On The Isle of Skye: a Tale of Temperance

There are landscapes so beautiful they are said to render a person speechless. Exhibit A: 

 

The Isle of Skye: Showing off. 

Unfortunately, none of these vistas have yet been proven effective on one particular American Gen X empty-nester from Westchester who begins the majority of his sentences with “Well, actually...” I know this because Alec and I recently took a 3-day minibus tour (that we won pretending to be rich people in a silent auction last Robert Burns Night). The tour was a thorough historical and geological deep dive into Scotland's gorgeous jewel of the Inner Hebrides, the Isle of Skye, a place of such unreasonable beauty that it appears G-d may have become briefly competitive: 

Mountains rise out of nowhere. 

Water appears wherever water just, like, feels like appearing. 

The light changes every eleven seconds.  

There are literal Faerie Glens. 

Sheep stand on hillsides looking all smug because their rock has better views than your rock.

And there I was, inside all this geological majesty, on a minibus, contemplating committing felony assault. Not actual assault, obviously! The theatre-person kind, where you spend hours imagining the immaculate delivery of a singular devastating sentence so perfect the offending party evaporates into the Scottish mist...
…. 

      Just me? Oh.... Okay...

Our particular provocateur was a fellow American possessed of that magnificent conversational impulse to improve every statement made by another human being. A fact could not merely be offered by our intrepid, fully-trained, scholarly, fabulous tour guide Jamie. It had to be amended.

 

          “Well, ACTUALLYYYYY—”

 

Every point clarified. Expounded upon. Corrected. Enhanced by information no one had requested. 

          "Aren't Americans the worst?" 

They'd scream from the back of the minibus, proving their own point, accompanied by the ear-stabbing laughter of his (actually perfectly nice) wife as they sat immediately behind us. 

For three days.

 

Reader? I began to hear his "Well, actually" and the wife's sanity-pummeling laugh in my spinal cord. On Day 2, the group experienced a magnificent vista at the top of one of Skye's highest mountains. Jamie (again: the fantastic, patient AF tour guide) told us there were two paths up to the top: the gentle winding path, and a slightly tougher “scrambly” one. Of course, Well Actually Guy took the scrambly path, and at the top proceeded to tell the rest of us that "WELL ACTUALLY THE PATH WASN’T ANY HARDER THAN A HIKE WE DID EARLIER TODAY."  

 

........Okaaay. 

I cracked my knuckles. Did a take to an invisible audience. I moved on. Breathed in the sea air. Then to Alec, I vocalized that I was experiencing awe. The emotion human beings experience when life feels "beyond us." I'm going to go to Merriam-Webster: 

"AWE: NOUN. An emotion variously combining dread, veneration, and wonder that is inspired by overwhelming greatness (as in beauty, power, or size)."

Awe can be positive and negative. It is part of awe's power. The negative part of awe is, in fact, the root of the awful, which is what this man was, and I would like Merriam-Webster to consider including his picture in the next printed edition. 

 This moment atop the mountain with Alec felt special. Sacred. Not only because we have both had such expansive and life/career altering half-years, but special because we get so few opportunities to experience this kind of natural awe in the modern world. 

I said this aloud. I felt I uttered it privately, to my husband. But guess what? Before I could finish a breath, I hear: 

          "Well. actually, I recently read a book called AWE, that says we can train ourselves to experience modern awe if you just put you mind to it...”  

This man was so lucky I didn’t fling him from the top of the cliff straight into the North Sea. Oh, okay. So my lack of daily awe was a me-problem. (I also seriously doubted he had interpreted this book's research and thesis point accurately.) I thanked him for his feedback, and promptly ran (ran!) back down the mountain.

Literally: Awesome

 

You think he’d get the message. 
But no. 

The following morning at breakfast—at 7:30AM—before COFFEEFORTHELOVEOFGD, seated next to me at our B of our shared BnB, he just wants to “pick up on our conversation yesterday about modern awe…” I hadn't slept well. I already despised him and had attempted to be polite the day before. This was too much. Well Actually Guy proceeded to tell me every single way in which he say awe in the modern world ("the subway, the electrical grid, Broadway!") Oh FFS, he brought Broadway into the chat? Did he want me to choke him with the black pudding? Was his hypothesis that I was jaded, deficient at seeing beauty and experiencing sufficient gratitude? Sure sounded like it. But I hadn't had enough sleep or coffee or alone time to know that with certainty. 

 

I tried. I nodded. I attempted silence. Cogent points that defended my right to feel or not feel emotions however was authentic for me. But turns out, I was too depleted to truly bear it. Unrelenting in his TedTalk, I pushed back. 

• "I don’t believe in a forced gratitude posture, I find it is part of the #GoodVibesOnly movement that potentially represses important emotions like grief and disappointment that do truly need to be processed."
• "Thank you so much for sharing what YOU find awesome in the modern world" 
• "I wonder if you would feel the same way if any of those were your every day reality—is there a possibility that you might not feel that way? If so, I think that is allowed." 

He wouldn’t let up. And I hadn't had enough caffeine. I finally looked at Alec across the scrambled eggs and begged aloud, not even that quietly: “HELP ME,” and Alec escorted me in a side conversation before I could commit murder over toast points. 
_______________

*EXHALE* 

_______________

All of this irritation presented a problem you see, for I have recently been making an effort to become a psychologically evolved, emotionally mature person, and psychologically evolved, emotionally mature people presumably do not spend vacations silently composing closing arguments against irritating know it all strangers. 

 

Ugh. 

 

So naturally I did what I have always done: I made my extreme irritation mean something: that obviously I am a monster. Fine. So maybe this guy found me cynical. Or jaded. Or intellectually lazy. Or perhaps I just… annoyed him as well. Who knows? 

 

Was I intolerant? 

Ungenerous? 

Depressed? 

A bad traveler? 

Had I become one of those awful middle-aged women who simply hates everyone? 

Shouldn’t I be GRATEFUL? 

LOOK AT THE ISLE OF SKYE! 

Alec is SO HANDSOME AND HAPPY! 

There are GOATS! SHEEP! WATERFALLS!! 

Why are you thinking about pushing Well Actually Guy into one?!
 

But somewhere during those three days, something surprisingly profound shifted. I realized I didn’t have to hold a trial. On either of us. There did not need to be a prosecution, a defense, witnesses, or a final ruling from the Supreme Court of Alexandra Silber declaring either THIS MAN IS OBJECTIVELY INSUFFERABLE and/or YOU ARE A TERRIBLE PERSON FOR FINDING HIM SO. Sometimes two perfectly decent adults have different values about how one occupies shared space.

And they irritate the shit out of each other on a minibus.

And that can be the whole story.

 

This might sound ridiculously small. For me, it isn’t.

 

I am a sensitive being. There are pros and cons to this. I'd like to think that my sensitivity is part of what makes me an artist of excellence. But it also makes me enormously sensitive to human stimuli: a person's volume, moods, interruptions, energies, and proximity; strong smells, bright lights, and in general, whether human beings are considerate of a shared, collective space. Add crowds, travel, reduced agency and twelve people sealed inside a moving metal tube, and my nervous system begins processing every human quirk as though NORAD has asked me personally to assess the threat. 

 

For years, I have hated this quality in myself and done everything in my power to "toughen up." I have, thus, compounded my innate sensitivity by adding morality to it: 

First comes the irritation.

Then comes the shame about the irritation. 

Then comes the analysis of the shame about the irritation. 

...Until a blowhard talking too loudly and too much has somehow become a referendum on whether I deserve citizenship among humankind.

 

What if I simply… didn’t do that?

What if irritation is information?

What if I can notice it, make room for it, perhaps move seats—and decline to construct an entire philosophy of good and evil around it?

"Too much input. Too little agency. You are irritated. No big deal." 

Because the other, very real truth is that Skye WAS magnificent.

I felt things there I had worried I was no longer capable of feeling. After years of struggle and a numbness that likely helped me bear an adverse physical existence, awe came back. Wonder surged . Pleasure returned in flashes so clean they almost startled me! I looked at my beautiful Alec—watching him experience a country and landscape he loves, that has given us both so much, watching the particular happiness of my husband being fully himself—and felt enormous pride and tenderness.

 

And none of that—none—was cancelled out because a couple of loud American Gen Xers on the bus annoyed me.
 

Perhaps this is one of the quieter freedoms of growing older: discovering that contradictory feelings do not annihilate one another.

We can be overwhelmed and grateful.

We can love humanity and need humanity to please STFU.

We can stand before something staggeringly beautiful and still be tired, hungry, irritable, preoccupied, or desperate to be alone.

Scotland does not need me to perform wonder for it.
The mountains are not taking attendance.

And honestly? if Scotland doesn’t know how much I love it this, of all years? It never will.
 

Maybe emotional maturity isn’t finally becoming so healed that nothing bothers us. Maybe it is becoming spacious enough to allow things to bother us without making the bother mean everything. 

 

On Skye, I noticed the weather passed over the land with astonishing speed and drama: 

Sun, rain, mist, wind, brightness again. 

No condition appears embarrassed by the one before it. 

The mountain does not panic when the cloud arrives. 

The cloud does not apologize for obscuring the view.

It just... passes. 
 

Perhaps feelings are allowed the same dignity and irritation can simply be weather.
 

And perhaps, once we stop interrogating every cloud, we have considerably more time to behold the mountains. And feel the awe that arrives within our heart, naturally. 

 

 

What does an actor love?

If I were sane, or, even merely a betting man, I would guess almost nothing. 

 

Surely it is not the unemployment, which is frequent.

 

Not the eight-show week. 

Not the just-for-the-holidays nine show week. 

And not even the six-show week, which is mysteriously just as exhausting. 

 

Not the matinee.

Not the two-show day.

Not Saturday night after the two-show day, when civilians suggest “getting a drink” as though you have not just spent seven hours being emotionally obliterated beneath industrial-strength, gorgeously designed lighting.

 

Not the dressing room with no window, the apartment with no dishwasher, the hotel room containing one fork and a refrigerator apparently designed to chill three individual grapes. 

 

Not the audition. Certainly not the self-tape. Not the self-tape requiring a reader, a tripod, two full-body shots, a slate, a song of your own choosing and, presumably, a minor in cinematography.

 

Not the dignity, which you surrendered somewhere around the third callback requiring you to “bring movement clothes just in case.” 

 

Surely not the stability. 

 

Not the money.

 

Dear God, not the money.

 

Not the magnificent union health insurance one spends half one's career trying to qualify for. 

Not unemployment forms. 

Not taxes in seven states. 

Not learning that you apparently earned $68 in Ohio eleven months ago and Ohio would now like to discuss it.

 

Not the the glamorous housing, with its miniature refrigerator, useless saucepan and mattress designed by the CIA.

  

Not the notes.  

Not the reviews. Not the absence of reviews. Not the reviews one claims not to have read and can nevertheless quote verbatim seventeen years later.

 

Not opening.

Not closing.

 

Not the exquisite little death of packing one's dressing room into a tote bag while you hear the demolition-screech of the work crew dismantling the world you have inhabited for six months, twenty feet away.

 

 

And yes, we Theatre People kvetch and winge and bemoan and complain because the theatre really does ask so very much of a person.

 

Time, for one thing. Evenings. Weekends. Christmases. Summers. The years when other people acquire houses and sensible shoes.

 

It asks for the body. Eight times a week, please. Healthy or tired, heartbroken or menstruating, grieving or merely middle aged.

 

It asks for faith without evidence. Patience without guarantees. Rejection without bitterness. Confidence without arrogance. Vulnerability on command. 

 

It asks you to leave home. To live in strange apartments with one spoon. 

 

To love people ferociously and then, on a Sunday evening, pack your dressing room into a grocery bag and perhaps never see them again.

 

It asks you to begin again.

 

And again.

 

And again.

 

And it is this astonishing knowledge—blindingly elegant in its straightforwardness—that after a lifetime of all rejection, airports, bus terminals, callbacks, unemployment, bad digs, good reviews, bad reviews, illness, heartbreak, triumph, disappointment, eight-show weeks and Sunday-night trains—that I am, somehow, still here.

 

An entire ridiculous life is narrowed to one illuminated stagedoor I have walked through one hundred thousand times. 

 

I am still here. 

Still standing in the dark, just beyond the light. 

Experiencing that humiliating, inconvenient, financially indefensible sensation:

 

Oh.

Right.

This.

 

This ancient, sacred, indescribable-in-its-profundity human ritual, is what I love.  

That's why. 

 

Perhaps the mystery isn't how I ended up here, but why, after everything, I still love it.

  

What does a person owe the thing she has loved all her life?

The theatre asks for everything. 

Surely thirty years is enough payment, I think, more often than I care to admit. 

And yet, beneath all the indignities, compromises, dressing rooms, unemployment, bad housing, opening nights, closings, and years spent wondering whether one really ought to have become a lawyer—I stayed. 

  

And I am beginning to understand, belatedly, that nothing in this artistic life was ever owed in the first place.

Only offered.

Only entered.

Only returned to, again and again; the ritual we cannot quite stop believing will change us, one rising curtain at a time.

 

A Voice

I've been thinking a lot about my voice lately. 

 

For a long time on this blog, I felt a silence come over me. It was shame. I was so terrified to admit (to others and to myself) how very ill I truly was. If I admitted it to my employers, I might lose work, and thus the insurance that would help me return to our regularly scheduled program of overworking my way to out-running self-loathing! 

 

And if I admitted to to myself, my psyche would collapse utterly under the weight of It All, and I might never recover physically or emotionally.  

 

But yes. If you've stuck around here long enough, you probably noticed I was doing quite the fancy thing there for a while, and now, (as a close friend so recently, dismissively? callously? maybe totally innocently? labeled me—) I am "a regional theatre actress." 

 

For the record, nothing about that label is shameful, and of course, nothing about the quality of my work has altered. In fact, it has only deepened. 

 

Careers are not at all the meritocracies we were promised in elementary school. They are often merely the reality of 

who you know

where you geographically were

where you were in your maturity

if you had financial support

if you had emotional support

if you possessed maturity 

how audacious you were

if you had representation at the just right time 

the hand of luck

the hand of fate.

I had a lot of those. I didn't have others. I believe I valiantly attempted to make the most of what I had. Such is life. 

 

I'd also add that in emerging years... I am much more than "just" an actress, as my literal tax return would point out. 

But I digress. 

 

For this friend is not wrong: I acknowledge that once upon a time, I was a big West End leading lady, a Broadway-person-in-the-making, and suddenly had a lot of fancy classical music gigs and 2 Broadway shows under my belt. And since 2017 I haven't performed in those spaces. And my health is largely responsible for that.  

 

It's taken me years to recognize, acknowledge and metabolize what actually occurred in my body, let alone in my career, and it is one of the great griefs of my life that specifically the singing experience—once such a source of pure joy and release—has become so fraught (even though it is now, largely in my psychology...)

 

____ 

 

Around 2014 I started to notice a change in my body, which included a change in my singing voice. I couldn't place it. I couldn't fix it. I couldn't even totally name what was happening, but it felt like this: 

after a lifetime of holding a pencil and knowing how to write with it, suddenly one day I picked up the pencil and it started to fall gracelessly out of my grip without ceremony. Nothing I did could regain the sense of "controlled-freedom" I worked so hard to enjoy in my music-making. And this was right at the moment I was the most visible on earth as "a singer." 

 

Oy.

I now realize it was the beginnings of a terrible illness that would take much more from me than merely a effortlessly floaty passagio. 

It would take momentum. 

Relationships. 

Years of my, and off my, life. 

It would take literal organs. 

It would take my fertility. 

And of course, it ravaged the most sensitive part of my body to all of this: my voice. 

 

39 failed medications. Years of physical pain in the form of body tension that still lives in my fascia to this day. And as they say of racehorses: "an injured champion never quite races the same..." I'm learning, as I heal all this that though not at all unusual, over the years mind did something horrible. It did not simply do say: 

"I grieve what my instrument used to do."

or

"I grieve the life I could have had, had my instrument remained on what I felt was a promised trajectory" 

 

But almost immediately:

"What does this mean about me as a human being?"

 

Those are two utterly different griefs.
One is grief over a legitimate loss.
The other is utter shame.

The first says:

"Something precious changed."

 

The second says:

"I became less worthy."

 

Those are not the same emotion. But trauma often fuses them together until they feel indissoluble. 

This was not a change I could understand. For someone whose nervous system learned that understanding equals safety, that is an almost unbearable request. 

  

For the record:  

I no longer feel that my voice is broken or damaged. But it is not remotely what it was in 2013. Partly because I haven't been able to "get the reps in." But the soaring has returned! When I am asked to soar. Which is a gift I have to re-earn on those big stages, and I am, of course, willing to re-prove myself. And, of course, it means even more to soar when one has learned what it means to fall out of the sky. 

 

And lately, life has been teaching me to challenge a lifelong strategy. 

 

My instinct has always been to "make meaning" of events. I am compelled to make meaning, to analyze, to build a coherent narrative before I even fully feel the emotion. A self protection, of course. And not a sustainable one. 

This year has not allowed that.
 

This year of expansion is asking me to relinquish Certainty. Perfection. 

And replace it with curiosity. Space. Wonder. Awe. 

To relish all I do know now, throw my head back, and laugh at all I have yet to learn and do and become.

  
To cease not only striving for perfection, 

        but performing the illusion of perfection. 

© hula seventy

Farewell, Désirée

There are some roles you play, and there are some roles that play you back.

 

Désirée Armfeldt, I have discovered, belongs firmly in the second category. The woman who met me exactly as I was becoming ready to inhabit my own life more fully...

 

And now, apparently, I am supposed to say goodbye to her.

For now. (For now, universe. I am making eye contact with you...)

But the glorious lesson of The Theatre is the lesson of ephemeral beauty, the ever-fleeting impermanence of It All, and in that truth lies a divine gift: that to love anything means we will lose it. And that the axiom "this too shall pass" is just as true of joyful moments as it is of adverse ones. May we relish the good times while they are here, for soon they will ebb once more. 

 

Such is life. 

 

So for now, the kimono goes back. The wig goes back. The glorious Lady-Gaga's-PLEAT-GUY-pleated-this-handmade-Fortuni-gown gowns go back. The makeup comes off. The dressing room empties. And once again I am confronted by the specific, beautiful, brutality of theatre: that we build an entire world together, furnish it with our bodies, our hearts, our neuroses, our snacks, and an alarming quantity of pins, and then one night we simply stop.

Poof.

Gone.

 

Cheers.

 

Which feels particularly strange because the last five months have been among the most expansive of my life.

There was Brigadoon—a piece I had spent years loving, interrogating, rewriting, fighting for, and finally watching become real in front of actual human beings. 

There was Chicago. 

There was Désirée. 

There was turning forty-three.

There were new friendships.

And old friendships returning in surprising new shapes.

There was writing.

There was acting.

There was (fraught but ultimately satisfying) singing.

There were meetings with exciting people. 

There were rooms full of artists imagining impossible things! And then, through some combination of craft, caffeine, delusion, and a text thread or three, making them possible.

 

And somewhere inside all of that, something in me began to soften. From my mindset to my nervous system to perhaps even to my literal fascia? I'm softer. Or life doesn't feel so hard. Or some semblance of both.  

______

Ah, softening. 

For most of the first half of my life, I believed strength meant bracing:

Prepare for the blow.

Anticipate the loss.

Read the room.

Make yourself useful.

Make yourself excellent.

Make yourself indispensable.

Make yourself whatever shape might prevent catastrophe.

And then life, with its usual lack of subtlety, eventually taught me that no amount of bracing can stop life from being life.

People leave.

Bodies change.

Careers zigzag.

Health fails.

Plans explode.

Love arrives anyway.

New identities present themselves with or without your consent.  

 

So perhaps this "middle-aged growing up journey" I'm on, is not at all about learning how to brace more effectively.

It is, I suspect, discovering that I no longer have to. (Isn't THAT rich?)

 

That is one of the gifts Désirée gave me. 

She is, after all, a woman who has spent much of her life moving.

City to city.

Stage to stage.

Affair to affair.

Performance to performance.

Always admired.

Always desired.

Always slightly elsewhere.

 

And then, suddenly, she wants something different.

Not applause.

Not admiration.

Not another dazzling entrance.

Home.

And I know that I understand that differently now than I would have ten years ago.

Home, I now realize, is not really a place at all. 

Home may be allowing yourself to be loved without immediately wondering how you can repay it.

Home may be trusting that the people who love you are not secretly conducting quarterly performance reviews.

Home may be waking up inside a body that has survived extraordinary things and finally regarding it not as a problem to solve, but as the astonishing vehicle that carried you here.

 

I have spent a great deal of my life trying to "earn" safety. I am beginning, tentatively, to believe I might simply... have some?

 

And of course, this has changed the way I think about my work, too.

For years I felt an invisible pressure to choose. To "brand." To "pick a market." Woe betide the mid 2000s and all their "so many years of muddle." 

Are you an actor? A singer?

Or are you an educator?  

Or wait: are you a writer?

Are you truly serious about performing?

Or serious about making your own work?

 

Pick a lane, Silber, the world is waiting. (Preferably before everyone notices you are driving several vehicles at once...)

 

But lately I have started wondering:

Why? WTF? Who made that rule?

 

I have always been suspicious of false binaries, and yet somehow I had constructed an enormous one inside my own career.

Actor OR writer.

Interpreter OR maker.

But what if the answer is simply:

Yes.

I am a woman standing backstage in a corset five minutes before places thinking about sentence structure. 

I am ALL.

"Applause for the clowns. They're finally here..." 

And perhaps my life is spacious enough to hold all of it.

 

Perhaps that is true for you, too. I don't know you, dear reader, but I suspect that we all contain multitudes.  

 

So aside from being overwhelming in its feeling of "midlife tardiness," this realization feels enormous not because it means I must now do everything at once (which is exactly the sort of conclusion my nervous system used to draw automatically, but, frankly we are no longer letting her run the meeting...) it means I don't have to amputate pieces of myself in order to appear coherent. My coherence may be entirely about embracing the combination. The All. The All of AL! 

 

And while I may moan and weep about how long it took me to heal and get a grip and make these discoveries, one of the strange gifts of midlife is realizing how much time has passed us by while simultaneously discovering how much life might still be waiting. Ahead. Still. 

There is grief in that. Of course. 

But there is also tremendous freedom.

I am no longer "waiting to become the person who gets to relax and just live my life."

 

She is already here. 

 ______

So farewell for now, Désirée.

 

Thank you for finding me at exactly this moment.

Thank you for asking harder questions than I expected.

Thank you for reminding me that growing older is not the diminishment I once feared, but perhaps an invitation to become more.

 

More honest.

More ridiculous.

More true.  

More absolutely alive.

 

There is still so much I want.

 

And for the first time in a long time, wanting does not feel like evidence of lack.

It feels like evidence that I am here.

 

Still becoming.

 

Still beginning.

Still.

©Joe Mazza / Brave Lux (of course) 

 

43

I used to write a little birthday post every year. I would list all the interesting things about the number/age I was turning and reflect. I glance over them now and feel charmed by how innocent they are. They were before the years felt "piled up." 

- I distinctly recall turning 24 and having the realization that childhood was truly over and I had "missed it."

- I remember waking up in San Francisco on the morning of my 30th birthday just after West Side Story had closed (the cast sang to me at midnight!) and feeling like life was truly all ahead of me... not fully realizing that less than two years later I would have a diagnosis and so much fear and pain. 

- I remember 36—the first birthday with Alec in my life—and not knowing where to put all of my peace and joy and happiness. 

- And 40. Days before I turned 40 I quit a high profile job and thought my career might be over, but the relief I felt at walking away from something so toxic was a level of certainty I couldn't ignore, and realized I had fought too hard to be alive to live feeling that horrendous about my work...

 

So. Hello 43. 

 

For decades my life has been organized around earning: health, approval, love, safety, another day. This year is the first in which I seem to have experienced what psychologists sometimes call "earned security"—not perfection, but a nervous system that is slowly learning, "Wait wait wait what: I don't have to manufacture every ounce of love that comes toward me?"

___
 

Last week, Chicago was flirting with one hundred degrees. The sort of heat that makes the buildings shimmer and convinces everyone they have suddenly become experts on hydration. 

 

Alec looked at me and said, "Beach?"
For me that answer is always "Obviously."

 

If you've never been to a Chicago beach in the summer, it feels vaguely illegal. You're standing in one of the largest cities in America, surrounded by skyscrapers, and somehow there's an inland sea stretching toward the horizon with no opposite shore in sight. Lake Michigan has always refused to behave like a lake. It insists on being mistaken for an ocean.
It is also? My water.
I grew up diving into it from the Michigan side, and every time I return, my body recognizes it before my brain does.
Without ceremony, I walked straight into the bone-shivering water with abandon.

 

Or perhaps...with ceremony? Because as the cold overtook me, something unexpected happened. My entire body began to tingle with the intensity of an arm waking after it's fallen asleep. Every nerve ending seemed to announce itself at once. As though someone had quietly switched my awareness back on.

 

I couldn't help thinking about the mikveh—the ritual bath that marks transition, renewal, emergence into a different chapter of life. I've always loved that Judaism understands water as more than water. Sometimes immersion is less about washing something away, than becoming someone new.

 
Standing waist-deep in Lake Michigan, I found myself waking up.
To health.
To gratitude.
To the astonishing, ordinary miracle of having a body that can carry me into freezing cold lake water without fear.

And excuse me please but let's pause here to appreciate one of the quieter miracles in this story:
I got into a bathing suit, mmkay? 
I walked into the water without negotiating with my reflection.
For decades, body dysmorphia/ disrodered eating/ general self-loathing literally stole moments like these from me. Even when I longed to swim in my favorite thing on earth: The Water, some cruel internal accountant insisted I hadn't yet earned the right. My body was something to apologize for before it could become a vessel to enjoy human experience.

This time, I didn't bargain.
I just got in.

The greatest victories increasingly resemble freedoms.
Not achievements.
Freedoms.
 

A few days later, I celebrated my birthday.
Forty-freaking-three.

And I can say, without hesitation, that it was the most beautiful birthday of my adult life.
Not because of presents.
Not because of messages of celebratory messages.
Not because that evening I had the extraordinary privilege of sitting onstage as Désirée Armfeldt and singing "Send in the Clowns"—(though, TBH: beginning a new year of life with one of Stephen Sondheim's most searing songs felt like a piece of theatrical symmetry too intense to have been planned?)

It was beautiful because, for perhaps the first time in my life, I allowed myself to receive it.

Receiving turns out to be much harder than giving. I used to pride myself on giving more than I received— if ever allowing myself to receive at all! As if that were some sort of superior virtue. Ah, youth. How wrong I was. 
But understandable, of course. Giving feels active. Noble. Productive. Receiving requires something far more frightening.
It requires believing that you don't owe anyone an explanation for why you're worthy of being loved.
And after all, for most of my life, I didn't believe that. My grandfather taught me—without ever saying the words outright—that love was a wage.  Approval was conditional. Safety was earned and re-earned— every day. Even accomplishment wasn't enough, because yesterday's accomplishment expired overnight. Whatever affection had been earned on Tuesday needed to be re-earned on Wednesday. Then Thursday. Then Friday. The treadmill never stopped.

I internalized the lesson so completely that I confused striving with living.

If I just worked harder…
If I were just more successful…
More talented.
More useful.
More exceptional.

Then perhaps I could finally exhale.

Of course, the finish line kept moving.
 

Illness complicated all of this in ways I'm only now beginning to understand.
When survival itself becomes your full-time occupation, you learn to live in a perpetual state of bracing. You become extraordinarily good at enduring.
But enduring and living are not the same thing.

This year, something shifted.
Perhaps it was writing Brigadoon.
Perhaps it was playing Désirée, who seemed determined to interrogate every illusion I still carried about worthiness.
Perhaps it was the privilege of being surrounded by extraordinary collaborators and friends who loved me without asking me to audition for the role.
Perhaps it was simply enough years between myself and the girl who learned to hustle for approval.
Whatever the reason, I noticed something extraordinary on my birthday.
When people loved me...
I let them.
I didn't rush to deflect the compliment.
I didn't immediately calculate how to repay every kindness.
I didn't secretly wonder whether I'd disappointed them somehow.
I simply received it. 

With the enormous gratitude a true gift deserves.

That's the lesson: truly receiving love is its own act of generosity.

If love is a gift, who am I to deflect it so callously? To decide whether or not it is deserved? Someone has thought of me, gone out, selected it, purchased it with hard earned wages and wrapped it up for your delight. 

Receive all of that. Without fuss or deflection. 

It is gracious to do so.  

People want to celebrate one another.
They want to uplift.
They want to cook dinner, write cards, send messages, hug you far longer than etiquette requires. They aren't keeping score. 

Healthy love isn't transactional. 

It isn't waiting for reimbursement.
It longs to be accepted.

I went to sleep that night feeling something I don't remember ever feeling before.

Full.
As though every kind word, every embrace, every laugh, every song, every impossible twist of fortune this extraordinary year had offered had finally been allowed to land.
 

For the first time, I wasn't carrying the bucket beneath a waterfall, frantically trying to prove I deserved the water.
I simply stood in it.
 

The beautiful thing about fullness, I've discovered this year, is that it doesn't end with you.
It overflows.

And flows ever-outward.  
The more completely we allow ourselves to receive love, the more freely we can offer it away again tomorrow.
 

The birthday gift of 43 is learning that there comes a moment in every life when we can finally stop asking, 

"Have I earned this yet?"

 

And simply answer, with gratitude:

 

"Isn't it rich?"

receiving: with my whole, damn grateful heart

"Don't Bother, They're Here..."

 Tonight after opening, and a week of tech plus 2 show days, I was doing the show feeling as “lost” and “at sea” and “clueless” as I ever have been (perhaps, save, Kiss me Kate for the BBC where I was just operating on adrenaline and... cortisol and... panic? Unclear. I still can't watch it...) 

 

Bluntly: I have been waiting around for the Désirée “aha” moment to arrive much like the (totally fake) Handbook for Adults whose delivery I am still anticipating. But tonight, during the crushingly iconic “Send in the Clowns” I began to have a catharsis so huge I was rendered inarticulate. I felt like I was bombasted with a shattering realization: that silly ol' Désirée is meant to teach me/show me/force me to:

confront my life choices

confront the health and traumatic history realities that had nothing to do with my “choices” 

including the loss of the full spectrum and potential of my singing voice

and above all my unavoidable relationship with self loathing and my compulsive search to find attunement and safety in the gaze of others. 

 

Whoa boy. It was overwhelming. And excruciating. 

 

The mistake? I was waiting for the intellectual breakthrough—for the moment when I'd finally understand Désirée.  Instead, my body understood her first.

 

It strokes me that most people regard "Send in the Clowns"  as a love song, or a ballad of regret. But psychologically, I think it is something much more terrifying: 
It is the moment when a woman realizes that she has spent a lifetime arranging herself around other people's desires. In my experience thus far, it is filled with almost every emotion there is— including if not especially rage and shame. 

Désirée has always known how to be admired.
She knows how to be wanted.
She knows how to enter a room and make everyone turn.

She even knows how to piss of her own mother. 

But the week we meet her, what she discovers, far too late, is that admiration and attunement are not at all the same thing.

And something about that distinction feels uncannily close to a pattern I have come to recognize in my own life.
From childhood onward, I learned to scan faces.
Dad's long illness.
 An emotionally unsafe extended family.
Years of illness. 
Multiple surgeries.
Throughout those experiences, my silly ol' nervous system seemed to have created a painful equation:

If I can just become the right person... the exceptional person... the indispensable person... perhaps then I will finally be safe.

Not consciously, of course (nervous systems don't speak in sentences—at least I don't think they do...) They speak in actionable strategies.

I have always wondered why, with so much external "evidence" of worth, and with a great loving support system, partner in Alec, and such loyal friends, I have such a ravenous need to feel "deeply seen." 

I now realize that every time I moved to a new environment (which, as a freelancing artist happens every couple of months or sometimes weeks!) a new relationship or singular artistic environment would end up carrying the weight of my need to feel deeply seen. 

 

That's too much pressure for a scene partner. Or a group of strangers. All of whom have their own lives and boundaries and needs and neuroses. 

 

Tonight I think I experienced a revelation: I haven't actually been seeking any kind of admiration or even platonic intimacy.

I have been chasing safety. 

The experience of finally relaxing.
Of no longer having to earn belonging.

Those are different things.
One requires performance.
The other requires surrender.

Then there is another irony.
I've spent much of your career trying to convince audiences that I am "worthy."
But what if the mature roles ask something entirely different?
What if they ask:

Can you stand in front of people without asking them to heal your self-loathing?

 

Not because I no longer have self-loathing (I'm a woman on earth, after all...)

But because it no longer gets the starring role.
That is Désirée to me.
She isn't trying to be adored anymore.
She is trying, perhaps for the first time, to tell the truth.

 

I've been... surviving.
And the agony is that the strategies I constructed for that survival kept operating long after the danger had passed. 

I dunno. Perhaps that is why "Send in the Clowns" undid me. It is exposing the exhausting performance I've been giving for decades.

And somewhere beneath that performance is the woman I've been thinking about and trying to love-back-to-fullness all year: the one with the surgical scars, the cellulite, the altered voice and body, the intelligence and straaaange humor, the immense capacity to love 

 

and the courage to sit on a pile of pillows in the center of a theatre, without pretending to be immaculate.

 

"Hello, Désirée..."

     "Hm... I wonder if someone has made a clerical error."

 

This is how I feel about playing Désirée Armfeldt in Stephen Sondheim's A Little Night Music. Somebody is allowing me to do this in front of paying, living, customers, and I remain unconvinced that all relevant parties have been meaningfully consulted. I can only assume everyone involved is operating from incomplete information because letting me do this feels like the sort of decision that would normally require several permits and a psych evaluation. 

 

To stand in the middle of a theater, in one of my favorite theatre communities in America—Chicago—and sing one of the most iconic songs ever written for the musical theatre canon while removing articles of clothing in. the. round? 

 

Lord Almighty. 

 

Every day I arrive at work expecting to see an letter on official letterhead that begins, "After further review..." The entire thing feels like the sort of idea that should have been stopped by at least three responsible adults before reaching production.

 

And yet here we are.

 

 

Ah, time. You sneaky little bitch. One day you're Anne Egerman. Then you blink. You answer a few emails. You survive a global pandemic. You have a coupla life-saving surgeries. You discover that your knees now occasionally send weather reports. And suddenly you're standing on the cusp of forty-three, learning Désirée Armfeldt. 

 

The sunrise-sunset of it all has me staggered.

There is some grief in this reality.

Where did it go?

Where did she go?

 

The young woman who believed forty was impossibly distant. The girl who thought grown women possessed some secret map she had never been gifted. The actress perpetually trying to squeeze herself into categories that never quiiiiiite fit. For honestly, just like I did with "being young," I also always had to make ingenues work. Whatever ingenues I did play, I portrayed by smuggling my own strangeness inside them, bending the material around my oddly-shaped corners.

 

The women, though?

Ooooo the women are different.

Complicated. Funny. Wounded. Wise. Messy. Sexy. Flawed. The women know things. The 'women of the theatre' have lived badly and brilliantly—they carry history in their bodies and alter the temperature of a room. Suddenly I feel...equipped. Unapologetic. Ready. 

 

I've been waiting my whole life to portray the women that are now arriving.

Admittedly, perhaps slightly ahead of schedule? (Glynnis Johns was fifty when she originated Désirée) but maybe that doesn't mean I'm early. 

Maybe it means this is merely my first turn.

Maybe it means there will be more.

Maybe it means I can stop treating every new opportunity as if it is the last lifeboat leaving the dock.

Maybe it means I can simply be here.

 

*

 

Speaking of the nudity and sensuality of Désirée and and and—I've recently been recalling a realization I had several years ago while in the trenches of "eating disorder school" (which is to say: the first time Mount Sinai saved my life in the form of a rather strict in-patient treatment). For most of my teens and twenties, whenever an invitation involved swimming, I declined. Anything involving a bathing suit. The logic seemed airtight at the time: I genuinely believed I was protecting innocent bystanders from the burden of witnessing my body. And because this was the 1990s and early 2000s (a cultural era that looked women directly in the eye and cheerfully informed us that the less space we occupied, the better) we were all marinating in some fairly toxic nonsense.

 

The tragedy is that water is my favorite thing in the world. And I abandoned that water over and over again because I had become convinced that cellulite was a moral failure.

 

Recovery slowly arrived—and too-soon after, illness arrived. And I began to feel the betrayal. I had sold myself out thousands of times and missed irreplaceable experiences of swimming in the sea, of lakes on my skin, of canon balls and waterfalls and fjords—all because I was busy auditioning for a standard that did not exist. Convinced that if I just worked a little harder, sacrificed a little more, and occupied slightly less physical space, someone, somewhere, would finally hand me a certificate declaring me: Acceptable. And I did all of this with the intensity of a woman trying to secure the last helicopter out of Saigon.

 

What nonsense. 

 

When my body got mortally sick I realized I wasn't negotiating with perfection anymore, but with survival. Survival means the hierarchy of needs reveals itself with breathtaking efficiency. (I say this with truly PhD levels of expertise: survival is exactly like colonoscopy prep: there are no shades of grey, nuance or dilly-dallying. There is only what must go and what cannot stay.)

 

When you've spent years wondering whether you'll ever be healthy again, whether you'll ever feel strong again, whether you'll ever get another chance at an ordinary day, you start looking at your body differently.

At forty-two, do I love every inch of it? Absoluuutely not.

I remain a human woman.

But I am... alive. Astonishingly grateful to be alive.

And after 42 years on the fence, I've also arrived at the radical conclusion that at least some of me is extremely hot.

 

This, strangely enough, feels very Désirée. 

 

Désirée is a woman who has finally become more interested in truth than performance. Which may be why she feels less like a role I am playing, and more like a role I've been walking toward for decades. I have no idea the exact moment it occurred, but somewhere along the way, I stopped striving for perfection and perhaps more importantly, I stopped performing perfection. I stopped apologizing for being human before anyone had even accused me of it.

When I went to my callback, our director asked me: 

"Aside from the obvious glamorous reasons, why do you want to play this role right now?"

 I paused and really thought about it before answering: 

"Because... once, what feels like both yesterday and very long ago, I took final bows on very fancy stages. And then I got very, very sick. And lost so much. And gained so much. And now I just... want to be happy."

That's the real answer anyway. Perfection doesn't survive four surgeries and come back with scars. Or stand in the center of a theatre in Chicago, remove her makeup, her clothing, sing Sondheim's greatest hymn, and laugh at the absurdity of (please pardon the mixed Sondheim metaphor) being alive.

Breathing, living, human beings do.

 

And perhaps 

Cellulite.

Traumatic pasts.

Scars—literal and metaphorical.

The whole glorious mess.

is more than enough. 

 

And even though I spend almost every rehearsal waiting for the administrative team to dramatically burst through the theatre doors and yell, "WAIT! We meant the other Alexandra!"

 

I think I'm learning to applaud the vast, real, mess of it all. And if I don't fully succeed this time? 

"Well. maybe next year." 

  

© Joe Mazza for BraveLux (of course) 

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 mhath.*

 

exactly how I feel...

 * Roughly pronounced "SLAHN-jeh-VAR" In Scottish Gaelic, this traditional toast translates to "good health" and is the cultural equivalent of "cheers". It is deeply tied to Scottish heritage and is the perfect way to cap off a hard day or celebrate with friends while enjoying a nice dram of whisky.