? 

Wilderness Survival

So, here's a funny.

Remember when I posted that blog about finding equanimity in my relationships? About not being thrown by others emotions (or even my own)? Yeah, that one I posted on Friday... three days ago?

Well, guess what I've been given the opportunity to practice these last three days?

Bingo!

To be respectful, I will simply say that I saw many chances to retaliate and behave how I used to -- particularly, by being curt, punishing, and seethingly silent. If I behave that way, you, of course, will apologize for your behavior, and change in the way that I want you to, right?

Unfortunately, or fortunately, I really noticed how I wanted to react, my first reaction. How my disappointment wanted to come out as being mean. Instead, I tried to my best to "let it go." I had that silly Frozen song in my head a lot this weekend!

How others are choosing to behave is none of my business. As it affects me, it is my business. But it's up to me to choose how I want that to be expressed.

Let's just say that I was pissed, so much so that I was on the phone while driving, and got pulled over by a cop before I even left San Francisco.

Luckily I was let off with a warning (and I know how much those tickets cost!), but it gave me the opportunity to pause and look at why I was behaving in the way I was -- in a way that wasn't good for me.

The whole weekend ended up, for me, being an exercise in letting other people have their emotions and their actions, and not being drawn into that drama. It's camping. It's supposed to be light, fun, and not particularly insightful, except maybe the insight and rest and joy that comes from being in the silence of the forest. Which, is never actually that silent, once you get quiet enough. That's one of the things I love about it. To hear the rustle of the trees, the little animals, the little noises. How this tree sounds as it sways in the wind as opposed to that tree.

Luckily, I was able to ask for some of that time for myself, so that I could get my stillness in.

I am no saint, and I am no angel, and I have no business judging others, or assuming that they should be any way other than they are. But I do get to ask for what I need, and I do get to behave in a way that is in alignment with how I want to be. Despite that my brain gremlins are momentarily eviscerating you.

Upon arrival home to Oakland, I get a phone call. It's my dad.

Really?

I let it go to voicemail. I'm emptying out the cooler in my bathtub. It rings again.

Now I think it's an emergency. Nope: After a decade of being engaged to the same woman, he's finally getting married.

The last weekend of the play I'm playing the lead in.

I was *informed* I should see if they can get the understudy to do that weekend. I wasn't asked what play it was. I wasn't told congratulations. I was told, in the voice of force only my father knows how to invoke, that I should be there.

I told him I'd ask about the understudy.

I called my brother, who'd left me a voicemail about this earlier that day. If the invitations were going out the next week, it was clear that this plan was in place quite some time ago, no? Could be that I could have been informed a little earlier, no?

I was virulently reminded of when I was sick with cancer, and my father told me that he could only call me after dark, when I was exhausted from my days of chemo, that "This is how it works." This is what he told me about not being able to call me earlier. "This is how it works."

After I got off the phone with him yesterday, I remembered that. This occasion, this insistence that I be there, despite whatever (SUCCESS) is going on in my life, is part of his pattern of demand, and selfishness.

And, an inability to say something like: You know, Molly, it would mean a lot to me if you could be there.

I told my brother when we were discussing the viability of my coming out, plane tickets, and where to stay, things that my dad has obviously not thought of. ... that I would talk to my network. That I would look at my numbers. Maybe ask him to pay for half the plane ticket out, since I'm not in a position to go back east again right now.

But then, I do know how awful it is to ask for money from him.

So, I will talk to my network. I will repeat "Let it go" in my head, and I will remember the thing I usually forget when I feel made small by him: I am awesome.

My being in a play IS a big deal. My getting a lead role IS a big deal. I'm doing a brave and new thing. I am taking chances to be greater in my life. And the exercise in equanimity is to allow and remember and embrace and be bolstered by these facts.

It is not a surprise that the weekend I claim that I've moving "beyond" being thrown by others, I'm given several (immediate!) chances to practice what I preached.

A mentor once told me that our "character defects" (or, outmoded coping mechanisms) aren't relieved from us. They aren't removed. Instead, we're given opportunities to either pick them up again, or to act a different way.

I haven't known what that other way is, until I'm given the chance to try something else. If I only reach for what I know, I do the same thing. It's not that I feel relieved of being thrown by others' emotions. I just feel more able to deal with what that brings up for me, and how I choose to engage with that.

What will happen with my friend? Change.

What will happen with my father? I can only hope: Change.

Dear Mom, I Hallmark You.

It was always very clear what our family would do on Mother’s Day: We would have bought hanging fuschia plants at Metropolitan Plants up on Route 17 in Paramus, one for our mom (Ben’s and mine) and one for my Dad’s mom. We’d make the U-turn by Grand Union, near which, whenever driving past it together, my best friend M. and I would parrot a mean jingle about our babysitter: “Get everything you don’t want aaaat Grand Pam!” (name changed for anonymity!)

Once home, we’d exchange the broken and feeble fuschia that hung by the side of our house all winter for the new one, hook the other in the Camry, and drive over to Queens.

After the lovely awkwardness of pizza with them, our family would reward ourselves by stopping by The Pastrami King. Which has since closed, and there’s now a Pastrami Queen somewhere, which, sorry feminism, is not as good.

Pastrami King had the real barrels of pickles along the wall, all different kinds, fat, warty, dark, light green, and my mom would dive into the barrel with the plastic tongs to fetch these prizes out of the water. My brother and I would gag at her.

We’d get round potato knishes and pounds and pounds of, really, the best pastrami I’ve ever had, and also some of their own spicy mustard – because people, no mayo, no ketchup, nothing but MUSTARD, is supposed to go on a pastrami sandwich. Sorry. It’s the Jew way. Well, at least, our Jew way.

Mother’s Day did mean something in our household, and despite all the “It’s a Hallmark holiday” scorn it receives, and despite the mixed emotions it may bring up for people who’ve lost moms, lost babies, can’t or didn’t have babies, for me, it’s nice. Yes, even on this arbitrary date some CEO thought up some years ago, it’s nice to acknowledge my Mom. And so, I do.

This year, by coincidence and fortune, I came across a website with cuff bracelets with large metropolitan city subway maps engraved into them. Paris, Berlin, Chicago, New York. My mother, the consummate New Yorker. In fact, this very morning, she sent me a batch of photos from the window display of her local dry-cleaner. The purveyors apparently rotate a series of Barbie tableaus. Last time was the Oscars, complete with a miniature “Gone with the Wind” poster, red carpet, and a Marylin Monroe Barbie. This month, a Barbie Seder, with mini Afikomen and all!

She loves the city, and so, my brother and I split the cost of one of these cuff bracelets for her. She may never wear it, it may be “not quite right,” and sure, a nicely written card could have done the same thing, and for many years it has. But, this year, it was nice to say, “Hey, I know this is something very important to you, a part of you, this city, and I want to give you something that represents that, that says, Ben and I know you. You are not invisible, you are seen, you are recognized, and you are appreciated in your interests and oddities.” (Not many women her age would brave black and white saddle shoes with skinny jeans. But, her photo to us to mark the start of Spring was of just that!)

I am not a mother. I don’t know if I will be, the fates haven’t sent me that postcard yet. But it’s baby season around me. At work, I’ve gotten to snuggle almost weekly with what started as newborn for the last 4 months, and now teeths and laughs and dances and flirts all shy and coy sometimes, while his mom gets to compose emails with two hands. Like yesterday, I’ve gotten to snuggle another newborn at my friend’s house, letting him sleep on me for swaths of time where my little heartbeat rests right against his, and his flutters like a bird, and he’s so warm and soft and new.

It’s glorious.

I’m flying out at the end of the month to visit one of my best girl friends on Long Island. She got married last year during 4th of July, went on honeymoon in August, and got pregnant on a boat in the Mediterranean. 9 months later, baby. I asked a few of the new moms I know if it would be “worth” my flying out to see her. How “important” it was. If money were no object, it would be no question. It’s the only time at work that I can really go in the foreseeable future. 

How important is it? The baby won’t remember. My aunt tells me all the time how she was there when I was born. I don’t remember. Doesn’t really mean anything at all to me. Or, at least, it hasn’t. But, now I’m beginning to see that it is meaningful -- to the adults. To have the people you love around you at a time when everything is changing, exciting, exhausting, new – I’d want my best friend there, too.

I don’t have those “uteran tugs” that some women experience around their 20s and 30s, that ache for a baby in my body. But being so close to the motherhood around me makes it so much more real, significant, miraculous.

I’ve written before about my own “Maybe Baby” question, so this one is just to say, laying a baby – my baby or not – on my chest, having him nuzzle into me and rest because I’m a safe place, is Life’s great privilege. 

This Used to be my Playground

I’ve been thinking in detail about my home town today. Thinking about describing it to you: Up the block lived the boy I had a crush on, across the street from him was our teenage babysitter, the park where they buried plastic eggs every Easter, the library I used to hide in, and the honeysuckle fence by the elementary school we all learned to eat from.

I catalogued it all in my brain before I got up. The radius of what I knew determined by how far we’d bike. The friends who lived the flat road across town to the other elementary school, and the bakery where my mom would buy bagels each week, and sometimes cupcakes with frosting heaped on top in the shape of Sesame Street characters – we’d beg for Cookie Monster, since he also had a cookie stuck in his mouth.

The Dunkin Donuts down the hill where I got my first job, and how you could smell the doughnuts baking from the top of the hill. The house next-door where my best friend lived, yellow, now beige with new owners. That big house on the corner that burned down amid rumors of arson and insurance fraud.

The houses you knew to skip on Halloween, and the little league fields with an actual brick concession stand. The tire playground that used to stand at the grade school, where D. fell off the top of the pyramid and broke his whole leg. The small white, bean-shaped rocks that carpeted that playground; I picked up a handful the last time I was there, and when I rub them together in my fist, the sound of scraping unlocks my childhood.

I was going to tell you about the awesome 4th of July parade one year when I bought a Strawberry Shortcake ice-cream pop that, once eaten, revealed a “Get One Free” prize on the wooden stick, so that the free one I got had the same message.

The street I first tried to drive down, the patch of pavement where I fell off my bike and broke my foot.

I’ve been thinking about all this, everything I knew and remembered, that shaped the world outside my front door, because facebook told me yesterday that an old classmate’s mom suddenly died of cancer a year after his father died of it, too. And I was picturing where his house is, just a block from the library, one I’d have walked past thousands of times. It abuts the big park where we all went on Memorial Day when school was closed, and there’d be hot dogs and cotton candy.

For reasons I can’t explain (and despite being tired of talking about my own cancer -- Tired of referencing it like people reference a year abroad: "Well, last year when I was in Scotland –" "Well, last year when I had cancer..." as it simply is my frame of reference right now. Tired and bored of it, and yet astonished at where, like yesterday morning), its presence and reality will side-swipe me.

My sudden grief wasn’t all about me: it was the sadness of the reality, once again, that life is so uncertain, so sudden, and so disillusioning. That life offers those of us in it, grief. Live long enough, and it just does.

When my final grandparent died last year, my generation, the one of my classmates, became solidly in the center of life’s process. Our parents are now grandparents or grandparent age. We’re them. And the generation we’re birthing is us. We’re transitioning to the center of that boat.

Some of us already have transitioned, lost parents long ago, and have always been in the center of that boat. But there’s no illusion anymore that this is something we may be exempt from.

I don’t really know why I cried when I saw this. I felt for him, for the innocence of our town, for my own remission/relapse fear. For sudden grief that doesn’t permit goodbyes.

I don’t know how to end this blog. I don’t say that “those were the days,” that the experience was idyllic, though these recollections tell me it was closer than I knew. But the fact remains that those of us who grew up, who learned to ride bikes and squirt super soakers at one another, who bought Big League Chew at the same candy store and rang the same Halloween doorbells, will always be connected.

We may not be or have been friends, we may barely know the lives each other lives now, but by circumstance and proximity, we shaped for one another those two square miles of childhood. 

Manic Panic.

It’s what the junior high and high school kids were using to dye bright streaks of their hair in the 90s. There was one store in the mall that sold it (Nature Works? - The Nature Company! that's it.), and if you said you were going there, you meant that you were going to dye your hair a brilliant shade of rebellious.

I never bought Manic Panic. I was as straight an arrow as they come until the end of high school. There was too much order to maintain, and too many rules to follow, for me to diverge any bit off the path I was expected to walk.

And so, as I am very apt to do, once I hit college, the pendulum swung so desperately and frenetically in the direction of “off the path,” that it swung right around and hit me in the now-pierced face, like a rogue tetherball.

Obviously, this wasn’t the “way” either. This wasn’t my authentic way, at least.

I had a therapist tell me a long time ago that if my mother had killed herself when I was young, as her behavior threatened she’d do, that I would have probably gone down with that ship. I’d spent so much time and energy attending to the needs and expectations of someone else, there wasn’t room to explore or attend to my own.

Years later, I had another therapist tell me that this life was my own, that I didn’t have to make choices anymore based on whether I thought my dad would approve, or disapprove and retaliate anymore. That this life was my own was such a novel concept, I’d rejected it for years. That I could choose now to dye my hair, pierce my face, be alone, reject the world, participate in it, smoke, not smoke, date, not date – is still a concept I’m adjusting to, but the marination of this understanding and awakening has been long underway.

The idea that I am a master of my own fate … well, it seems just as rogue! That I can choose the kind of toilet paper I want; toothpaste I like; friends I call. That I can choose how I want to dress in the world; what hobbies to pursue; … job to have … partner to love.

Fulfillment, is the end game, or the suspicion of the end game. Am I happy in my path? Note, Molly: this is your path. There is no mother to care for, no father to obey. What is it you want in life? And do you feel free and brave enough to pursue those desires?

Do you feel free and brave enough to apply for a new job? Do you feel free and brave enough to wear clothing without stains? Do you feel free and brave enough to accept that you want a partner whose clothes are also without stains?

Do you feel free and brave enough to accept that you want a good life? A job you respect? A partner you admire?

Do I feel … stable enough, secure enough, self-supporting and self-worthy enough to not only admit these “taboo” desires, but also to express them to the world, through action?

Do I feel ready to tell you, world, that I want in? That I want in on the goods, on the joy, on the self-respect, on the intellectual stimulation, on the bed-rocking sex, on the critical, yet specious-seeming ease?

Well, I guess I’m telling you. I guess it’s been long enough that the tetherball has hung limp and impotent, and it’s time to begin playing again. I no longer am… tethered to ideas of being and living that aren’t my own. The cord is cut, the apron strings untied. The life, really, is my own. 

And though today that may not mean dying my hair green or copper, as I wish I’d been able to do a dozen years ago, it means I now know that I could. And that I would be awesome besides. 

Because I’m your Mother, That’s Why.

The last song on Anticipate This, the mix CD I’d made for him, is Dave Matthews’ Say Goodbye. It includes the refrain, “For tonight let’s be lovers, and tomorrow go back to being friends.”

The line from Alanis’ Thank You has been repeating in my head: “Thank you, Disillusionment.”

And, finally, if I was “craving cupcakes,” well, a cupcake isn’t a sustainable meal, is it? It’s never actually intended to be, and so you've got to enjoy it while it is there, savor, relish, cherish it, and then you let it go. Then you move on.

We had a “debrief” conversation last night, during which most of the above sentiments where shared by us both. Acknowledging the loveliness, the heights, the calm, the titillation. And yet, that it was what it was. That it was a moment in time that we’d both signed up for, participated in, and get to let go, get to allow its sanctity, without marring it with all those Whatifs that spun in (both) our heads.

To allow the sanctity of beauty, to allow it its singularity is a challenge and a lesson of adulthood. To be disillusioned, to know that moving isn’t right for either of us, that fantasy can overtake reality and crumble it. To have had the hard-won experience of knowing that selfishness and possessiveness can suffocate a beautiful thing, is perhaps not “romance” as we think of it. But it is, in itself, a mercy.

Relinquishing the ties to future, to “meaning,” to purpose, we can allow it the simplicity and integrity of its joy.

I wrote a poem once about trapping a moment away in a mason jar, locking it deep inside for fear that the moment would get marred by time and eventuality. But the problem was that I forgot what that moment smelled like anyway; in my possessiveness and fear of losing it, I forgot what made that moment so precious to begin with.

The same is true here. And, smartly, maturely, rightly, and a little wistfully, we both, or at least I, have to allow the experience its autonomy and “string”lessness.

I called my mom yesterday. I’d spoken to several friends about my conflictedness, and my sadness in letting the moment go. In knowing, surely and deeply, that I would have to. This knowledge all the more painful since it was such a thing of beauty, since it was, for me, a lesson in intimacy, vulnerability, and ease that I haven’t felt with anyone in my past.

As we spoke, I told my mom it was like tasting ice cream in a shop for the first time, and having to realize that ice cream is available elsewhere, all over the place, in fact. That I don’t have to go to this one place to experience it. That I’d be missing out if I thought this was the only wellspring of deliciousness.

Part of the beauty of it at all, is that I get to see that ice cream is in fact available to me. (Ice cream! Cupcakes! Sheesh, can you tell I don’t really eat this stuff anymore!?)

But, I did. I got to experience, savor, relish, and cherish, and I get to decide to believe—DECIDE TO BELIEVE—that I can have similar dishes elsewhere. Somewhere a little less complicated.

My mom told me that of course it was available to me. That we all deserve to have the kind of love we want in the world. That we all are worthy of finding it, searching for, letting the non-fits go, and working toward creating in ourselves a person deserving of the highest order this life offers.

Why? I asked her.

Why? Why is that so? Where is the cosmic contract we’ve all signed that says that we'll get that kind of love? Where is the agreement that we sign as humans that says, Work and open and heal and (for)give, and you shall receive? Really, honestly, who the fuck says that any of us get any of that?

It was important for me to play my own Devil’s Advocate. I’m the one with all the woo-woo affirmations posted around my apartment about abundance and light and love and serenity and security and radiance. I’m the one who’d easily and believingly tell a friend that things work out. I’m the asshole who believes all this muck.

And for once, I needed someone else to tell me it. I needed to be the petulant asshole who says, “Yeah, Says You.” I needed to allow my disillusionment of that kind, too. I needed to allow that it sucks and hurts, and is disappointing, and hard fucking work, and that we (I) do this with absolutely no promises whatsoever of any kind of “reward,” or change.

There is no rule that says, Thou Shalt Not Toil Until Death.

There isn’t.

So, I need, sometimes, someone else to tell me. Because, truly, somewhere (a little out of reach at the moment), I believe that we all do deserve the precious and gorgeous things in life. I believe that none of us are meant to toil and suffer and be beaten by life. I truly, somewhere, have a faith that is unalterable. A place inside me that has never known fear or scarcity or sorrow.

But, despite my friends’ ears and wisdom and empathy, I simply needed my mom, former Miss Cynic of the Universe, to tell me, Molly, It’s going to be alright. There is ice cream elsewhere. There is love, abundant and resplendent. Not that it isn’t without its own challenges and lessons and compromises, but there is love, and I am worthy of it. That I “deserve” it.

Despite the “adultness” of letting go and loving detachment and equanimity and allowing what is… in these moments, in this one, I simply needed the maternal “all knowing” assurance of that which I actually believe.

Dear Egregiously Gorgeous Moment in Time: Thank you.  

Caution: Lifeguard on Duty

Today, I think of Death as the figure of the Grim Reaper lounging by a public pool, a lifeguard. Watching, waiting for the people to tire, and when they do, reaching in his scythe, and hoisting them out of the water.

Over the last week, I spent my time with several people I adore who are all in their 30s and 40s and in phases of change in their lives. I got to witness how they’re handling, adjusting, chafing, and, sometimes, enjoying their lives. And if I’m honest, I got to witness a good deal of loneliness. ("If you spot it, you got it," the saying goes.)

Because this isn’t only my story, I will be courteous to allow others their story and their privacy, but it inspired in me a great deal of reflection over the week about my own life, my own story.

Early in the week, I heard a woman, a stranger, say, "At some point, we have to give up all hope of our past being different." There’s a lot of standing in two worlds--past & present, present & future--that I got to witness this week, and see reflected in myself. I had a line from Fiona Apple repeating to me on the plane home yesterday: The child is gone.

I got to see that there is a pivot point in life; that adulthood is more than an age, or bank account, or relationship. It’s a marrow-deep understanding that the time that was is over. We're no longer looking toward the top of the mountain and how to get there: it's now a horizon we are looking toward. There is a plateau in the middle of the ‘natural’ course of life between the climax of our lives to come (if we get to it), and its decline.

Maybe it was all the True Detective we watched this week!

I don’t mean to be grim, I just mean to be realistic with where I am standing in my own life. I simply saw the story arc. I heard the restlessness, the ambition toward something not yet attained, and I believed for the first time, despite all cancer-awareness and mortality-facing, that the long life we have is shorter than I’ve known, that the center of that life is closer than I've known.

Mostly, I thought about my own ambition toward family and career. Toward relationship and being “settled” and the timing of all that. I’ve written before that being in a metropolitan area, I feel less inclined to think “TICK TOCK” than some of my suburban friends. But, on the heels of the new job proposal I handed into my work last week for myself, and the idea that if I spend 7 or 8 years in that job, I’ll be 40, and then be poised for a more senior management position. Seeing my professional future suddenly chopped up into finite chunks, seeing that I actually do want that kind of trajectory, having the ladder open up to me suddenly, and fucking taking a step onto it – well… everything else seems to now be broken up into those same finite chunks.

I’ve never had a “five year plan” or a “ten year plan.” I’ve never known enough about what I want to do to have any path whatsoever seem like it makes sense to pursue in any certain direction.

There may be “many roads to the mountaintop” and “All roads lead to Rome,” but I’ve been so stilted in knowing where the fuck Rome is, that I’ve sat at the base of the mountain, stared at the nailed signpost with its array of choices, and drawn figures in the dirt with a stick, waiting for one of them to illuminate or something.

Well, honestly, one of them has, career-wise, and I see the opening, and I feel myself-- well, no, I actually did take a step in that direction at work. And in seeing that there is suddenly a path that I’m actually on and actually taking, I see that there are all these other 5 and 10 year plans that I kind of have to be aware of now… and I see what implication that has for life. For romance, for family, for place.

I see that I’ve sat at that intersection for much too long, or, simply for as long as I needed to, but now I feel like I have to race to catch up to the toll of the clock.

I feel like the sense of timelessness in life has disappeared. That, “eventually” and “some day” are not allowed anymore. And not really that they’re “not allowed” or “not permitted,” but that there’s just no room for them. The dreaming must be directionalized now.

This terrifies and goads me. I feel pushed in a way I haven’t. I feel more certain of what I want in my life, and a bit of a manic thrall toward doing it. – Sure, All things in time, and All things in balance, but: I have begun to think that this might be what ambition is; and what it is for. 

The Whatifs

Last month, I contacted my psychic to ask about this upcoming trip to visit the Boston Cupcake (as he shall henceforth be known).

I can get an emailed reading from her, and despite your and my own doubts, I get pretty accurate and insightful results from her, via email or by phone. I mean, I’ve met her and all – but this isn’t about her. It’s about him. And me.

I’d panicked a little after we’d confirmed that I was going to fly out, over the continent, to spend 4 days in his bed, arms, town, space. As Shel Silverstein elegantly put it:

Last night, while I lay thinking here,

Some Whatifs crawled inside my ear

And pranced and partied all night long

And sang their same old Whatif song:

Whatif it’s awkward?

Whatif I can’t sleep?

Whatif I don’t come?

Whatif we ruin our friendship?

Whatif it’s good, but that’s the end of it?

Whatif it sucks in person, and we never text-flirt again?

Whatif we do like each other?

Whatif we fall in love?

Whatif I'm too bruised to fall in love?

Whatif I have to move?

Whatif I move and it doesn’t work out?
Whatif we get married and have kids, and everything works out amazingly?
Whatif we get married and have kids, and struggle for money?

Whatif I have to leave the Bay Area?
Whatif I can't afford to leave the Bay Area?
Whatif there’s no women’s spiritual community?
Whatif I never see my friends here again?
Whatif I hate the winter there?

Whatif he doesn’t like the way I laugh?

Whatif I don’t like the way he chews?

Whatif …

What if.

Va voy.

So, a few days before the deadline to purchase my flight, I emailed my psychic to try to divine some answers. What are the implications of this trip? Is this a good match? Is this a good thing, even if it’s not a match? What Is Going To Happen To Me???

Well, here’s what happened: She got sick, and emailed me that she’d have to postpone my reading until the following week. Or, she could just PayPal me back the funds and cancel the reading.

So, I thought about it. What was I really trying to get from her and her answers, anyway? Assurance, Confirmation, Certainty.

Ah, yes. Certainty. If you can tell me with certainty that the risk I’m about to take has the outcome that I want, then I’ll take it. If you cannot tell me with certainty that it will be alright, then I am terrified to risk it.

So, I went to her blog, to re-acquaint myself with her, to see if I could divine my own answer, since I knew I was trying to get something that no one else could really offer me. That life can never offer me.

And her most recent post was basically, if I remember correctly, about taking chances. About putting your best effort forward, and letting go; about allowing ourselves to try, and to know that whatever the outcome, we’re cosmically safe.

Arghh…. Right. I am safe, loved, assured, no matter what any outcome; but it is my responsibility to try.

If nothing changes, nothing changes.

So, I emailed her back, and told her her blog helped me realize that it was up to me to take this risk, to try without certainty to allow adventure, intimacy, attraction, vulnerability into my life. That I would take the refund from her, and go on this trip, and let all these unknowable chips fall where they may.

Because, it all flows from what I was just saying yesterday, about throwing my hat in the ring at work, professionally putting myself out there, just for the esteem of it, not knowing if it’ll “go my way,” but getting the benefits of trying anyway.

It’s all about what I’d quoted earlier this week, “You gotta get in it, cuz it’s a day-by-day gig.”

If nothing changes, nothing changes.

I won’t know til I try. I won’t have certainty even when I am in it. None of us do, even with cohabitation, a ring, children, none of us know if this will "work out," or if we'll end up signing divorce papers, bankruptcy papers, restraining orders.

But, what I know for certain is that I really am looking forward to this trip, to spending this time with someone I admire, fancy, and enjoy. I really am so very happy that I am taking a risk, stepping into the wide unknown, opening my arms and falling into his, come what may. 

Seeing Someone

Yesterday, I saw my new somatic therapist for the 2nd time, and we’ve decided to continue to work together, for the next little while. I don’t know, exactly, what changes will be wrought from it, but it’s nice to have someone to talk to again who’s third party and kind and uninvested in propping me up or giving me advice.

Which isn’t to say she isn’t keen on helping me recover and heal, but she doesn’t really have any agenda except that. Which is nice.

At the end of the session, I said how it galls me that I was supposed to, all these years, work on trauma recovery and grieving, and now I have to go through recovery from the trauma and grieving of cancer to even get to that layer of healing and muck.

She said something heartening, which I’m not sure I agree with yet, but maybe will eventually: That it’s all connected. That if we work on one part, it’s pulling on all the others. Like a spider web, if I work and tug and pull and excise over here, it’ll ripple across and affect the other parts.

We’ll see. As always, the act of showing up is one of hope that things (that I, my life and how I engage in or hide from it) will change. I have hope, every time I call a friend or reach out for help or write this blog – this blog is an act of writing myself out of the darkness.

In my “stats,” I see someone read that first blog called “Cancer,” so this morning I went back to read it too. So much of what I wrote about the recovery process was true and so many of the questions are still the same, if not a little more in focus. My cousin is a doctor in palliative care, and reads my blog (Hi, L.!), and she emailed me the other day after she’d read my blog to say she’d never thought of life-threatening illness as trauma before, but of course it is. And to thank me for the bravery of putting my process of coagulation up for the help of so many.

It’s interesting to read back to that first blog, and to read the virulent ambivalence of being “an inspiration.” And it’s something that came up yesterday in my session: the desire to be someone who holds the torch, and the desire to stop being the f’ing person who holds the torch all the time.

The duality of being a leader, if you can call this that (which, frankly, I’m coming to see it is), is that sometimes you want to just march along with everyone else. You get tired of standing at the top of the mountain alone to look out and see where you should go next, what horizons need staking. You get tired of being the one who charges into the fray – of being the person, as I wrote in that blog, who just “goes with it,” faces it, accepts it.

AND YET, of course, for me, I want to be that person, too – I want to be the person who is a light for others; I want to be a teacher and a leader and an inspiration. I want to exact positive change in the world.

Yesterday, in session, we spoke about vascillating between both these feelings, and allowing it to be. It’s part of owning the all of myself: the fearless leader, and the exhausted soldier. The tireless explorer, and the guy who just wants to carry the horse oats and play cards in the tent.

I think part of my ambivalence is a conscious understanding of what leadership might mean, too. To recognize, without slipping into workaholism or unseeing “progress,” that I am, and have always been Both/And.

At some point, I also told her that I’d been scrolling through my profile photos on Facebook just the other day, since I’d put a new one up. And I came, on Tuesday, sitting in my car waiting to meet up with some folks, to the photo of myself at graduation from Mills College in May of 2012. That I stand with a cap and gown, long hair, and a “radiant smile,” I told her.

I told her how I began to cry, looking at that photo, out of grief that that girl had to go, and would go, through all this. That she had no idea what was about to happen. That the innocence of that moment and that glee was … time-limited. To see that girl, to know what she was about to go through, to feel so sorry that she does and will, and still is, is grief. To know that my right eyelid will never look quite the same, an eye infection during chemo causing it to droop slightly, so that I can see it now, though others can’t. To know what that graduation day meant to me – to accomplish something, to put my energies in and to excel, learn, progress, and shine.

I suppose, truthfully, I can say the same for my current profile photo. Almost 2 years later, headshots for theater gigs. The result of something I’ve also put my energies and monies and progress toward in order to shine the way I know that photo does, too.

It’ll take some time, as I wrote in that first cancer blog, to heal from all this. But I am a leader with a torch--though, please, sometimes, can you be one too?

Easy

“Pain carves out a place in us that allows us to feel more deeply and be more usefully whole.”

Bullshit.

This is the kind of thing you tell someone who’s had to go through shit and needs something to hold onto as a reason why. And I’m not going to tell you it’s not true or that I don’t believe it to be true, because, maddeningly, I do think it is.

But what about all the people who don’t have pain carve out a place in them? What about those of us who haven’t have the razor of life cut into our quick? What about those who have lived what some might call “normal” lives?

Are they not as valuable as human beings? Of course not. Are they not as deep in thought or artistry? Well… that’s really hard to answer.

There is a pervasive ideal of the martyr in our society (and, again, I’m not the first to write about this). There is also the thick idolatry of those who are young, innocent, unscathed, “beautiful.”

So, we have for ourselves, as a society, a conundrum: We both want desperately that kind of luxury and ease that calls to us from the pages of Sunset or Dwell or GQ, but we disdain those whose lives closely resemble them, condemning them for “having it easy.”

So, what do we really want? Do we want the life of ease, or do we want to tear down those who actually have a life of ease? And if the latter is true,… why, then, would we ever want to be a person of ease, and be the object of disdain and envy-laced judgment?

There is an affirmation in my repertoire: Life is easy for me.

How nice is that?

“Life is easy for me.”

What would that be like?

Life is easy for me.

I just smiled. 

Ease. Flow. Calm. Centered. Guided. Held. Easy.

Why should it not be?

An affirmation is something you tell yourself until you live and believe it, according to my own understanding. So this isn’t something that I can tell you today with assurance is accurate. But I can tell you that it is something that I would like to believe and live with assurance.

“Life is easy for me.”

Pain may have carved out a place in me that enables me to help other people who have been there. But there is a downside to identifying with others on the commonality of pain: What happens when one of you doesn’t want to identify with their own pain anymore?

A friend of mine inherited a sum of money a few years ago, after the death of her mother. She, my friend, is one of the pain-carved women. She is shorn and built and pyred from pain – she is one of the strongest and most admired women I know.

And yet. After the inheritance, she, on her own, bought a vacation home—she bought a second home, just because she could. She has a husband, and two kids, and this was what she wanted to do, and could do with that money.

It was only after the fact of the purchase, however, that we began to hear about it. She had to “confess” to us that she had this boon, this exciting news, this abundance. And she’d been avoiding telling people, precisely because of that envy-laced judgment.

However, she realized that not talking about her success was just as dangerous to her well-being as not talking about troubles, and that by isolating and hiding her good fortune, she would certainly falter.

Not talking about success, about “what’s going on,” is just as precarious as not talking about challenge. However, because we are a culture that feeds off mutual exchange of stories of strife, because all of our literature is based on triumph over adversity, or simply is an account of adversity, we do not share about it.

We are ashamed of our success. We are ashamed of our good fortune. We are ashamed to admit that life is easy for us—and so we couch it in “humility”: Oh, it’s only because of the inheritance from a death; Oh, but I had to overcome such hardship to get here; Oh, but it’s really only this one time that I’m getting a boon in my life – I promise the rest of my life is a shit show!

SO WHAT if my life were easy? What does it impede on you? (is a question I pose to myself as well.) What are the merits of slogging through a desperate existence, to live to possibly be honored post-humously as a great writer, as a Baudelaire (and the list is endless)?

A while back, I wrote you about a poem of mine whose only line went,

            Otherwise, who would eat the blackened one?

And I told you how I’ve come to see that the answer, which had so long been, “No one, so I better eat it first so you won’t have to,” has become, “No one. Period.” I’ve told you that I no longer feel as fated or compelled to be a martyr.

It seems the other side of that action is to embrace what our culture feels so aggressively conflicted about: Allowing my life to be easy.

Perhaps my “meta” affirmation, then, would be: It is easy to allow my life to be easy. 

Nature vs. Nurture.

Being raised by a psychoanalyst, I grew up believing pretty strongly in Nurture vs. Nature. I believed adamantly in Tabula Rasa, and that every aspect of my personality was developed in reaction to my environment.

Eventually, even through a Psychology Major (that switched to Minor), I began to admit that perhaps there were a few inborn traits that one has out of the womb, but the majority of a human’s personality was forged out of their experiences before the age of 3.

But, I have to admit that the aggregate of my own lifetime experiences, up to and including a Leukemia diagnosis, has begun to make me admit that perhaps there is something more to the Gattaca within us. Perhaps something like perseverance, courage, and visceral insistence on life has more to do with my wiring as “human” and as “Molly,” in particular.

I would never peg myself as someone brave or bold. I don’t charge into the fray, or head corporations, or tie myself to a tree before a bulldozer. I have few of the outward markings I would associate with leader or change-maker.

But I am compelled to admit that my undertakings as an adult do, in sum, mark me as someone willing to rage, to rail, to fight, to excavate all in the service of healing.

Though perhaps if my formative years hadn’t been what they were, I wouldn’t find the need to heal from much. Perhaps.

I had a therapist a few years ago who said something novel to me: Your dad is not a courageous man. This struck me as apocryphal. My father, the one so quick to temper and anger and rule of iron fist was not brave? Isn’t that what violence is—bravery? Isn’t that what power is—anger?

Yet, her words rang so unbelievably true. Like seeing the Wizard behind the curtain in Oz. I know now that that kind of anger does usually hide and house one who is critically afraid. I mean, I usually wear my black leather jacket when I’m feeling more insecure, as if its made of chainmail instead of leather.

But, I was on the phone with a friend yesterday, answering her question about why I was in Victoria’s Secret the other day. I told her about my upcoming trip to meet my consummate penpal—and she squealed. She thought it was so bold and brave, and adventurous, and ALIVE. She rattled on that this experience is going to help so many other people down the line, help women to see that life is meant to be lived.

It sounded so epic when she mirrored it back like that! And maybe it is. And maybe it’s not.

But, I do know that with every meditation, every alternative healer, every inventory, every striving, every goddamn picking myself up, that I am taking something back. That I am reclaiming something. And if that impulse to charge onward, in light of all that is, is called courage, then I guess the Wizard granted me a heart on the day that I was born.