The first time I passed Grand View Avenue when I moved to LA, I thought, "Okay, sure. Whatever, soulless boulevard." Today I actually walked down Grand View Avenue and discovered that a mere five minutes from my house is a spot where if you turn to the east you can see all the way to the skyscrapers of downtown and the San Gabriel mountains beyond. If you turn to the west, you can see the sea shining in the sun.
Fine then, sign. Don't let me be cynical.
Aside from my five-year relationship, I've been more or less single my entire life. Yes, "more or less" covers a whole lot of ground - from six month relationships to two years of yearning to the one with all the sex in all the ridiculous places. Oh, mid-twenties. I miss you. Now it's all, "Sure, the forest floor is nice. The bears aren't that close. But you know what's nicer? A BED." For all that it makes me cranky sometimes, my more-or-less perpetual singledom has been invaluable. It's helped me understand that everything that happens in my life is mine. My experience, my responsibility. When you're in a relationship with someone, it's easy to fall into the trap of thinking "Well, if he didn't do this, then I wouldn't do that."
Dear Self: Unless he's chasing you with an axe and you're stealing a car to get away, THIS IS ALMOST NEVER TRUE.
So I've had to relax into the idea that it's all me. My feelings, my thoughts, my actions and reactions, my decision about the kind of love I want.
Honestly, this makes me a little crabby. Frankly, I'd prefer to be adored. Coddled. Doted upon. Maybe fanned with palm fronds.*
* Not really. Love and partnership and having someone to do found object puppetry with in the grocery store totally trump palm fronds. That said, I wouldn't mind having someone to crack my back on demand. There's only so much you can do with a chair, especially in public.
A lot of my...stuff (for lack of a better word) (hi, I'm a writer!) has come from wanting to feel loved. I mean, don't we all? We all want to be loved. We all want to be thought of as smart and successful and amazing and intensely adorable. But, in my experience, wanting to feel loved - and brilliant and hot and desired - just creates a sucking vacuum of need. A black hole of hubris.
Nobody wears Black Hole of Hubris well. Plus, it's exhausting when all the love just gets sucked in and is never seen again. Sorry, ex-boyfriends!
So, hey. Trying not to do that. Because I want people to like me.
Wait. Shit.
See? This is hard.
But I want to follow my heart, not my ego. The ego is louder, but that doesn't mean I have to listen to it. For me, the best way to step back from the obsessive cycle of affirmation craving is to be loving. Not loved. Same word, different tense,* very different effect.
*Because I'm a word geek who just thought about tense, I spent a solid minute laughing about how I want Future Perfect, feel stuck in Imperfect, when I should really just be Present. Grammar jokes for overly-contemplative hippie girls with vaguely Buddhist leanings! Haaaaa. I'm going to be snorting about this all day. No, seriously, you guys. All day.
I want to create love, rather than sitting around and letting my rabid little ego hijack my space. If I want a hug, give a hug. If I want to be told in poetic language how awesome I am, go write an ode to someone else. If I want to feel love, tell someone I love them.
If I want my back cracked, too damn bad. No surprise amateur chiropracty allowed.
Whatever you want, do it for someone else. Be loving, not loved. Muttering this wildly under my breath is the best thing I do to create a perspective shift. It picks up the brain hamsters and gently places them elsewhere. It refocuses me on others, instead of the graspy want-want-want trap that I swan dive into sometimes. It feels better. It's simpler than my ego wants to make it. Love breeds more love.
A few days ago, I broke the handle on my car door. Don't ask me how, these things just seem to happen. Snap. Now every time I want to go somewhere, I have to climb in on the passenger side and clamber over to the driver seat, which is noticeably awkward when I'm wearing a skirt or a date walks me to my car or I park next to the restaurant on Abbot Kinney with sidewalk tables and lots of blasé shiny people. Now I'm wondering if I should get the door fixed or just buy a new car. What? Buying a new car is an eminently reasonable, if fiscally irresponsible, solution. This plan didn't occur to me when my transmission busted, by the way. Or when someone smashed into me and totaled poor Suzi the Suzuki. The insurance company didn't realize that all she needed was a little love and a lot of life support. Luckily, I'm a very persuasive automotive advocate. Until my car gets the equivalent of a hangnail. Then I contemplate sending her to the slaughterhouse.
But I've had Suzi for eleven years now, so I guess I couldn't be accused of flagrant car purchasing were I to consider putting her and her busted door handle out to pasture. Not that I'm morally opposed to flagrant car purchasing, you understand. Everyone has their thing. If that's yours, you have my blessing. Purchase flagrantly away! Mazel tov!
For the past few days, my innards have felt like beef carpaccio. Raw and tender, like someone has been beating me enthusiastically with a wooden mallet. Nothing to worry about. Nothing even terribly unusual. I just have a...rich emotional landscape. This week's landscape featured lots of tears and wild arm flailing as I almost fell off the treadmill because I closed my eyes for two damn seconds to feel a feeling before the reality of the present moment reasserted itself in an abrupt but not permanently injurious* manner.
* Injurious absolutely does not seem like a real word. But it is. Don't worry, I looked it up. I often look up words because I'm convinced they're not real words, that my brain created them to fill a paragraph hole in an efficient but inaccurate way. I haven't invented nearly as much of the dictionary as I seem to think.
When Nicole and I decided to stop working early to obey our convenient moral imperative as self-employed LA-dwellers to get the hell out of the house and enjoy the February sunshine, she strode off to ravenously absorb Twilight and I drove to the beach.
If you give yourself permission to step away for an hour or two, your brain calms down. Sitting on the sand in the sun gives you space to remember that just because you feel like the emotional equivalent of an abused pink appetizer doesn't mean you're doing it wrong. It may even mean that you're doing it right.
Then you get to feel warm and peaceful and happier than you have in days. As a bonus, no one flinches when you accidentally flash them because you're wearing a sundress and are required by life to do weird things to reach the steering wheel.
The beach tells me I'm doing it right.
Thanks, beach.
My parents almost named me Sunshine. Hippies the way only East Coasters who moved to San Francisco in the early '70s could be, my parents meditated on roofs, toured the country in a renovated bread truck, ate tofu pudding, grew a lot of hair, did things with crystals that I still don't understand, adopted a stray mutt and named it Freedom, and eventually pondered naming their first child after the stuff that comes off the star around which our entire solar system revolves.
Which, come to think of it, might have worked for me. HI, I AM THE CENTER OF THE UNIVERSE. THANKS FOR NOTICING.
As you may have cleverly surmised from my header, they didn't. Because what if I...wasn't? As cheerful as the name implies, that is. I know they worried about this. Few other names come with such specific expectations of good nature. What if I was ornery? Angry? Tinged with ennui? Draped in a blanket of deep melancholy? What if I asked for smelling salts and a fainting couch for my fourteenth birthday? There's a lot of misfire potential in christening a child Sunshine.
As it happens, calling me Sunshine wouldn't have been as much of a lie as, say, Grace or Chastity. But this is not something a parent can know until long after the birth certificate needs signing.
I consider myself a happy person. Except when I'm not. Because I've been all those things: angry, ornery, marinated in ennui and melancholy. It wouldn't be a huge exaggeration to say that I've lost years of my life to depression. To save my mother the worried phone call, it may or may not have been true depression, but I certainly didn't do what I was capable of for years, simply because I was trying to get through them. To untangle myself from that blanket of melancholy. (They sell them at Ikea. Don't buy one.) But I decided I wanted to get through those years in my own way and so I did. And that was exactly what I needed to get where I am - a place that, on most days, I'm pretty darn happy with.
You get to choose who you are. Your parents name you something, your family develops a certain expectation of you, your friends know you as one thing or another - but none of that matters. You get to choose. You choose who you are and who you become. By choosing what you pay attention to and where you put your focus. By focusing on your life and no one else's. Focusing on what you want that life to be. On what makes you happy.
I have a lot of joy in me. In large part because that's what I've chosen to cultivate. I was born with a lot of potential for happiness, but I was also born with a lot of potential for the other thing. I choose what I want to lean into. I have to keep choosing it every day. We all do.
By living on juice for three days and then diving headfirst into a bucket of coffee and a plate of eggs after being a sugarless, caffeineless, joyless vegan for a month. (I wasn't joyless. But I am melodramatic. For melodrama brings me joy. My dates have a lot to put up with.) Followed the next day by the best damn butterscotch pudding you've ever had, recommended by a woman sitting at the next table, eating her breakfast with the woman we think was Joan Rivers, although I remain unconvinced.
But I promised that my official version of the story would feature a conclusive Joan Rivers and since I always keep my promises.... Guess what! We ate brunch next to Joan Rivers! And chatted long enough to net a butterscotch pudding recommendation, something I'm certain wouldn't have happened if it was actually Joan Rivers or if I had suspected it was Joan Rivers. Not because Joan Rivers and her friend wouldn't kindly recommend amazing butterscotch pudding but because I would have been weirdly and obviously enthralled by her bone structure and general Joan Rivers-ness. I'm not good at playing it cool.
Why isn't there an iPhone app that answers questions like, "Did I just have brunch with Joan Rivers?" There really should be.
Venice Beach
Over the next few weeks, I'll be figuring out how I want my real life to look when it comes to food. So far I'm leaning toward injecting myself with deer DNA so I can grow a few extra stomachs in which to store the pancakes. One stomach for the every day green juice, tofu, and all those other strange things that don't make sense in any context my past self recognizes. And another stomach for weekends and brunches with friends and beach walks and butterscotch pudding recommended by Joan Rivers.