Where is "The Handbook for the Recently Adult?"

I have long believed that adulthood is poorly organized.

Not in the broad philosophical sense—we’ve always known life is chaos—but in a customer service sense. There is no onboarding. You simply wake up one morning responsible for a health insurance deductible and three kinds of laundry detergent, and are expected to proceed with confidence.

This seems unfair, given that when one dies—at least according to Beetlejuice— a courteous supernatural bureaucracy provides "The Handbook for the Recently Deceased." You are welcomed to your new existential status with documentation. Instructions. Diagrams. A table of contents. And a (admittedly: dubious) customer service system. 

Meanwhile, when you turn 25, society hands you a car-rental eligibility and quietly expects you to know how grief works.

I had always believed adulthood was a ceremony.
At some point, a courier appears. They hand you a leather-bound Adulting Manual. Inside are instructions for taxes, conflict resolution, grief processing, how to iron a shirt without Googling it, and how to not panic when the pharmacy receipt is longer than a novella.
Instead, adulthood appears to be a slow leak of realizations.
No manual! Just episodes?!
This is an outrage. 
Where is "The Handbook for the Recently Adult?"

It would arrive discreetly in unmarked packaging. Perhaps slipped under the door at midnight on your birthday in a tasteful, intimidating binder.

Chapter 1: Your Parents Are Now Mortal.
Chapter 7: Friendships Become Appointments.  
Chapter 14: How to advocate for yourself
Chapter 17: Taxes: You Will Never Fully Understand Them.
(Includes a reassuring flowchart ending in the words “probably correct.”)
Chapter 20:    How Your Childhood Shaped You
Chapter 24:    Rest is Not Laziness
Chapter 29:    Boundaries!
Chapter 32: Bodies Keep The Score and Charge Interest.
You cannot out-schedule biology.
Appendix B: The Apology You Owe Yourself.

There would also be practical matters: how to buy a mattress without entering a personality crisis, how to cook for one without existential despair, how to talk to doctors without saying “sorry” for symptoms.

And yet my suspicion has always been that everyone else received this manual and simply forgot to mention it. I watch people refinance mortgages calmly, select appropriate throw pillows, maintain long-term relationships with dentists—and I think: *Ah, yes. Page 347. The chapter on faking ‘knowing what you’re doing.’

But adulthood, I’m discovering at the ripe old middle age of 42, is not the possession of knowledge. It is the gradual acceptance of permanent partial understanding. Because you see: NOBODY received the manual. We are all just gently pretending, passing notes in the margins of a book that has never been printed.

And occasionally, if we are lucky, I suppose we get to write our own chapter.  

All of this to say that there is a strange comfort of this season of life:
I thought growing up was an event.
When, in fact, it is a practice.
You don’t arrive at adulthood.
You revisit it—repeatedly—at deeper levels of honesty and awareness and forgiveness and acceptance. 

At 42, I am less certain of everything and more peaceful because of it.

I contain multitudes. And antibiotics.

Mirror selfie at the Four Seasons

Last week, I was a VIP guest at the St. Andrews Society of Los Angeles for Robert Burns Night at the Four Seasons Beverly Hills. I was rubbing elbows and seated beside luminous Scottish humans, dressed in black tie, celebrating art, culture, the Scots language, poetry in general, Robert Burns Poet Laureate of Scotland and of course HAGGIS.—in Beverly Hills amongst very fancy socialites, like a person who definitely owns matching luggage.

This was my second Burns Night of the year. And before you think I’m getting too fancy, this is the part where I tell you that I was wearing the same dress that I donned at the New York Burns Night at the University Club. It has pockets. It was also? rented. 

I was in town because the St. Andrews Society is sponsoring the Pasadena Playhouse’s world premiere of the Brigadoon I have rewritten, and I was tasked with giving a 4 minute speech plugging our lovely show for a room full of Scots. Did I know I was giving a speech? No. Did I write the speech during the salad course on the back of my menu? I did. 

I also was tasked with getting Tyne Daly to and from the event. There is very little Tyne loves more than poetry, and we were looking forward to getting gussied up and having a three course meal in a fancy place (even IF the world is burning down! Especially if the world is burning down!)

My gracious and wonderful host—not busy himself that evening— offered to let me borrow his extremely fancy car to drive to Tyne’s, pick her up and escort her to the Four Seasons, and drive home in style. WHAT COULD GO WRONG?

On my way there, I realized I didn’t feel as comfortable driving as I wanted to (living in New York, I only drive occasionally, and when I do I always need a couple of days to acclimate). Do I really want to be driving back at night? Do I really want to be driving TYNE DALY?! No. 

Al + Tyno: thrilling crowds since 2010

New plan: 

1. Drive to Tyne’s. 
2. Park somewhere safe. 
3. Take an $11 taxi to the Four Seasons. 
4. Taxi back to the parking spot. 
5. Drive home. 

After an absolutely splendid evening (my speech went well, thankyouverymuch) I return to the parking spot in West Hollywood. I am in black tie. My phone is at 11%. It is Saturday and pitch black. 

To my horror: I quickly discover that the beautiful borrowed car—a BMW worth approximately the GDP of a modest principality—was GONE. 
Had it been stolen? 
Had it been towed? 
Who was to know. 

I call Alec. He manages to brilliantly figure out the car has indeed been towed, encourages me to get a taxi home with the remaining battery on my phone, and retrieve the car in the morning. 

The next morning I stood not-so-proudly among the detritus of Los Angeles’ most panicked citizens in the fluorescent underbelly of Hollywood Tow Yard, wearing yesterday’s eyeliner and the facial expression of a Victorian orphan who has just learned about interest rates. The air smelled like hot asphalt and regret. Somewhere nearby a printer screamed continuously, like it too had made terrible choices.

with Brian Cox because of course

I handed a man $280 in cash to retrieve a vehicle whose cup-holders alone were worth more than my first apartment. Juan slid my $1 in change beneath the bulletproof glass—the kind of glass that has absolutely witnessed screams, threats, tears and at least one thrown Monster Energy Drink—and smiled warmly.
 

“Welcome to Los Angeles.”

Thanks, Juan. I hope you never have to grow as a person.
 

 

I returned to my digs and fell asleep instantly, the way you do after your nervous system spends six consecutive hours pretending to be a raccoon in a kitchen (alert, sweaty, and morally compromised) because cortisol is real I guess, and my body had decided we’d run a full Fight-or-Flight marathon about a luxury sedan that, oh, that’s right: did not belong to me.

Two hours later (and I swear on every union contract I’ve ever signed) I was at urgent care being diagnosed with a UTI. The doctor said it with the same calm tone one uses to announce light drizzle. Meanwhile I was spiritually Googling: can humiliation infect kidneys? 
If I wrote this into a play the dramaturg would gently suggest we ground the stakes in reality.
 

This is the perfect metaphor for life:


reciting poetry with Tyne Daly → municipal consequences → bladder betrayal.

 

Growth, I am learning, is mostly just being glamorous for 90 minutes and feral for the remaining 23 hours of the day.

And yet, in that same week, I:

• finished a draft of my brand new play adaptation (news to come) 
• Fully cast the world premiere of Brigadoon (!!)
• work-shopped another project I passionately love
• froze in negative-twenty-degree New York weather so thoroughly my thoughts crystallized

All to say: growth, apparently, does not present as a tidy montage. 
It presents as tonal whiplash. 

Because I am both Four Seasons gal and Sherman Oaks Urgent Care gal. 

I contain multitudes. And antibiotics. 

"For auld lang syne..."

This year, my dear friend Katie Spelman; my artistic soulmate, and my “whyfe”(as we call one another, with deep gratitude to my actual husband for generously lending me to her for this, and many other adventures)  decided to cross an entire ocean to spend New Year’s Eve in Scotland. 

Because of course we did. 

 

We’re doing Brigadoon in Los Angeles in four months, and nothing says “professional preparation” like international travel fueled by a deeply optimistic relationship with our credit cards. It made perfect sense. Why wouldn’t we research and celebrate in one ambitious, impractical, technically financially responsible-ish gesture?

 

So we bought the tickets. We booked the fancy three-course New Year’s Eve banquet and ceilidh at Òran Mór (a magnificent venue in the heart of Glasgow’s West End.) Once a church, now refashioned into a complex of performance spaces, it still has the church’s bones complete with soaring arches and epic acoustics, only now they’re in service of accessible theatre, whisky flights, ceilidh nights, and general joyful chaos. We treated ourselves to the deluxe experience of dinner, dancing, and live music carrying us all the way to 2 a.m., because nothing says “women-circling-40-with-careers” like signing up for communal cardio until dawn...

But what we got was much, much more.

Before the “bells” (at midnight) we were already drenched in sweat from a few hours of the kind of dancing that asks nothing of you except that you show up with a body, a loose grip on dignity, and a willingness to be spun by strangers. 

Ceilidh dancing is deceptively simple, but it is not a solo act. You must take someone’s hand. You must let yourself be pulled off balance and trust that you’ll be returned upright. 

 

Their devotion to togetherness (in general, but in this particular moment: at the turn of the year) runs counter to  the myth of self-sufficiency so many of us carry around like rocks in our pockets. experts say we are living in a loneliness epidemic, where social isolation isn’t just an emotional ache but a public-health concern. In that way, the ceilidh feels like an argument Scotland has been making for centuries, disguised as a party. And what is that argument you may ask? It is the Scots’ insistence on a life lived in community.

We danced with people whose names we immediately forgot and whose laughter we instantly trusted. We ate, we drank, we danced ourselves to the brink of collapse, and somewhere between the second Gay Gordon and the third refill of Prosecco, we learned each other’s stories. By midnight, no one was a stranger anymore. 

As the final moments of the year approached, I was surprised to see that the bar didn’t crowd, it completely closed. (?!!)
Just for fifteen minutes.
But shut down utterly like a bank on a national holiday. 
For the next part was as sacred as it was mundane: 
The entire room, without fuss or instruction, stood up and formed a massive circle. 
No one lingered at the edges. 
No couples peeled off to create private moments. 
No one was left alone at a table scrolling through their phone. 
Stranger with stranger, waitstaff with guest, we all joined hands; arms over-under in criss-crosses. 

Then the bells tolled, and the room began to sing.

Should auld acquaintance be forgot,


And never brought to mind?


Should auld acquaintance be forgot,


And auld lang syne!
 

It is the world’s song now, of course. But long before it belonged to us ALL? Burns’ words belonged to them. To Scotland. This is theirs. They sang their words. 

For auld lang syne, my dear,
 

For auld lang syne...

People closed their eyes. Some people shed a few tears. Some made exclamations of joy. Of relief. Of excitement. Wishes were made—and none of it theatrically, but with a kind of sober tenderness. We stood shoulder to shoulder  in that circle at Òran Mór, and sang. 

We’ll tak a cup o’ kindness yet,
     

For auld lang syne.

Then confetti as a piper marched across the circle to an eruption of cheers. 
There was no kissing at midnight, no grand speeches, no pledges of life overhaul, no champagne-splashed performative joy. Instead, there was something far more commanding.

There was just presence: bodies close enough to feel warmth, voices raised in unison, limbs entangled in dance with people we had met hours before. By the final chorus, Katie and I were simply two humans—momentarily extra-alive—caught in the tide of other humans doing the same brave thing: showing up for one another at the threshold of time.

This wasn’t just some kind of charming cultural ritual. This was antidote.  
Is it possible that it might be this simple: that which keeps us truly alive, that which actually saves us, is not achievement, wealth, or hyper-independence. It lies within these ordinary moments of mutual existence.

Here, as the year ends, the culture insists: not only are you not alone—you never have been, and shall never be, alone. You will ring life in together, shoulder to shoulder. You will sing the same words at the same time. You will mark the passage of time not as an individual triumph or failure, but as a communal fact.

Good years come. Bad years come. Terrible eras and joyous decades pass through us like weather systems. But according to the Scottish people (and their eternal song) all of it happens in community. There is no other honest way to endure.

Tonight, I felt it.

Dancing arm over arm with a sea of strangers and one soulmate friend. 
In a former church turned music hall. 
In a country that remembers—ritual by ritual—that survival is not a solo sport.

Happy New Year.