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.  

 

Books-by-the-Month: October

"I'm so glad to live in a world where there are Octobers..." 

— L.M Montgomery, Anne of Green Gables 

__________
 

She is HERE, y’all. She is HERE. 
The air: cooler, thin, electric.
Leaves: crinkly underfoot.
Halloween decorations: UP.
The ordinary: touched by enchantment. 
The light: chiaroscuro, slanted, theatrical, faintly candlelit. 

As we wind our way into October, we find that this (in my humble opinion) most precious of all months offers us bibliophiles the opportunity to dive into titles more delectable than a pillowcase full of candy; titles that flicker with mystery, magic, and language that smells of smoke and cider. 

PS. This month also brings a few of my favorite reads ever, so I dontwannabebossybut: enjoy.

__________

1. "The Night Circus" by Erin Mortgenstern 

The Night Circus is a spellbinding work of fiction that will transport you to a place where the boundaries of reality are deliciously blurred. Beneath the spectacle lies a love story between two rival magicians whose fates are bound by a contest of imagination.  

 

Mortgenstern’s prose dances like the illusory tents of the circus itself, weaving a dreamlike, intoxicating atmosphere of wonder and mystery. Two rival magicians, bound by a centuries-old pact, use a fantastical circus as their battleground. The novel’s structure is non-linear, its rich, poetic language rendering each scene as a delicate, sparkling tableau. The prose itself feels like silk and smoke — perfect for curling up under a blanket with a cup of something spiced. And for those who prefer to listen, the audiobook narrated by Jim Dale is a marvel: his voice makes every illusion shimmer.

__________


2. AFFINITY by Sarah Waters

For séances, secrets, and International Lesbian Day (October 8).
In the flickering candlelight of Victorian London, Sarah Waters weaves a tale of spiritualism, obsession, and forbidden desire. Affinity follows a grieving gentlewoman who begins volunteering at a women’s prison and becomes entranced by one of its inmates — a medium who may or may not possess real powers. It’s the perfect October novel: gothic without gaudiness, erotic without excess, and as psychologically charged as a room before a storm. Read it around October 8, International Lesbian Day, and toast to all the brilliant, defiant women who have made their way through the world in the dark and left the door ajar for others.
__________


3. THE MASTER AND MARGARITA by Mikhail Bulgakov

For devils, love, and chaos in the moonlight.
When autumn deepens and your appetite for strangeness peaks, The Master and Margarita delivers deliriously. A talking black cat, a satanic ball, a mysterious writer, and a love story that defies time and death — Bulgakov’s novel is one of the great surreal masterpieces of the 20th century. It’s wild, funny, terrifying, and transcendent, like Faust rewritten by a trickster. Read it when you want your October literature to crackle with wit and metaphysical rebellion — a book that reminds you that good and evil have always danced together under the harvest moon.
__________


4. Goblin market by Christina Rossetti

Or, a case for WHY YOU SHOULD NOT READ POE THIS OCTOBER. Y'all. Let’s be brave enough to say it: Edgar Allan Poe is, in many estimations—including my own and Harold Bloom’s—a terrible writer. Ponderous, purple, self-serious to the point of parody, his stories creak under the weight of their own gloom. His idea of horror is to yell “Madness!” at the reader until they believe him. Instead, let us turn to Christina Rossetti, who understood the gothic heart not as a chamber of screams, but as a mirror of longing and temptation. Her long poem “Goblin Market” (1862) is sensual, eerie, and profoundly moral — a tale of two sisters, strange fruit, and the peril of yielding to desire. It’s haunting without hysteria, musical without melodrama, and genuinely moving. Read it aloud on a cool evening, and you’ll see why restraint, rhythm, and imagination can conjure more ghosts than any beating heart beneath a floorboard ever could.
__________

5. Spoon River Anthology by Edgar Lee Masters

The perfect companion for the season of slow decay, Spoon River Anthology gives voice to the dead of a small American town. Each poem, an epitaph; each speaker, a confession. It’s eerie without being macabre—a meditation on how memory, gossip, and regret intertwine. Reading it in September feels like strolling through a graveyard of stories, listening to the leaves whisper what the living won’t say aloud.


__________

October invites a special kind of reading: not for information or accomplishment, but for enchantment. It is the month that reminds us stories were once spells, that reading was once an act of summoning. Whether you prefer circuses of dreams, séances of the heart, or moral tales whispered in meter, these books promise company in the gathering dark.

So light a candle. Pour something warm. Open the window just enough for the night air to slip in. The stories are waiting, and they know your name.

Shabbat Shuvah, 5787

Tonight is a special Shabbat—the Sabbath between Rosh Hashanah (the Jewish new year) and Yom Kippur (the Day of Atonement) also known as the High Holy Days. 

Like all New Year traditions, it’s a time a renewal and reflection, of repentance and repair, and of commitments made to do and be better in the year to come. 

There is a Hasidic teaching Rabbi Alan Lew (author of “This is Real and You Are Completely Unprepared”) loved to repeat:

“There is nothing so whole as a broken heart.”

At first, this sounds like a contradiction. We know what heartbreak feels like. It does not feel whole. It feels like something has gone catastrophically wrong: a rupture, a break; a relationship has ended, a hope has failed, a person we love is gone, or we have finally seen the harm our own choices have caused. We may arrive at the High Holy Days carrying shards of ourselves we would prefer not to examine too closely…

But Rabbi Lew asks us to distinguish between a shattered ego and a broken heart.

The ego shatters when the story we tell about ourselves can no longer be maintained: 

I am always right. 
I am in control. 
I am the injured one. 
I would never cause harm. 

When that self-image is threatened, we may become angry, defensive, or ashamed.

But a broken heart is different. A broken heart is undefended. It no longer has the strength—or the desire—to pretend. It says: 

This is what happened. 

This is what I did. 

This is what was done to me. 

This is what I cannot repair alone.

And, according to Rabbi Lew, this is not a spiritual failure. It may very well be the beginning of new kind of spiritual life.

Jewish tradition gives us an extraordinary image for this. Moses descends from Sinai carrying the first tablets of the covenant, carved by G-d. When Moses sees the Golden Calf, he throws them down, and the tablets shatter. Later, after anger, grief, pleading, and reconciliation, Moses carves a second set with his own hands.

Jewish tradition teaches that both sets were then placed in the Holy Ark: the whole tablets and the broken pieces. The remnants of the “perfect” tablets, and the ones constructed from a place of grief and repentance. 

The shattered tablets were not discarded. They were not treated as an embarrassment to be hidden outside the camp. They were carried in the very holiest place, beside the tablets that had remained whole.

Shabbat Shuvah is an invitation to our hearts:
May our hearts become like that Ark. 
May we carry what is whole in us—our generosity, courage, wisdom, and capacity to begin again. 
But we also carry the broken pieces—the promises we did not keep, the grief we could not prevent, the words we cannot call back, the selves we once believed we had to be. Our brokenness is not the whole of who we are. But neither is it refuse. When held honestly, it too can become sacred.

This is the work of teshuvah. We often translate teshuvah as “repentance” but its deeper meaning is turning or returning. 

We turn away from illusion and toward reality. 
We return toward the people we have neglected. 
We return to the truths we have avoided. 

We return to the self beneath our defenses. 
And in doing so, we discover that we have also returned to the Divine.

Forgiveness, then, is not a matter of persuading a distant deity to become merciful. Mercy is already woven into reality. The prophet Micah tells us that G-d does not retain anger forever, but delights in steadfast love; that G-d returns to us in compassion and casts our misdeeds into the depths of the sea.

Yet mercy does not require us to deny what happened. Rosh Hashanah confronts us with din—the clear, unsparing vision of judgment. We must first see. 
We must name. 
We must stop hiding. 
Only then can we experience the spaciousness of rachamim on Yom Kippur—the spirit of compassion.

This is why, during these holy days, we gently strike the heart as we confess. Some say we are punishing ourselves for our misdeeds. I see this differently. We are not punishing ourselves by beating upon our breasts. We are knocking on the doors of our hearts, crying out:

“Open, oh fragile and resilient heart of mine. 
Open to what you regret.
Open to what you have lost.
Open to the person you have harmed.
Open to the ways you, too, have been wounded.
Open to the possibility that honesty need not end in shame or humiliation.
Open to mercy. To forgiveness. To compassion. 
It is already here” 

We cannot force such an opening. 
The ego cannot muscle its way into surrender. 
We can only become willing: willing to be vulnerable, willing to relinquish control, willing to stand before the Divine without disguise.

Rabbi Lew wrote,

“Every soul needs to express itself. Every heart needs to crack itself open.”  

These are not new needs. They are among our most ancient human yearnings: to move from anger toward healing, from denial toward consciousness, from numbness toward renewal.

So perhaps the question before us is not, “How can I make myself perfect enough to be forgiven?”

Perhaps it is: “Can I become honest enough to be found?”

May we have the courage in 5787 to carry both sets of tablets: what is whole and what has shattered. 
May our hearts become holy arks, spacious enough to hold them both. 
And through the openings in those hearts, may compassion enter.

Open our hearts.

And help us begin again. 💜

 

©Nick Bantock (who else?) 

 

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)