Present and pain-free: an example

This is a photo of me on February 4, 2021. My wedding day! It was also the exact halfway point between my first and second bowel surgeries.

Look at that lady: radiating health and happiness! That’s the real me.

And yes, in that photo of a healthy happy woman in her prime, there is also a life-saving ostomy bag beneath the (glamorous AF) gown.

I think there is a time when that detail would’ve concerned me a great deal— but on February 4, 2021? All I felt was alive and in love.
 
I am overjoyed in this photo— not only because I am marrying a man I adore, but equally because I feel so FULLY ALIVE. So PAIN FREE and PRESENT for the first time in so very long. I am not thinking about my gut, about being curled in the fetal position, or worried that I’ll be in so much pain I won’t be “present” on my wedding day…
 
No. I am experiencing joy! And I know that my courage, endurance, and the unparalleled skills of my medical team helped me feel this FREE. I wish I could take past Al by the hand—the Al convinced no one would ever love her or commit to her because of colitis—and whisper to her scared self “Giiiiiiirrrrrrrrrl wait ‘til you see yourself in your wedding dreeeeeessssss.”

Alec said over and over again

“We MUST not wait to get married until you no longer have the ostomy—I LOVE that stoma. It saved the love of my life! Give yourself the gift of loving yourself unconditionally THAT MUCH.”

He’s smart.

If you think for one moment that living with illness, IBD, an ostomy, or enduring multiple major surgeries will rob you of life’s joys: think again. It GAVE me this joy. Over and over again I have learned that *true* beauty begins with true health, self-acceptance, happiness and inner peace.

Take a look at that photo and *behold.*

Things I want to remember about this week 7/10 - 7/17, 2020: A List

- a great deal of "clothing optional" swimming and sunbathing. Not sorry at all. 

- A glorious trip to San Francisco centered around the LGBTQAI+ journey and history in this historic city. 

- Eating delicious bao and dim sum in downtown San Francisco 

- A foggy drive across the Golden Gate bridge whilst listening to this... 

- Meeting my new friend and teacher, poet Thomas Centolella for the first time IRL (a friendship born, believe it or not, of this very blog!)  

- meeting my new friend and soul-sister Leta from ^ Tom's poetry class (because even though I attend online from New York, the class is held at College of Marin County... where I am as we speak. Fate!)

- Muir Woods. ....Magic. 

- Tati being extra

- beautiful drives

-  introversion paradise

- marveling at a mask-less California (is this... the Time Before?!) 

- seeing so very many hummingbirds

- writing poems 

 

- reading Phillip Pullman's The Amber Spyglass on audio-book as we float in the pool.

- Drinking wine flights in Sausalito with my love

- meeting important people to Alec who now live in NoCal.

- cooking so many delicious things from the farmer's market 

- preparing to leave the USA for London...

38

This is a special birthday. It almost feels like a RE-birthday!

38 is...

• The atomic number of strontium
• The Messier object M38, a magnitude 7.0 open cluster in the constellation Auriga 
• The most common eye-test for color blindness. (see [or don't see?] right) Most people will see the number 38, but people with red-green color blindness might see 88 instead.
• The number of slots on an American roulette wheel (0, 00, and 1 through 36; European roulette does not use the 00 slot and has only 37 slots)
• The number of years it took the Israelites to travel from Kadesh Barnea to the Zered valley in Deuteronomy.
• The "over-38 rule" is a feature of the NBA salary cap that affects contracts of players who turn 38 during their deals.
• Of course, a "38" is often the name for a snub nose .38 caliber revolver. 

This is “38 and feelin GREAT!” 

This is FLIRTY-8! 

This is THIRTY-GREAT!

All.

I am filled with joy, gratitude and relief to have reached 38 with a CURED and totally healthy body at long last. (Aging is a privilege!) I get to spend this day reveling in, and surrounded BY, family and natural beauty. Isn’t being alive THE BEST GIFT EVER? 🎁

Further, the dream come true of being wedded to my love, Alec, emerging from a difficult era of our modern times with love, family, art, and my health.

There is an Italian saying: “a healthy man has a thousand wishes, a sick man has only one.” — well that wish came true for me this year and today, I celebrate *extra*

Thank you for all of your love and support, always.

— Al

 

"From the ashes we rise..."

There are no words to express how profoundly moved I am to return to this incredible play and production, with this company, in my theatrical motherland, in this brilliant theatre.

One of the remarkable things about theatre is its relationship to repetition and “sameness.” We will wear the same clothes, say the same words, make the same movements…it is the same but the world is not. My body is not. 

We shall tell our story through new lenses of humanity and it will resonate in new ways. The rain Rifkele and Manke fall in love in shall celebrate this new beginning, and like falling tears, shall mourn all that we have lost.

Art is the essential work of our souls, and of tomorrow. 

And tomorrow is almost here.

Ale Brider.

"Live performances will resume at London's Menier Chocolate Factory in September with the reopening of the European premiere of Paula Vogel's Indecent. Starring Broadway's Alexandra Silber, the show began performances on March 23, 2020 prior to being shut down due to COVID-19. Helmed once again by the show's Tony-winning director Rebecca Taichman, Indecent will play from September 3 through November 27.

In addition to Silber, the cast of Indecent will include Cory English, Beverley Klein, Finbar Lynch, Molly Osborne, Peter Polycarpou, Joseph Timms, Merlin Shepherd, Anna Lowenstein and Josh Middleton." -- via Broadway.com

 

"Separation" by W. S. Merwin

Your absence has gone through me
Like thread through a needle.
Everything I do is stitched with its color.

 

— W. S. Merwin, “Separation” from The Second Four Books of Poems

 

The Shame

Dear All, 

 Thank you all for the most incredibly supportive response to the news of my surgeries. I never dreamed I would be so uplifted, for I was certain that sharing would bring about responses of pity and disgust.
 
I have been struggling to confess the full spectrum of this experience for I, like so many people, felt EXTRAORDINARY SHAME. Shame is The Great Destroyer, and Irritable Bowel Disease, or 'IBD' is a disease that thrives on shame; it grows in intensity and strengthens in the darkness-- just like all toxic narratives we foist upon ourselves and project onto others.

As a society we rarely talk about bowel health, and thus bowel diseases (and all conditions like them) take root—and accelerate—in that silence.

I wavered when it came to posting a photo of myself with my ostomy, honestly portrayed. But I realized that the image was powerful, in two ways:
     1. Perhaps someone out there needs to know that ostomy-life is not so bad, it is, in fact, a GIFT.
     2. Although I bid farewell to my bag and stoma yesterday, I felt it was important to hold myself accountable to the shame I felt by posting a photograph of The Truth below my clothing. I had to proudly display my body in an empowered way to prove to myself (above all others) that there is nothing to be ashamed of.

By sharing our truths (however challenging), we shed light upon our shame and it shrinks. It shrivels. We take our agonies and they are identified with, supported, lightened somehow. We are not alone. We do not have to live in the shadows or on the sidelines of this one glorious life.
 
Thus, here I am: talking about it.
Because (as I said yesterday) SILENCE IS SHAME’S GREATEST NOURISHMENT.
Secret-keeping is how shame transforms into viciousness,
isolation,
fear
and disconnection.

Thank you for giving me the gift of feeling less isolated, for your blinding goodness, and above all, for connection. Connection is the great reward of vulnerability.

Onwards with courage and integrity. 💜

© Emma Mead

 

J-pouch surgery news

 [CW: surgery, disturbing images]

After nearly 7 years dealing with severe Ulcerative Colitis, on November 30, 2020, I had my entire large intestine (aka, the 'colon') completely removed.

I wanted to share this news from a more processed  place, with radical honesty.

The last 6 months has been an awe-inspiring *three-surgery process.* It has cured me of ulcerative colitis PERMANENTLY. Though the experience has been psychologically confrontational, horrifying, inexpressibly painful, and awe-inspiring, every aspect has felt truly miraculous. TODAY is the first day of my healthy, ostomy-free, colitis-free, flourishing life.

Here is how is went:

- PART 1 (Nov 30, 2020) — total removal of the large intestine 

- PART 2 (March 1, 2021) — creation of what is called a “J POUCH” out of my small intestine, to ultimately serve the function of a “new colon” 

- PART 3 (May 24, 2021) — the attachment of the J-pouch to the *traditional exit* with the only evidence being a scar. Freedom.

 Science is *AMAZING.*

This procedure is extreme. My medical team and I did not make the decision lightly. Colitis can be a brutal, rabid, greedy, relentless jerk. Mine was the giant jerk-kind. And it was often—though I never ever wanted to admit it to myself or show it to the world—life-destroying.
 

Oh friends, I never wanted to complain. I possess perspective upon the horrors of the times we live in— and acknowledge that SO many fellow human beings are struggling. I wish to be a source of light.

But truth be told, it has been hell. I’ve lost a so much. I’ve also learned and grown and gained a great deal. Wisdom is earned.
Life is both.
Life is all.
I crave, and humbly ask for your shared humanity.

•
 
Today, I underwent my final surgery!
This was a life CHOOSING surgery, as much as a life SAVING one.

Thank you to Dr. Sergei Khaitov, my colorectal surgeon.
Mount Sinai Hospital.
Mama Silbs.
Alec.
And too many close friends to name.

I write this from my hospital recovery bed in floods of grateful tears. I did it.

Onwards with courage and integrity,

Al x

"Tenderness" by Stephen Dunn

"Tenderness," by Stephen Dunn, from Between Angels

Back then when so much was clear
and I hadn't learned
young men learn from women

what it feels like to feel just right,
I was twenty-three,
she thirty-four, two children, a husband

in prison for breaking someone's head.
Yelled at, slapped
around, all she knew of tenderness

was how much she wanted it, and all
I knew
were back seats and a night or two

in a sleeping bag in the furtive dark.
We worked
in the same office, banter and loneliness

leading to the shared secret
that to help
National Biscuit sell biscuits

was wildly comic, which led to my body
existing with hers
like rain that's found its way underground

to water it naturally joins.
I can't remember
ever saying the exact word, tenderness,

though she did. It's a word I see now
you must be older to use,
you must have experienced the absence of it

often enough to know what silk and deep balm
it is
when at last it comes. I think it was terror

at first that drove me to touch her
so softly,
then selfishness, the clear benefit

of doing something that would come back
to me twofold,
and finally, sometime later, it became

reflexive and motiveless in the high
ignorance of love.
Oh abstractions are just abstract

until they have an ache in them. I met
a woman never touched
gently, and when it ended between us

I had new hands and new sorrow,
everything it meant
to be a man changed, unheroic, floating. 

 

The Art of Play

📸: @themichaelkushner
💄: @perspectivebeats

When we were young, creative play came easily. 

Children are used to looking at objects for what they can be, instead of what they ARE, at face value. 

Think of your inner artist as a child—a child at their best *and* their worst. At their best they lose themselves in play, they look at the world from a perspective of pure possibility, their innocence is a superpower unburdened by failure and fear...

...But that inner child can *also* be uncooperative; it has wild tantrums, gets upset, shrivels under neglect, and thus needs to be shown attention, care and above all: love. Your inner artist needs to bust-out and be silly AND be shown loving forms of structure.

Remember that Play is an essential part of being alive—for all creatures! All animals PLAY as a form of practicing for life’s necessities. Lions “play” at hunting, to be in shape for when the kill is truly on. So too must we!

This bottom-line-obsessed shaming of Play is not only a detriment to the very “productivity” our society holds so dear, but we do extraordinary damage to our psyches, with invisible, but very real scars.

So pick up the paintbrush, journal, craft kit and crockpot; sit down at the piano, or indulge in an imaginary world for a moment or two. Play is part of who we are. And to my theatre-maker pals? Remember: “it’s called a Play for a reason.”

World Theatre Day, 2021

 God, how I miss it...

The Fo(u)r MORE Questions!

This weekend is Passover, 2021. Remember how last year we all said "Next Year in Person" and we were so certain that that precise joy would be our reality? 

Not so for many of us. COVID19 still rages on, millions across our aching planet are dead (many, so needlessly due to mismanagement, denial, and the preposterousness of politics), and many have a tragic (and tardy) new understanding of the systemic racism and inequality that pervades every part of society. Plague and oppression? Several plagues and the evils of slavery? Well it sounds like Passover and all the themes the Book of Exodus offers us, cannot come soon enough to help us to confront, to celebrate, and to heal.

One of the great gifts of this tumultuous year has been the gift of learning that activism, and the fighting of evils, comes in many forms. Well, this year I have learned over and over again that my most authentic weapon against darkness... is light. 

The story of Exodus is about the enslavement and oppression of the Jewish people, but it has served as a metaphor for oppressed people everywhere for countless generations. The year we have spent with the coronavirus has revealed many excruciating oppressions that remain today. The ones that shall always be the most immediate for my existence and safety is the fight against Anti-Semitism, and sometimes, fighting Anti-Semitism is not just about declaring violence and hatred to be evil and wrong, it is equally crucial to be PRO-Semitic, to shed light upon the beauty of the things all kinds of Jews across the planet hold dear, and to do so with passions, joy and the enthusiasm of my whole soul.

And so? I want to offer you all a little Passover gift, from my seder table to yours.

Here is a download of fourteen questions for your Passover dinner table! Passover is all about questions, so I wanted to offer something beautiful and meaningful to keep the conversation going long after the traditional "Four Questions" have been asked. 

- Click the link.

- Download the artwork. 

- Print on any paper or card-stock you desire. 

- Cut down the center, and then cut every "color block" / individual question out (with scissors or a paper cutter)

- Spread them out on your Passover table for all to see, 

     or keep them in a deck to "pick a card any card" 

          or thumb through them throughout the night. 

Use them however it feels fun and meaningful to and for you.

 

Chag Semeach, one and all. May we all know greater freedom in 2021, and may we also be greater liberators of the oppressed who need our advocacy.

 

Stop Asian Hate: a Letter to my husband and Chinese-American family

 Dearest Silver Family,

I wanted to send you all a virtual embrace about this recent wave of Asian violence and hatred. No matter the level of personal endangerment you do or do not feel on a daily basis, it is always horrifying to see and experience hatred toward *your existence* perpetuated. I just wanted to utter it; to acknowledge it as horrendous, and to honor you as Asian human beings who deserve every respect and dignity. 

I feel like all hatred shares a roots of Fear. Which I say because I experience inner rattlings all the time with a constant, still-quite-bad, 4000 year old wave of Anti-Semitism. I wonder if you feel this next sensation too: that the prejudice is “always there,” and then, every once in a while (like the last few weeks) a series of horrendous events occur that make it WORSE and you’re reminded “Oh yeah... people still hate me. And...that....is terrifying...” 

I am not the greatest revolutionary in a traditional sense. I’m not one to burn down buildings and fight hatred with anger. I’ve felt guilty about it for years. I’m quicker to weep than to rage. I’ve often felt that meant I didn’t have a recognizable place in fighting oppression— as if I weren’t “built” to be the “correct” kind of change-maker. 

But for what it is worth, in my experience of fighting evils, I have found that I do have a place! In addition to decrying Anti-Semitism, I can participate in “PRO-Semitism!” Which is a clunky term, but meaning: being a super proud, visible, relatable, and enthusiastic Jewish person, sharing the beauty of everyday progressive Jewish life through my very own proud lens. And that feels good, and gets me excited, and resonates as true to and for me. 

That’s not unsolicited advice, by the way— it is more of a direct affirmation of what each of you already do: SHARE THE JOYS of your cultural reality in every breath you take! And I’m here to declare: that is revolutionary, I think. Well anyway...that’s just my 2 cents. 

The most important message of this email is a huge embrace to each of you today and always. I am so proud to be a part of this Chinese and American family, and bring a little matzah to the dim sum tea room.

All my love 

Al