25 Years

My father has been dead for twenty-five years.

I have now spent considerably more of my life without him than I ever spent with him. I have been an adult without a father longer than I was a child with one.

I was eighteen when my father died. An age at which one is technically permitted to vote, enlist in the military, and purchase cigarettes, but is still largely incapable of understanding how the world works, and certainly lacking a fully developed frontal lobe.

 

I was also an eighteen-year-old girl with enormous promise. People reminded me of this constantly (except, of course, my grandparents, who detested me, but that's another essay). Teachers, directors, mentors, friends. I was going to “be somebody.” I was going to “do extraordinary things.” My life stretched before me like a great illuminated boulevard, and somewhere at the end of it, presumably, stood Sutton Foster-level validation, Tony Awards, provable achievements that would make all these adults proud, hopefully a tasteful apartment with incredible natural light, and, of course, happiness?

Then my father died. After more than a decade of battling cancer.
And somewhere in the wreckage, without quite realizing it, I made a terrible bargain:

I would “make it worth it.”
I would become so extraordinary, so accomplished, so undeniably successful that the terrible thing that had happened to us would somehow be redeemed. I would take all that potential, all that promise, all the love and encouragement he had poured into me, and transform it into something magnificent.
Something worthy of him.
Something worthy of the loss.
Something that justified the size of this tragedy.

Which, when you think about it, is an absolutely insane assignment to give an eighteen-year-old (but after all, I was a “gifted” student, and I took it very seriously because almost all gifted and talented kids are totally deranged...)

 

For twenty-five years.
___

Now, there is an important distinction to make here.
My father never asked this of me.
Not once.
My father thought I hung the moon.
He delighted in me. He was astonished by me. He celebrated my ambitions, my peculiarities, my successes, and even my failures with a generosity I have spent much of my adult life struggling (and frankly, failing) to extend to myself.
He was not a man sitting at the breakfast table demanding to know why his teenage daughter had not yet secured a Broadway contract.
He was…my dad.
He loved me. I could viscerally feel that love.
And yet, after his death, I somehow transformed this loving, imperfect, deeply human man into the chairman of a celestial awards committee. I imagined him watching from the afterlife, arms folded, quietly disappointed.

 

Meanwhile, some of the brilliant kids I went to high school with were winning the giant awards, and I was watching their extraordinary careers unfold while privately conducting the sort of comparison exercise that ought to require protective eyewear and a licensed therapist.

I was truly happy for them. Their brilliance was undeniable.
I was also profoundly ashamed. And I assumed they were ashamed of me, embarrassed for me.
Not because I hadn't accomplished anything (I had accomplished quite a lot?) But because I had failed to become the version of myself I had promised I'd become at seventeen, back when I still believed life proceeded in a straight line, and tragedy was something that happened in Russian literature.
I had mistaken a possible future for a contractual obligation.
And worse, I had made my father its guarantor.

 

Of course, life had other plans.

There were extraordinary artistic experiences of the highest possible calibre, yes.
There was also my own terrible illness. Years of a screaming body demanding my attention with a ferocity that made artistic ambition seem, at times, like a quaint extracurricular activity.
There was grief, depression, and the long, unglamorous work of excavating childhood trauma that began long before Dad actually left this earth. There were years when merely remaining alive and continuing to participate in the world constituted a rather astonishing achievement.
But, of course, I didn't count those.
My internal awards committee did not recognize "survival" as an eligible category.
Nor did it recognize recovery, resilience, learning to trust, building a beautiful marriage, making a home, or becoming someone who could experience happiness without immediately checking whether she'd earned it.
These were apparently supporting achievements.
The principal award remained outstanding.

And so I kept going. Striving, measuring, imagining that somewhere, just beyond the next visible achievement, was the moment when I could finally look toward heaven and say:

There. Papa. Please. Tell me. Is it enough?

____ 

When I wrote White Hot Grief Parade in 2018, I was honoring my father, the enormous absence he had left behind, and the resilient, remarkable people who helped my mother and me survive it. 

I am proud of that book. It's where the world learns about Mike's love of Frisbee and pie-for-one and typewriters and What About Bob? And summer rainstorms and my mother, Catherine.
But the woman who wrote White Hot Grief Parade was still living inside so much pain. She had not yet completed her own harrowing journey through illness. She had not yet met Alec. She had not yet discovered so much of the life that awaited her.
She was still trying, in ways she could not entirely recognize, to make something beautiful enough to justify something terrible.
Now, twenty-five years after my father's death, I find myself wanting to remember him as a man, not a monument. And I want to remember myself as his daughter, not the executor of some impossible unfinished business.
Because the truth is that nothing I accomplish can make his death “worthwhile.”
And my life is not its compensation.
My life is my life.
It is not a memorial project. It is not an apology. It is not a twenty-five-year campaign to demonstrate that tragedy produces sufficiently impressive people.
It is simply the life I have been given, and the life I have made.
______

About two weeks ago, something changed.
Not dramatically. There was no ghostly visitation accompanied by the tasteful swell of an orchestra. Nothing announced itself. The world went on about its business, as it always does when a human life is quietly being altered. Somewhere a kettle boiled. A train arrived late. The sun rose over the same indifferent rooftops. But within me, a truth that had waited twenty-five years for an audience finally found me willing to listen. It was this: 

My father was never disappointed in me.
I was disappointed in me.
My father had never looked upon the woman I had—or had not—become with disgust.
I had.

And because I could not bear to acknowledge the full savagery of my own judgment, I gave it a face I loved. I took the likeness of Michael Silber and draped it over the crooked scaffolding of my own self-loathing. I fashioned an effigy from shame and longing, then used that monstrous creation to justify indenturing myself for a quarter of a century.

That is a very difficult thing to admit.
It is also, strangely, one of the most liberating things I have ever understood.

It is a terrible thing to discover that the voice which has condemned you all your life was your own. I had made myself both prisoner and jailer, and called the sentence love.
And it is a stranger, more merciful thing to discover that you may, at any moment, stop obeying it.
Because if my father was not the one demanding that I become extraordinary, then perhaps there was no demand at all. Perhaps the contract had never existed. Perhaps I had been working for twenty-five years to repay a debt nobody had incurred. No celestial ledger waiting to be balanced. No interest accruing with every passing year.

Only a frightened girl who had mistaken grief for obligation, and a woman who had grown so accustomed to paying that she had forgotten to ask whom, precisely, she owed.
And then came the thought that frightened me almost as much as it freed me:
Perhaps I no longer needed to imagine my father being proud of me.
Not because his pride had ceased to matter. 

Not because I loved him any less. 

But because somewhere in the long and difficult business of becoming myself, I had acquired something I once believed could only be bestowed upon me by another.
 

I was proud of myself.

 
Not in the frantic, feverish way I once understood pride. Not the brittle pride that must be earned again each morning, as though yesterday's living had left no evidence.
Something quieter. Something with roots. I was proud of the woman who had survived, and of the woman who had softened. Proud of what I had made and what I had mended. Proud of the dreams that had flowered and the ones that had died, and of the life that had continued growing around them.
Proud not because I had become everything I once promised I would be, but because I had become someone I could love.

And for the first time in twenty-five years, that love did not arrive as a verdict.
It arrived as peace.
I looked at my life and saw it: 

A body restored to health after years of suffering.
A mind learning to live without perpetual punishment.
A husband I adore, who adores me.
Work that challenges and delights me.
Dreams still unfolding.
Friendships.
Beauty.
Possibility.

I am happy.

Not every moment, obviously. I remain a human woman with an inbox, a nervous system, and a working knowledge of the New York City subway...But beneath the ordinary indignities of existence, there is something new:

A sense that I have arrived in my own life.
And that I do not have to keep proving my right to simply inhabit it.

 

_____ 

 

Lately, I have noticed my shoulders dropping. Not metaphorically. As though some ancient muscular instruction—hold this, carry this, don't you dare put this down—has finally been rescinded.

I think of the eighteen-year-old girl who lost her father and, standing in the wreckage of a world that had offered no explanation for its cruelty, decided she must spend the rest of her life "becoming extraordinary." 

She would make something of the suffering. 

Something enormous. 

Something worthy of the terrible price that had been paid.
She would take the senselessness of death and force it to yield a meaning.

Oh, Little Al. 

 

I understand why she did it. She was frightened. She was grieving. She was a child with a great and ravenous need to believe that the world possessed some hidden architecture of fairness; that if a thing was taken, something must be given in its place. That suffering, properly endured, might be exchanged for greatness. That the universe could be reasoned with, if only one brought sufficient evidence of one's worth.

And so she made her vile bargain with the silence.
She must be remarkable. She vowed to be worthy. She would make her father's death mean something.
 

And when the heavens offered no reply, she mistook the silence for agreement.

God, how tenderly I regard that girl now.

How fiercely I wish I could reach across those twenty-five years and take her face in my hands. Tell her that there are losses which cannot be redeemed, only lived beside. That no amount of beauty made afterward can make the destruction beautiful. That the world is not a just accountant, keeping careful books of what it takes and what it owes...

And that love, real love, has never been entered into such a ledger.

She was wrong about one great and terrible thing: she believed she had to earn what had already been given. Her father's love was not a loan. His death did not make it a debt. And the life that followed was not collateral against the loss.

Twenty-five years is a long time to carry a stone.

Long enough for the shoulders to grow crooked around it. Long enough for the spine to bend and call its bending strength. Long enough to forget the shape of the body before the burden, until the weight seems no longer something carried, but something you are. And what a strange, quiet terror there is in laying down a thing that has helped define you. Even a cruel thing. Even a thing that has worn the flesh raw. For when you have carried a burden long enough, its absence can feel, at first, like another kind of loss.
 

I think this is what I am learning now. That putting down the stone is not putting down my father.
That I may relinquish the punishment without relinquishing the devotion. That I may dismiss the stern and sorrowful ghost I fashioned in his likeness and make room, at last, for the man himself: beautiful and flawed, tender and human, a father who loved his daughter without requiring her to become a monument to his memory.

I may grieve him without making my life an extension of his death.
I may remember what was taken without surrendering what was given.

And I may go on into the years that remain—making art, loving fiercely, wanting things, losing things, daring greatly and sometimes foolishly, succeeding where I never expected, failing where I was certain I would triumph. I may live among the small and ordinary miracles: a warm bed, a hand reaching for mine, the sound of laughter in another room, a morning in which nothing remarkable happens except that I am alive to see it.

For there is no shame in an ordinary life.
There is no disgrace in a life that does not fulfill every promise made on its behalf.
And there is no human achievement great enough to purchase back the dead.
This is the ruthless truth of it.

My father died. 

I lived. 

Neither fact can be made to justify the other.
But one need not justify the other.

The years are not a debt to be settled. 

They are mine to inhabit. 

And after so long mistaking endurance for devotion, I find that I want to live them—not as proof of anything, not as payment for anything, 

but simply because they are here, 

     and I am here, 

          and there is still so much of the world left to love.

 

I know he would've liked that. 

 

 

May we all, on earth and beyond, be free.  

 

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) 

 

"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.

 

Becoming Warm Again

There is cold, and then there is New-York-waiting-for-the-above-ground-N-train-in-deepest-February cold.

 

Ah yes! Welcome back you vicious breeze! You have discovered the one gap in my coat! I hear your raspy whisper threaten: “You will never be warm again...” Y'all? I weathered the Polar Vortex of 2018 in Chicago (where it was -53ºF and colder in Chicago than on the surface of Mars), and I've been to Siberia, and this New York winter kicked my ass. So I would like to formally submit a complaint: 'hear ye hear ye, no human being is meant to stand on an open-air platform while the wind weaponizes itself against your femurs.' 

 

I don’t care how cold it is in the Arctic Circle, Vladivostok or Fargo—are those people waiting for the bus? 

 

Because that’s what this winter felt like.

Not just meteorologically. Spiritually. 

Good ol' 2026. Making itself known. It's not enough that the world is at war, everything is unaffordable and the spine of America has been crushed beneath an orphaned mack truck no one can afford to drive because gas is $5 a gallon. 
No. We also had to have when-will-it-end winter whilst stuck on the 6 train. 

 

This was a winter of sub-zero temperatures, multiple snowstorms, and me, once again trying-and-failing to quit show business like a woman calmly exiting a casino before she sets her own wallet on fire. I called it a “dramatical sabbatical,” which sounds elegant and intentional, like I was sipping oolong and reading Strinberg, but in reality? I was horizontal a lot. I finally did (and remain "doing"), the trauma work. And not the chic, go-to-the-woods-for-a-retreat kind. I mean the kind where you sit inside things you have spent decades outrunning. The kind where your body (which has been quietly holding receipts since childhood) decides it’s time to present the bill. Dad, his parents, disordered eating, ulcerative colitis. All all all. All of it, apparently, has been living in my proverbial basement like emotionally charged raccoons, waiting for me to finally turn on the light. There was a lot of sitting and remembering. A lot of realizing that I had built an entire life around highly functioning.

 

And also—and I want to be clear about this—there were still, like, errands. Getting your shit together does not cancel your CVS obligations. You can be mid-epiphany about your childhood and still have to pick up a prescription and stand behind a man arguing about coupons. 

 

But something began to shift. Very slowly, like thawing. At first, it was physical. I realized one morning that I was not clenching my jaw. Then I noticed I could sit still without immediately reaching for an activity to "accomplish." Then—and this felt revolutionary—I took a full breath without it catching halfway through like a Windows 95 error. 

 

All to say: 

Warmth, I am learning, is not just temperature. 

It might just be your nervous system lowering its weapons, and the body deciding, at last, that it is not under siege.

I did not know, until this winter, how deeply unrested I have been for most of my life. How much of my productivity was powered not by inspiration, but by fear. Fear of stopping. Fear of feeling. Fear of what might catch up to me if I ever stood still long enough to let it.

And now, having stood still—truly still—I can say this:

Nothing caught up to me.

I caught up to myself.

Because when you emerge—and you do emerge—you are not the same person who went in.

You are warmer.

You are rested.

And perhaps most importantly, you are no longer estranged from yourself.

 

This is a kind of abundance that has nothing to do with money or accolades or even opportunity. 

It is the abundance of being present in your own life.

Of feeling your breath fully.
Of trusting your body again.
Of knowing that whatever comes next, you will meet it as yourself — not as a performance of yourself.

 

So here I am.

Standing on the edge of a season that feels, for the first time in a long time, not like something to survive—but something to live. 

If winter was the pulling back of the bow, then this moment is the breath just before release.

 

Not frantic.
Not forced.

Ready.

 

© hula seventy

Bye bye 2024

^ on a kamzoil date with adam kantor. cheers vienna

Good Gd, you were weird. 

 

There were great times

And new friends

and mountains climbed

and lessons learned 

What a ride. 

A year full of jaw-dropping highs and face-palming lows. 

Is it okay to say I am so glad you are over?  

 

 

I never thought I’d spend December 31st clutching a glass of wine like it’s a flotation device, but here we are. 

 

2024, you full-on gave me the business—and also handed me Champagne. Work opportunities rained down like somebody forgot the funnel on the sky. I made some incredible new pals. Created some new traditions. But whoof. This was a year that made me seriously consider things like "when I finally complete my transformation in to an 'Interesting Town Character,' shall I have a more predictable vice like a drinking problem, or shall I go rogue and just get a Shoulder Crow?" 

I’m ridiculously lucky to have Alec. He didn’t flinch when I came home after soul-pestling days at work, and said, “Babe, you crushed it,” even though I felt like I had spent the day doing Shakespeare wearing an inflatable unicorn costume because oh wait I DID. 

But hey, it wasn’t all rainbows and group hugs. I faced health drama that took my breath away. I spent more time in waiting rooms this year than I did in dressing rooms or actual rooms of my house. Doctors ran so many tests I half expected them to stick electrodes on me and say, “Great news—you’re a spaceship.” Turns out I need not one but three twists eliminated from my small intestine and for extra measure: I also had a hernia. Also I’m spiritually burnt out and have the gut health of a shopping cart with a wonky wheel. Go figure.

I said goodbye to people I thought I’d keep forever, watched friendships and professional relationships shift like tectonic plates, and at core? I learned that outgrowing your old life can feel a lot like boredom—this deep, yawning ache that happens whether you want it to or not. I cried at the airport. I cried after the election. I cried when not one but three close friends told me they were pregnant. I cried because the houseplants I named after Ragtime characters kept dying. (RIP, Willy Conklin.)

I discovered that “adulting” isn’t a destination; it’s a series of irritating pop quizzes. I decluttered, and decided that if I have nothing to spark joy, at least the pile of Amazon boxes will spark curiosity from the recycling center.

So what did I learn?

• Gratitude is a muscle. Obviously. You have to work it out every day, especially on the days your back hurts and you hate kale.  

• Some people DO NOT WANT YOU WHOLE. They want you manageable, agreeable, and small. Before you internalize their shame, take note. Adjust. 

• Change often brings grief. especially when it means losing people who prefer4ed a stagnant version of you. A new path will always pull you away from the old one.  

• Humor is medicine. If you can laugh at yourself—and at the delicious absurdity of life—you’ll survive just about anything.
  

 

As the clock ticks toward midnight, I’m planting my feet firmly in the chaos, raising a toast to everything. Here’s to 2025. Ring in the new.