The Lionhearted

I didn’t want a cat. I sat for a friend’s once, and their constant up-in-my-grillness was off-putting to my isolatory nature.

My aunt had cats; was/is the stereotypical cat lady, unmarried, living alone, 3 cats of circulation when one dies.

They’re nice and sweet sometimes, and good for petting. But all that fur! Forget it.

My ex had a cat. It was good enough, companionable enough, but there were so many things in his apartment that identified him as a cat-lover/owner: the framed New Yorker cover with a cat; a magazine about cats (that he swears his brother bought him as a gag-gift); the industrial vacuum meant for all that fur.

It took me almost a year to put up curtains in my last apartment, because to do so would mean that I couldn’t abscond in the middle of the night. I would have to unscrew it slowly, with meaning and intention; I was committed to something.

Commitment was the largest reason I didn’t want a cat. Not the commitment of keeping it fed and littered, but the commitment of caring.

My brain would go immediately to, “I don’t know how I could deal with its death.” The hypothetical death of a hypothetical cat. The consequences of feeling that deeply for anything frightened me.

And yet. During the time I was with that ex, I moved to Oakland from San Francisco for grad school, and I was living a bridge away from anyone I knew, and things were a little lonely here in my studio apartment.

After a side-track story I won’t tell now, I ended up adopting Stella from the SPCA. A green-eyed (no freaky yellow-eyed cats please!), silken, mottled brown/black two-year old cat.

She has been one of the best things that’s ever happened to me.

She’s not an in-your-face’r. She’ll hang when she wants to, and over the 3 years we’ve lived together now, she began to sit more and more in my lap as I meditate in the morning or nap on the couch. Over time, we’ve grown more accustomed to one another; and over time I’ve gotten to see how much my love wants to express itself.

I say things that only my mother must have said to me in endearment. They come naturally and without thought, these names and phrases that I whisper to her, or chide at her. The sweetened names of love that were hanging out inside me until there was a vessel in which to pour them.

I didn’t want a cat.

I didn’t want the responsibility of love.

But it’s opened rooms in me where there were only walls. 

I Came In Here For An Argument

I’ve been recalling the above-referenced Monty Python sketch. In the first moments, a customer walks into a room and the man behind the desk there begins to berate him. The customer stops him, and exclaims, I came in here for an argument! – At which point, the man behind the desk apologizes and says, Oh, this is Abuse. Argument is down the hall. (It’s a very funny sketch, and I do it no justice here – please make liberal use of Youtube.)

I’ve been thinking about what kind of lesson I think I’ve been signed up for. What ideas I have about what I’m supposed to be learning in this life, at this time, in this moment. And how maybe the room I’ve thought I’ve walked into isn’t that room at all. That although I have some ideas and hopes/generalities about the parts of myself I’m supposed to be working on right now – the fact is, that I’m not actually the one choosing my courses.

I’ve had enough experience to learn that I have to let go of what I think this lifetime’s lessons are for other people (that they should learn self-esteem, compassion, ease, or forgiveness), and I’ve had mild success at that – understanding that what I would have this person learn this time around may not be what the Fates or Universe or Gods would have them learn. That although I very much and fully think that this person ought to learn how to be softer or to be more resolved, they’re apparently not here on my course schedule, and so I have to let go, or else be in the pain of trying to manipulate my will into theirs.

However, it hasn’t yet ever occurred to me that I need to let go of what my ideas are for my lifetime. But it is now.

Because some of these lessons I’m learning aren’t ones I would’ve consciously signed up for.

Last night, at my callback for this play, I was asked to read a scene as the mother to a teenage girl who stood on stage with me. We read the scene, and the director said it was good, but to slow it down, and really find the emotional connection in it. We ran it again, and I was pretty sure I didn’t do that.

I see this morning that I didn’t really trust that I could convey that kind of emotion, and so I barreled through it again. I didn’t trust that I could be good enough, or believable enough, or hold the emotion of love, care, and concern enough to portray it.

So the lesson becomes "trust," instead of "follow my dreams." Trusting that if I slow down, I’ll be okay. That if I allow myself to be seen (a lesson that’s been on my syllabus for a while), I’ll be okay. Trusting oneself is not an easy lesson to learn. Trusting in the safety of being oneself is not an easy lesson to learn.

There’s a phrase I’ve been mulling on this morning: There comes a point in your recovery when you stop backing away from alcohol, and you turn around and start walking toward G-d.

Whatever your thoughts are about "god," the idea, to me, is that eventually, we move beyond being motivated by fear, and must begin to be motivated by love.

The idea that I know what room I walked into, what lesson I’m supposed to learn, is a manipulation based on the fear that I can’t be myself, that I’m not okay with whatever “is.” To accept the fact that I don’t have the syllabus for my life and that the Fates will steer me toward whatever lesson they deem necessary for the goodness of all, means I have to be willing to let go of my expectations for my life and myself. For all my aspirations and intentions, in many ways.

To let go, doesn’t mean to abandon. It means to release control, or perceived control. To let go doesn’t mean to not audition, pursue, or practice what is in front of me. It doesn’t mean to reject or eject anything, in fact.

For me, this morning, “to let go” means “to allow what is.” To allow what is in me, in you, in the cards, in our hearts to BE.

I’ve never had the greatest relationship with the phrase, “Let go.” It feels like falling. But “To allow what is” feels like releasing and accepting in a warm way.

So, I will walk today into the classroom of life, and I will allow what is here to mold and shape me, and I will allow that I am cared for and need not brace for it, and I will allow that I am safe in the care of these lessons, and I will allow myself to shed one millimeter of armor between us.

I will allow the idea, just the idea!, that I am actually totally and completely held, and therefore be able to turn my attention from clenching and bracing to opening, giving, and receiving. 

Bonus quote: "G-d steers the boat; all you have to do is row."

"Forget Your Troubles, Come On, Get Happy"

So you’ll have to bear with me – I haven’t totally got this one down.

I was on the phone with a trusted friend Sunday morning. I was giving her the update about this potential Cupcake Situation, the pros and cons, the merits and demerits. The gnawing maw of my brain.

I fully expected her to say something like, That sounds reasonable. It makes sense to not do something that has potential negative consequences. Yes, continuing on the path of solitude sounds like the right one toward health.

Instead, she surprised me by saying, Life is meant to be lived.

Instead, I surprised myself by beginning to cry.

Somehow, hearing her “permission” enabled me to feel what was actually happening in my heart. The joy, the longing, the contentment, just in the idea and fancy of anticipating being with this Cupcake.

And I said something to her, actually I sobbed something to her, that I’m not sure I ever admitted or understood – “I don’t know how to be happy.” And I cried some more.

I don’t know how to let myself be happy. To admit good things. To trust that I’m able to face good things – that I even think I have to “face” them is evidence that I still think happiness is something to be battled.

In my early experience, happiness wasn’t reliable, and so you mistrusted it. You forced away the “temptation” of happiness because if you allowed it in, it would corrode. Better to be mildly miserable than submit to betrayal.

It’s astonishing to me that I’m still facing this same demon. This same old pattern of beliefs and behavior. But then, I must be at a place where I’m ready and able to uproot it in a new way.

I read an email from the Cupcake (the person I’ll potentially spend a few days with next month) telling me that he welcomes the chance to melt with me, open his heart, sit in lazy contentment. That the idea of doing so stirs something in him, emotionally and physically.

When I read this (for like the 8th time), I was walking outside my work, trying to get away from the gnawing Pro/Con-ing catalogue inside me. I reread it on my phone on a side street in Berkeley. I had to stop walking. I crouched down in the sunny afternoon, held the screen toward my face, and felt the same feeling I would have on Sunday when my friend said, Life was meant to be lived. Something moved, something heard this. Something within me allowed the possibility for even a moment to trust that someone was honestly saying, Let’s be happy. I offered myself the possibility that I could be happy.

And on that sidewalk, my eyes filled with salt water, my brain temporarily ceased arguing, and I felt in my heart.

I just felt in my heart, being in it. hearing it, feeling it. I was moved.

I don’t know how to be happy. It’s not something I know how to do. Like a learned skill, this will be something I will have to try my hand at, and be inexperienced at, but try anyway.

I’ve been amazingly dexterous at learning all kinds of new things--grad student, performance poet, bassist, actor, painter--physically at least. Emotionally, I’ve learned how to be more honest, how to have more feelings than anger, depression, and mania, how to be more visible and trust I won’t be shot.

I don’t know how to be happy. But if my emotional responses are any indication (whether this whole Cupcake thing comes to fruition or not), I am apparently, on some level, ready to see if I can be. 

And I hereby give myself permission to try. 

Wow. Wowie Wow Wow

(Christopher Walken on SNL; check it out if you don’t know; too funny)

You know when they (I) say “Both/And”? That life is both this, and that. It is inimitable and gripping, and sallow and challenging? That life is “everything all at once”?

That you are both excited for your new callback and getting dressed to get a possible melanoma removed?

Yeah. Both/And.

So, that’s happening right now. In a little while.

I went to the dermatologist about a month ago to get a strange new mole checked out on my back. She told me that that one was nothing to worry about; that, in fact, it’s the kind of mole you only see on fully adult homosapiens. So, I asked, then basically, this new mole is a Rite of Passage Mole? That I’m officially an adult human, now? Wow. Weird to have your skin tell you it!

You, Molly Louise, you are now officially an adult. Instead of a parade, statue, medal, or email from the Universe, you get this nifty little mole on your back. Holler!!! Luckily, I think it’s kind of awesome and funny, and I’m really not concerned about the aesthetics of it – it’s not gross or repulsive or anything. It doesn’t have a satellite moon orbiting it or have a hair growing from it. – although the Derm said that a hair is usually a good sign that a mole is not malignant.

(It’s this an awesome blog topic!)

"BUT," she said. …

"This other one…" and took out the little 6-inch ruler she kept in her white lab coat. "Well, this other one, …"

Yeah, that one’s kind of new too, in the last year for sure, I told her.

So, today I have it taken out. Which means, they have to dig all the way through ALL of the layers of skin into the fatty flesh below, and take out, like a dowel in the earth, a cylinder of my skin. Yum.

It’s a small thing, it’ll only leave a centimeter of a scar, but for a few days, until the stitched, sewn-together skin around it heals and seals together (our bodies are amazing), no heavy lifting or working out the same way.

Meh. C’est la vie. Small price to pay for solace of mind.

Although, when I told someone when I found this out those few weeks ago, that it was a possible skin cancer thing, they said, oh, no big deal, that’s simple, they gauge it out. Done. … Well, I felt like that was a tad insensitive. I mean, this was coming from another young cancer survivor!

I’m not “worrying twice,” and it is something you just take out (I think – I don’t know – I’m not Googling anything until the doc indicates I ought to). But, it’s still a (what’s “less than worrying”) – Ah, concerning, it’s still a concerning thing. So, I’m concerned. So I get it checked out.

I think my Rite-of-Passage Mole might be on to something.

And, further in the Wow category, this acting thing. Wowie wow wow, man.

It’s so fun. Sure, I talk about the isolation it offers when you’re practicing lines alone, auditioning alone, but, the camaraderie that it leads to, is the point. The opportunity to turn the light on in an audience, to share something with someone else, is the point. And this is the path to that.

I’m stoked.

I have no clue if this is beginner’s luck, if anything more will happen, if I’ll circle around the drain of “aspiring actor” for years. But, SO WHAT.

When I think back to what it felt like on Saturday to join into the lobby of a group of folks, stand around awkwardly in a room with other aspirers, to have my name called, and to walk down the dark aisle of the near-empty theater. To stand on a real stage under real lights, state my name and my piece, and perform it. To have the director say, “Very nice. Thank you.” To then walk back up that aisle less than two minutes later, and gather my purse and walk back out into the amazing Berkeley Spring day?

Well, I’ll tell you:

Wow. 

Craving Cupcakes

For reasons unknown by me, I came home the other night and while in my closet, took down the book He’s Just Not That Into You. It sits in a pile of books I own that I’ve taken to the bookstore to sell back to them, but they’re not having it – it shares space with the Twilight saga – and for further reasons unknown, I haven’t just put these books out on the street or donated them yet, and so they’ve stayed for several years.

Taking down Not That Into You, I read the chapter titles that at the time I bought the book I imagined I would sneer at and laugh at in obviousness, but that on reading, in fact, offered a swift kick upside my besotted brain. For example: He’s just not that into you if he’s not asking you out; he’s just not that into you if he has a girlfriend/is married; and my personal eye-opener at the time: he’s just not that into you if he only wants to see you when he’s drunk.

But what struck me the other night as I perused the chapter titles was the one added on after the first printing, the one entitled: Life after He’s Just Not That Into You.

I flipped there, and the female co-author writes about the typical stages she’d seen in herself and in those who’d taken the book’s message to heart.

First, there’s empowerment: YES! I Get It! I see that these mixed messages are just smoke-screens, I’ve stopped waiting by the phone, I’ve stopped accepting “Let’s hang out” as an acceptable “date.” My life is awesome!

Then there’s loneliness: Great, he’s out of my phone and out of my life, what do I do now?

Quickly followed by temptation: Okay, so if I know that he’s just putting up a smoke-screen, and I get that this isn’t a relationship – then I’m in full knowledge participation, and it’s okay, right? Then I can’t really get my feelings hurt, right, because I know that this is not what either of us really wants, right? Besides, the door isn’t breaking down with guys asking me out on real dates, and I’m lonely, horny, and just give me a BREAK already!

I called this yesterday, over lunch with a friend, the cupcake moment.

We all know this temptation. I’ll set it up for you:

It’s someone’s birthday at the office. They’ve brought in a dozen of the most delicious looking cupcakes from the 4 dollar a cupcake place with the clever name. Everyone stands around this offering and awkwardly sings Happy Birthday to the person of honor, and you feel a little proud, and a little separate as you gouge the cupcakes out of their container and hand them to your coworkers, expressing that, No thank you, you’re not having one.

You know how you feel after you’ve eaten one, you know they're not actually as good as they look, and it’s not worth the calories or kicking off the sugar addiction. You’ve had SO MANY afternoons where you’ve had half a cupcake, only to return for the other half, another whole, and maybe, another half or two.

You know that to put one bite of this thing into your mouth is to set off a series of woeful and painful head moments of debate, self-derision, and self-pity.

So you’ve been so good. It’s been weeks, or maybe months since you’ve let yourself fall into the pattern. And sometimes, it’s so easy to say No thanks, and be on with your day. The cupcakes don’t whisper at you. The longing doesn’t bite at your throat.

And then you find yourself in the moments when you say, I have been so good – and what the hell good is it doing me, anyway? What kind of a martyr, saint, ascetic am I, anyway? What am I proving and to whom?, the thoughts run. …

What kind of martyr or saint am I?

What kind of pleasure-avoiding, overthinking, “principled”-living dullness am I?

So, you stand at the cupcake moment. You’ve seen the outcome of this moment on both sides, and you don’t know which path you’ll go down. You stand equally torn toward “health” and “pleasure.” And you haven’t enough experience yet to know that sometimes health and pleasure are available in the same situation. And remember, it’s been SUCH A LONG TIME since you’ve had that kind of pleasure, anyway. That kind of solace.

The final phase of “Life after He’s Just Not That Into You” is Balance.

The book says, “Life, love, dating—it’s all a process. There will be highs and lows, disappointments and temptations, and it all might take a while. If you are just so lonely that you simply have to get into a less than ideal situation, for God’s sake, get out of it before the guy makes you cry or mope in bed all day… No matter how long you end up being without a relationship, you will always be worth it.”

I stand at a cupcake moment right now. “Sometimes I think ‘health’ and ‘reason’ are the great enemies of ‘passion’ and ‘love,’” he wrote me. And I think he’s right. However, though I don’t have much experience with them being aligned, I do believe they can be.

Will our heroine submit to the temptation and luster to sink into the arms of comfort and human affection? Will she turn away from the alluring embrace and continue to march the lonely path toward an imagined ideal of a less complicated entanglement?

Tune in to find out!

Time: in fair and foul

Oops, I did it again -- I changed my clocks on the wrong day! (Last time, I changed them in the wrong direction!) I don't think I'm cut out for this. 

In speaking of time, tomorrow will mark one year from my final day of chemo. Last year, today, March 8, I was in Kaiser hospital, 6th floor, on the “off day.” Since I had Leukemia, the treatment is different than you hear for outpatient breast cancer treatment or even lung cancer (not that they don’t go through hell, too). How the treatment went is that each month I spent a week in the hospital (after the initial first month in), and would get chemo on days 1, 3, 5, and then on day 6, if I looked healthy enough, I could go home. 

“Healthy enough.” Sheesh. What a thing.

A year before that, I was probably working on and procrastinating on my MFA Poetry thesis at Mills College.

There was a moment after my diagnosis during which I was sitting at this same kitchen table, likely in these same pajamas, when I looked out this same window at the cypress trees that grow over the roof of the building next door. I’ve always watched them, since I’ve lived here. They’re one of the few trees in my area that loses leaves, and then regrows them in full regalia in the spring and summer.

I sat at this table, and as it was October/November, I watched it shedding the last of its leaves for the year. And I wondered if I would see its leaves return. If I would be alive to witness it.

And I was. And I will be when, once again, the brown tree suddenly sports those green buds that never cease to surprise me, like an overnight graffiti artist.

Perhaps some people think my marking of this time is morbid. And maybe it is. But, it’s impossible for me to turn away from. I don’t always think about it; in fact, over the course of these few months, the “this time last year” thought has become pretty scarce. But sometimes, there are moments to remember, to recall, measure against, and praise to high bloody heaven and hell and all the imps in between that *I made it,* through all of it -- the terror, the loneliness, the unknowing, the isolation of it. I made it through alive, and healthy, my eggs still ticking in my ovaries, my blood producing what it ought to. I made it through the arguments with doctors, through giving myself injections, through Christmas in an inpatient bed. 

I made it through with your soup waiting for me in the hospital fridge, with the cup of coffee you went out of your way to Peet's to buy, with the fuzzy blanket and the neon socks you brought to keep me warm. 

I made it through with the green shakes you made for me, and the protein drinks you sought out at Whole Foods. With the burritos you bought and the chicken you made. I made it through with our conversations about leaving your store, leaving your soon-to-be ex-wife; about polyamory and the '89 fire. I made it through when you held my hand as I bawled into your chest, heaving the Ugly Cries because I knew you could take it. 

I made it through when you brought a big book and a 12 and 12, and we sat and talked about other things anyway. But the praying helped. 

A year ago tomorrow, I will have been awoken at 6 in the morning. I will have had my pee measured, my temperature and blood pressure taken, and swallowed the pre-medication meant to stave off nausea. I will then have gotten dressed, eaten whatever plastic-wrapped breakfast they’d provided, done my morning pages, meditated, and perhaps written my blog if I could get it in before I got hooked up to the IV pole.

The nurses will have come in in yellow apron suits over their scrubs, and thick blue gloves and goggles. The two, always two, would call the numbers of my ID back to each other, the volume of the chemo, confirming the three hours it was to drip into the port line that entered my chest and pumped into my heart.

A year ago tomorrow, in the evening, they would do the same 12 hours from the first one. And by the time the bag of clear but ominous liquid was empty and the machine was beeping loudly for the nurse, I will have tucked into the stiff hospital bed with that fuzzy blanket, curled up maybe with a book, maybe too tired to read, and they would come back in their yellow suits and thick gloves, and unhook the tube from my chest. 

And I will have had my last round of chemo. (Ever.)

Give me some wool, and I’ll spin you a yarn.

I have another audition tomorrow, this one for the role of a mother in her early 40s. And I’ve been thinking about who I can believably "play," what my “place of life” would be as a woman in her early 30s? I feel too young to be the queen, to be the mother of adult children, but I feel too old to be the ingénue or the lover. But I suppose I fall more easily castable into the latter category. Lover, Romantic, Unwed.

So many actors have sordid pasts and upbringings, making it easy and understandable to want to lay on the skin of someone else, the idea that it’s easier (safer?) to be someone else than it is to be yourself. However, I think I’m realizing that to take on the skin of someone else means that I have to find that person within me, those feelings, and then face them, understand and inhabit them. And not all of those feeling are easy for me to have. Not all of those parts are natural for me to play.

And I think that’s why I love it and am challenged by this so much. (With all my scant experience!) I will have to find the romantic within me, the tyrant within me, the tortured within me. I’m going to have to let my internal flashlight illuminate corners I’d rather mark off-limits. Some of those corners I avoid because I’m afraid I’ll enjoy them too much—Who doesn’t want to dissolve into rage instead of pulling yourself up to decency? Who doesn’t want to allow the gnawing chatter to become a cacophony and play itself into Ophelia’s mad death? How easy it is to go mad; how very hard to stay sane.

And, surely, some of the corners of experience I may be asked to play, I don’t want to go into because I’ve spent so many years avoiding what they demand of me. To fully feel passion, desire, or even (don’t say it!) love?

It’s amusing to me that once I changed up my blog settings to list the subject tags in order of frequency, “love” became the first one. I think it makes sense if you put before it the words: “avoidance of,” “challenges with,” “attempts at,” “softening to,” “fear of.” But, just “love?” Hm. Yes, it makes me smile.

I also know that acting isn’t therapy, and can’t be primarily intended to process my own demons or fears through its use, but I can’t help but imagine there will be some side-effects like that. I imagine that I’ll get to see where my flashlight is happy to go, and where it isn’t. Where I’m naturally at ease, and where I’ll have to cull my acting chops.

But, isn’t that the thrill of anything new? Isn’t that the thrill of being alive? Being challenged to feel, do, and be that which you weren’t able to before, simply by the act of showing up with intention?

I have no idea how long or wide this acting path will be for me. But the caves it is already calling me to explore are worth the price of admission.