Make the thing.

If there is an artist reading this—exhausted, frightened, embarrassed by the size of your own wanting—I want to say something plainly:  

 

Make the thing. 

 

Write it. 

Paint it. 

Build it. 

Stage it. 

Ask the question. 

Send the email. 

Be embarrassingly earnest. 

Be valiant. 

 

Not because the world owes you applause—it doesn’t—but because making things is one of the oldest and most generous acts available to a human being. 

 

Make things because they delight you. 

Make things because they confuse you. 

Make things because they SERVE other people. 

Make things because your heart is trying to tell you something your mouth cannot. 

 

You do not know which strange little act of courage becomes the doorway to your life. 

 

Two and a half years ago this production of Brigadoon was me sitting alone with a laptop with the unearned confidence of a man ordering sparkling water for the whole table, and an unreasonable amount of feelings. 

Now it exists in the world. 

 

You truly never know.

 

Leaving Brigadoon.

Last day in California. 

Leaving Brigadoon. 

And I am thrilled to report: I do not leave hollowed out, but brimming with fullness.

I have spent more than two years orienting my life around these specific six weeks. Not merely writing toward them, but living toward them. Making decisions with one question in mind: ‘when this moment comes, will I be able to be fully present for it?’ 

And somehow—miraculously—I was.

This has been, in every possible way, the richest artistic experience of my life. There is something impossible and sacred about watching a thing that lived only in your imagination for years suddenly live, expand, breathe. To hear people speak words (and play the silences) that once existed only in your own skull (while you were wearing sweatpants and eating shredded cheese directly from the bag) is both deeply disorienting and impossibly moving.

But more than the production itself, I am carrying the people.
 

Katie Spelman—my whyfe and artistic soulmate. To make work with someone whose instincts feel braided into your own is one of life’s great privileges. And to share leadership with so many extraordinary women on this production felt quietly revolutionary.

 

What stunned me most was not that the work reached a high standard — it was how we reached it. This is a standout professional experience of my life where not one single sliver of my integrity had to be traded at the door. Nobody had to become cruel to become excellent. Nobody had to be diminished to make the room efficient. Nobody had to pretend exhaustion was virtue or disrespect was rigor. We worked hard—God, did we bleed and sweat—but we worked with kindness, curiosity, accountability, humor, compassion, and deep respect for one another’s humanity. 

For years I quietly accepted the mythology that great art must emerge from suffering, ego, fear, hierarchy, and collateral damage. This experience cracked that belief open. Excellence and gentleness are not enemies. Integrity is not naïveté. Respect is not the opposite of ambition. Sometimes the highest standard is reached not despite love—but because of it. 

And then there is the thing I can hardly write without crying: I was healthy. For the first time since 2014, I moved through an entire artistic process physically healthy, and surrounded in love, healthy relationships, and true support. That is absolute life. 

I do not take my health lightly. There is an Italian saying: "a healthy person has many wishes; an unhealthy person has only one." For thirteen years I have understood that wish in my bones. Illness narrows the horizon. It shrinks life into appointments and endurance and bargaining and becoming very acquainted with pain and loss and the undignified shadows of human existence, not to mention the particular acoustics of hospital waiting rooms. I think I stopped dreaming for a while there. Perhaps that is the “only one” wish part of the saying. Dreaming began to feel arrogant. I hoped smaller. 
So to arrive here—to this enormous artistic undertaking—and find myself not surviving but actually living inside it? I do not have language for that gift. Health did not solve every problem. I still over-packed emotionally and literally. But health gave me something I had not realized I lost: appetite (in every sense). Curiosity. Ambition. Permission to imagine a future. I do not take my second chance lightly. I intend to use every inch of it.

 

We are nothing without our health, and hollow without a community to uplift us in bounty and in storms. 

I fought for life. I changed my existence consciously choosing life rather than merely allowing it to continue. I was given a second chance and I endeavor every day to make it worthwhile. And as a result of that hard-won gift, two years ago I made a promise to myself: if the work did not nourish me, if it did not feel good, I would stop saying 'yes.' Some of that journey has been chronicled here. The current conclusion? 

Turns out: we do not have to suffer for our art.

I got to do the work I love while healthy, with my mother nearby, and Alec—my great love and world-class hype man—cheering from the front row of my life.

One of the strangest and quietest lessons of this experience had nothing to do with theatre and everything to do with allowing myself to be loved. I don’t think I realized until late last year how much of my life i have spent “bracing.” Not-quite-exhaling. Priding myself on being capable, independent, “low maintenance” and “not having needs” thank you so much. Which sounds noble until you realize sometimes independence is just fear in a trench coat. Hyper-vigilance with good posture. I did not realize how exhausted I was from holding myself upright until people began offering to hold me too. Alec, more than anyone, taught me this. He has loved me not as a reward for competence but as an invitation to rest. 
And then there were the friends—artists who read drafts, gave notes, solved problems, made calls, and friends who crossed oceans and time zones and spent money and energy simply to sit in the dark and say: I see you. I am in awe of that kind of love. I don’t think I understood how much courage it takes to receive support. More courage, perhaps, than to do everything alone.

Now I hand this beautiful show to its gorgeous, gifted, deeply feeling company and move toward the next horizon. But part of me will always live in this, first ever Brigadoon.

So. If this chapter taught me anything, it’s this:

More.

More joy.
More courage.

More community.
More women.
More art that feels like coming home.

Slàinte. 

 

exactly how I feel...

 

We BrigaDID it.

Our brand new Brigadoon is open.

For nearly three years, this piece existed mostly in private: in notes apps and rehearsal rooms, in half-finished thoughts, in airports and 3 a.m. emails and long walks and seemingly impossible hope. For years it was fueled by a kind of delusional optimism and unearned confidence of, like, a gold prospector? 

 

All to say: I started all of this medium-unhinged because who was I to think that one can simply rewrite a classic musical and emerge psychologically unchanged? 

And then somehow—impossibly, like Brigadoon itself—it all became real.

What moves me most is not that this adaptation exists. 

It’s that it exists because of people. 

Of community. 

Of a love and respect for art-form and one another.

To Katie Spelman—my whyfe and artistic soulmate, our director, choreographer leader and my counterpART. We dreamed this thing together and built it with the strange faith that sometimes exists between two people before there is evidence. (Which feels very “Mr Forsythe” of us…) This world is tattooed with both our fingerprints. 

Danny Feldman and everyone at Pasadena Playhouse took a chance on two women steering a beloved giant and gave us room to imagine. Endless gratitude to the Lerner Family and the Loewe Foundation for this incredible honor, and all of the inspirations imagined and practical (you know who you are).

And then there are the friends. 

Old friends. 

Very old friends.  

Forever friends.  

New friends. 

Colleagues. 

All-grown-up students. 

Mentors. 

Collaborators. 

Heroes. 

People from every era of my little tiny artistic life appearing at exactly the right chapter to breathe life into these beautiful people and gorgeous town, that once only existed in my imagination...

A special thank you to my patient and inspired husband Alec, the ever-inspiring MamaSilbs, thank you for loving me through the glamorous process known as “watching someone stare silently into middle distance and call it work...”

 

Theatre is never made alone. It is created and consumed in community.

 

I feel very small beneath the size of my gratitude—and very lucky to stand among such giants. 

We all, BrigaDID it. 

 

 

I Would Like to Report That I Am Thriving (Deranged Edition)

Oh hello. WTF. I am currently in Los Angeles having the most important professional experience of my entire career.

 

Let me say that again, because it sounds fake even to me:
I am at the Pasadena Playhouse working on the world premiere of my new adaptation of Lerner and Loewe's Brigadoon. 

 

Which, yes. I wrote. Like… I wrote it. 

With my human brain. 

And now real actors—gorgeous, talented, emotionally available unicorns are speaking the words and ideas and character arcs out loud while I sit behind a table laughing and crying and pretending I know what I’m doing and not, say, internet-searching “what does the playwright do during rehearsal besides spiral?”

 

To be clear: this is all, objectively, the dream.

So naturally, my psyche responded by committing seppuku. Because, let's not forget: I am me. 

 

At one point, mid-week, I had the very fun realization that maybe I’m “not good enough”… Or maybe I am simply a woman who has been expertly trained—by the ambient noise of culture—to hate myself on a cellular level despite a decade of therapy, a trip to literal Siberia, and several well-intentioned journaling phases.

 

Because here’s what’s wild: nothing around me suggested I was failing.

The work is good. The room is phenomenal. The people are extraordinary.

And yet my brain was like "Yes, but what if you are secretly a fraud and everyone is too polite to say so?"

 

So let's review. Within the span of one week, I have:

• Had a full-body emotional meltdown (positive) hearing my writing spoken aloud

• Had a full-body emotional meltdown (negative) hearing my writing spoken aloud

• Navigated sitting “behind the table” while internally whispering "they’re going to find you out..."
• Experienced an existential crisis so vast it could qualify for its own zip code
• Gotten my period (obviously. the uterus always clocks in for chaos) and "pulled" three other uterus-having humans off their cycle because I'm a trend setter
• Been pulled over by a traffic cop for driving too slowly, which I did not know was illegal exactly, but apparently is if you are radiating panic at 37 miles per hour along the 101.
• Been interviewed for a profile piece in the Los Angeles Times and photographed with legendary American playwright (and Alec's idol) David Henry Hwang, which is the kind of sentence that should belong to someone with much better posture
• Watched my computer die spectacularly! Forcing me to deal with the not-so-genius CARLOS at the Genius Bar, and spend $1400 I definitely don't have on a replacement, while whispering “this is fine...”

 

All of this while my husband was visiting for five too-brief days, during which he demonstrated the patience of a saint who has accepted that he married a woman who will—at any moment—combust over art and printer settings.

 

*

 

And THEN—because the universe is frankly a little aggressive—I remembered: Oh. This is what always happens right before you level up. I have been here before!

 

The migraine during the SATs.

The car dying on the way home from the hospital.
The sinus infection the day of my West Side Story audition.

It’s like life leans in, cracks its knuckles, and says,

“You want this next version of yourself? We'll just… see about that.”

 

Because the true test is not whether or not you can survive the chaos, but whether or not you can you remain yourself inside the inevitable chaos. 

 

Can you still show up?

Can you still do the work?
Can you still breathe, and pivot, and not light your entire life on fire because one thing went wrong? 

(or twelve things went wrong)? Somewhere between the traffic stop, the hormonal spiral, the computer funeral, and the deeply surreal experience of standing next to David Henry Hwang while trying not to dissociate, I realized I wasn’t falling apart. I was expanding. I guess... it just feels identical sometimes.

 

Because, dear reader, growth is not cute!

Growth is not a soft-focus Instagram reel with a voiceover about “stepping into your power.”

Growth is ugly-crying in a borrowed car while calculating interest rates.
Growth is showing up to rehearsal anyway.
Growth is letting yourself be seen before you feel ready.

Growth is saying, I am terrified, but I am not leaving.

 

There’s a psychological term for this —anti-fragile. 

 

When Nassim Nicholas Taleb coined the term anti-fragility, he was trying to name something that didn’t exist in our literal or psychological vocabulary. We have words for things that break under pressure ("fragile, breakable"—think of a wine glass shattering), and we have words for things that hold steady or bounce back ("robust, sturdy, steadfast,"—think of a levy or damn during a hurricane).  But what Taleb realized what that we did not have a word for systems that actually improve when they’re exposed to adversity, stress, pressure, or volatility.

 

Taleb describes this as a gap in the language with real consequences. 

Fragile clearly means something that’s harmed by shocks. 

Robust describes something that resists them. 

Resilient covers systems that can recover after being knocked down. 

 

But in all three cases, the best possible outcome is staying the same.

 

The central premise of an anti-fragile system is that it doesn’t merely survive difficulty. It actually improves, and becomes better because of it. It refers to systems that strengthen under pressure. A useful way to picture the distinction is as a simple triad:

 

Fragile: weakened or damaged by adversity.

Robust / resilient: able to withstand adversity or return to baseline, but unchanged by it.

Anti-fragile: made stronger by adversity.

Strengthened by the adversity.
Sharpened by the friction.

 

The exact opposite of the part of me that wanted to run.

 

*

 

So yes. Wow. I am in Los Angeles, living my dream.

 

And I am also crying in parking lots, buying emergency laptops, bleeding on schedule, and learning in real time how to stay present in the life I worked so hard to build.

 

Which feels about right.

 

Because maybe the "level up" isn’t the success at all. Maybe the level up is the ability to withstand all the good bad joyful heinous and identity-melting things that come with "success," and not talk yourself out of it.

Anyway, if you need me, I’ll be at the Pasadena Playhouse, trying to act like a person who belongs there, while also? Quietly becoming one...

Internal monologue: "Ahhhhhhhhhhhh!"