Root To Rise

Like most everyone on planet earth, I’ve been ruminating on the past decade.

Turning 40 actually felt less intense than when the clock ticked from 2019 to 2020 - even though technically we have another year before the new decade, which I take great comfort in.

Regardless, I turn 42 this year and 42 is a much scarier age than 40 to me, professionally, financially, and reproductively speaking.

One boon of the previous decade is that I’ve gotten much better at wrangling my fear. I know how to dissolve it and I might even be so bold as to say that I’ve mastered it…that is, if I actually remembered to do what I know to do in the actual moment. But as often as not, I circle the fear drain whenever my brain serves up a tender morsel of TIME IS PASSING WHAT HAVE YOU ACCOMPLISHED or YOU CAN’T AFFORD A BABY SO YOU’LL BE SAD FOREVER HAHA.

Sometimes I remember to check in with my wiser self and ask, Is that really true? And my wiser self will say: No. Time is not a thing, I’ve accomplished rather a lot. And even if I hadn’t, who cares? Maybe I can’t afford a baby in this precise moment, but circumstances can change quickly.

On the Baby / No Baby question, I freely admit that I’ve become quite set in my waking-up-whenever-I-want, no-distractions, having-free-time ways, and babies are not conducive to any of that. So the Baby / No Baby question gets a giant shrug, even as I careen into 42.

Of course, I would like to have the option. Maybe this needs to be the decade of standing firmly in my own moxie and saying I can do whatever I damn well want with this life of mine.

I admit I’ve been doing a bit of “Hey, you’ve had twenty years to get your house in order on this Baby Thing” self-recrimination.

But that’s not precisely true either. I didn’t want a baby in my twenties.

In my thirties, I would have said, Yes. Sure. Why not. But then I look back at this past decade - as we humans enjoy doing on the precipice of calendar shifts - and realize, There kind of wasn’t any time for a baby. There certainly wasn’t enough emotional or financial stability.

At the beginning of the decade, I had only just recovered from the break-up of a serious longterm relationship (circa 2008) and being fired from the last real job I held (circa 2009).

Hell-bent on a fresh start, I moved to LA (circa 2011). Bolstered by eight whole months of my healthy new lifestyle, I decided I wanted to be a world-traveling nomad. So I left my place in LA and went to Costa Rica, Amsterdam, and New York.

Then my dad died (2012) and I ceased my wanderings to hang out in my childhood bedroom and eat fried chicken under the covers. I got my shit together and moved back to LA, this time to Santa Monica, five blocks from the beach. Until I got punted out of LA and back to the Bay Area (2013). I struggled for awhile, got my shit together (again), and moved to Mill Valley (circa 2014).

I started feeling stable financially, emotionally and locationally, so I got into a relationship, my first real one since the breakup of ‘08.

Three months in, I got pregnant. In romantic comedies or other people’s blogs, this would have let to baby announcements on Facebook followed by an adorable wedding featuring an even more adorable toddler.

I miscarried (2015). Breakup (2016). New relationship. Breakup (2017). New relationship. Breakup (2018), a week before my fortieth birthday. Got back together in early 2019. Moved in with him in late 2019, the first time I moved in with a partner in eleven years.

Let’s do the math:

SF to LA, LA to nomad, nomad to San Jose, San Jose to Santa Monica, Santa Monica to San Jose, San Jose to Oakland, Oakland to Mill Valley, Mill Valley to Petaluma.

Eight moves in ten years.

Breakup, getting fired, death, miscarriage, breakup, breakup, breakup.

Seven major grief cycles in ten years.

Yeah, that’s a lot of moving and grieving for one decade.

(I am counting the two grief cycles at the tail end of the previous decade because 1) I hadn’t learned how to feel my feels by that point, so I had to process those cycles at the same time as some other cycles, which made me a really fun person to be around, and 2) it’s more dramatic that way.)

Throw in an alcohol problem - that, weirdly, got solved by moving to LA - a fair amount of depression and a whole bunch of sorta relationships in between the real ones and dear god. No wonder there wasn’t time for a baby.

So if this past decade was something of an unfathomable emotional roller-coaster, one that I just kept buying a ticket to ride again, where do I go from here?

While I probably made a whole bunch of questionable choices, I was carried by the tides to a relatively good place: I know how to feel my feelings, something I couldn’t manage (and didn’t realize I couldn’t manage) for the first oh, thirty-four years of my life. I know how to roll through grief, how to find stability within myself, and how to find joy even in the worst periods.

What I lack in savings, I gained in major life experience.

Thinking back on the past decade of my life, it’s the joy creeping in through the cracks of pain that I find most astounding.

My brother throwing paper airplanes over my father’s hospital bed.

Orange and rose sunset over the Pacific ocean a few weeks after my miscarriage.

Riding a giraffe with friends and a bottle of champagne on my fortieth birthday, a week after the last breakup.

As for where to go from here, that is a great big who-the-hell-knows shoulder shrug.

Now that I’m in a serious relationship again, a friend asked if I was going to get married. I replied that I couldn’t even begin to predict. Maybe. Maybe not.

I’m now very good at the wait-and-see. Life will show us what’s meant to happen when we stop trying to control every single curve of the road. As a grade A control freak, I’ve learned that the hard way.

Now, I indulge my control freak-y nature in organizing my schedule and telling my boyfriend how to rearrange the kitchen.

In this last decade, I also wrote my first book, and I love it dearly. I started a business. I traveled to Costa Rica and Amsterdam and New York and Hawaii and Ireland, which doesn’t sound super impressive compared to most travelers or even my previous decade, but I had to fit airplane rides in with all that moving and grieving. I ran a marathon. I ran two 200-mile relays. I got healthier than I’d ever been in my life. I realized that I know how to channel and heal energetically. I realized I could talk to a lot of improbable dead people, like Jesus and Joan of Arc and my dad. I learned that I could talk to even more improbable beings, like archangels and unicorns. If I lost you there, that’s okay. You can write it off to a wild imagination or tequila-induced brain damage. I made major in-roads on a second book, one that’s been seven years in the making.

Most of all, I have possibilities in front of me. I could publish a book. I could have a baby. I could get married. I could earn plenty of money to do all the travel and self-care and baby-tending and present-buying and goat-wrangling and home-renovation that I would enjoy. I could become a speaker and seminar-giver. I could do something wildly awesome that I haven’t even thought of yet.

In all that, I can always choose to be happy. Choose to be at peace. Choose to be a loving human, to myself and to other people and to the cats that don’t appear to care much about me unless my hand is actually in the kibble bag.

We can choose, in this decade and in all our future decades. We can choose how we view our lives. We can choose how we show up, We can choose what we eat for breakfast and how often we stretch our legs and how much we engage with people. We get to choose.

I choose joy. I choose not to let my fear or my feelings get the best of me. I choose to keep following my intuition, as I have done for most of the past ten years, down the winding road they led me. I choose not to engage in my own bullshit. I choose to engage more with life. Learn more things, take more risks, get a dog, create more stability so I can fly. Root to rise, as those yoga people say.

I choose me.

Haunted by a Guinea Pig

I just took two weeks off. Two. Weeks. Off. And it was glorious.

I can’t remember the last time I took any significant time without opening up my laptop and stressing out, but I think it was in 2016. I didn’t touch social media or anything work related. I didn’t even open my email inboxes, except for that one time I did open them, before hightailing it right back out again when nobody had emailed me to say they were bleeding or on fire.

Instead, I turned off my brain, finished my Christmas shopping, and did all those holiday social things one does to be a part of the human race. I watched Netflix to recover from all those holiday social thing. I drank wine by the fire. I watched other people ski.

I did not teach myself how to play Vince Guaraldi’s Skating on the piano, which was probably a pipe dream anyway since I haven’t touched a keyboard in thirty years except to dust. Nor did I craft homemade thank you notes for Christmas gifts, nor have I sent thank you notes yet.

But I did go to Dodge Ridge to see pretty mountains and meet a bearded dragon named Jackie who likes to lounge on heater vents, and also poop on them. I went to Pelican Inn near Muir Beach and sat for hours with a book. I remembered that I liked books, something that I forgot, which just goes to show how much I needed a break. I made some decisions about my work - in that I’m going to show up for both myself and my work fully, no excuses, for three months (which includes built-in get-the-hell-off-social-media-and-the-laptop time) and see where I land. I even did a three-day cleanse to reset my all-bacon-all-sugar-all-the-time December diet, something else I haven’t done in years, but it felt really good.

For me, the challenge with cleanses isn’t the hunger - although I do find myself fantasizing quite a lot about roast beef sandwiches and waffles and also treating my loved ones to half-hour dissertations on macaroni and cheese - it’s the self-realizations.

Sometimes I use food to tamp down my feelings, I admit it. And it works a treat. But then when I remove food from the equation of a few days, a lot of things begin to rise to the surface. Like the fact that I’m pretty sure I’ve never let myself have a pet as an adult because when I was a kid I had a guinea pig, and then it died. I didn’t want a guinea pig, I wanted a dog, and I thought a guinea pig wasn’t a very good pet and it was kind of scared of me and then it died and I think I internalized the notion that it died because I didn’t love it enough. When actually, it was an old guinea pig, a second-hand guinea pig, and probably died at exactly the right time for a guinea pig. But still, I found my dead guinea pig in its cage one morning and drew some conclusions in my eight-year-old brain and boom, no pets for me.

(Yes, there are cats in this household, but they are my boyfriend’s cats and they will only crawl onto my lap in order to get to his lap. I am a cat bridge.)

I hadn’t thought about that guinea pig in decades but a few days without solid food and bam there it is. Honestly, I’m not 100% certain what to do with this information except maybe spend some time re-parenting that part of myself that thinks I killed a guinea pig with the force of my “that’s a lame pet” thoughts. Basically, I need to remind my inner child that we’re not god? EXCEPT THAT WE ARE. Because we are all our own unique expressions of god or spirit or the universe or whatever word floats your boat. But maybe we also aren’t responsible for the entire world or dead guinea pigs? I don’t know. Being human is super confusing.

Also, I eat meat so maybe the guinea pig isn’t what I feel guilty about? Oh my god, am I feeling guilty about the wrong things?

Guys, this is my vacation brain. Which may give you some insight into my everyday brain.

Anyway, it was a good and much needed rest and I’m actually excited to get back to it this week, which is more than I can say for most of last year. Thank you for reading about my vacation and my dead guinea pig.

Here we are at Dodge Ridge, before watching people ski as we eat nachos.

The Messy Middle

I had every intention of writing an essay for my memoir today.

AND THEN I DIDN’T.

(Spoiler alert.)

Because I didn't know what to write about and I convinced myself that other work was more important and then a friend stopped by with something called hard seltzer and, as it turns out, hard seltzer has alcohol.

Now it's almost 5 p.m. and I haven't started my essay and there's hard seltzer and eggnog and a Christmas tree that needs ornaments hung in an attractive yet unstudied manner.

I'm officially in the No Man's Land of this memoir. Until this week, I had a list of stories to write and rough drafts to edit and the process had some momentum.

Now I'm in the messy middle, where I don't know what's next. Where I have to dig around in my stories and my emotions and pull out something honest and vulnerable and true and entertaining to read.

No pressure.

Precisely why I started a Patreon page for this book writing process. Because now I have to write an essay for next Friday. I can't let fear take over. I can't decide that it isn't important or it's too hard or let myself wallow in the "I don't know what to do" phase. I have to keep showing up. Because the fifteen people who are subscribed and supporting me in this process mean I can't put this project down for a month or a year or a decade.

It’s a blessing to have support. This may be the first time I’ve used the word “blessing” without sarcasm or irony. But I’m sincerely grateful to have people on the other side of this process who are helping me stay accountable to myself.

Writing about the ghosts of my past is challenging - and then you get to the actual ghosts my life story somehow contains. (I admit, there are more than I would have expected.) Not to mention all the other multi-dimensional weird that I’m trying to put into words.

I’m like Ebeneezer Scrooge over here. Only with more ghosts and less money.

So this week it didn’t happen, and that’s okay. Being gentle with myself through the artistic and creative process is essential. Man, I can be a real jerk to myself sometimes and that helps not at all.

Next week it will. Because it has to. There’s a certain grace in the “well, it just has to.”

In lieu of a book essay, here’s a festive picture of our cat, Sera. Please note her adorable paws.

A Red Wall Named Jack

An ode to San Francisco, written in May of 2010 for I Live Here: SF.

Someone once told me that I live a charmed life. Since this was in a job interview, I can only assume that my resume writing skills are truly formidable. She was right though, especially when it comes to address. I’ve lived in some good spots – Manhattan, London, and Florence (if you want to be generous with your definition of “lived in.”) But this eccentric grand dame of a city has always seemed brighter than other places. Even when socked in by fog. Anyone who gets me started on the subject of San Francisco better have some serious time on their hands or no compunction about telling a bright-eyed, ever-so-slightly obnoxious history geek to shut her flapping trap already. I tell people about how the Flood Building (where I worked for five years) was one of the few buildings left standing downtown after the earthquake and fires of 1906. Next comes a detailed dissertation on the Gold Rush-era ships buried under the Financial District. Soon I’m pulling out my iPhone for an enforced viewing of a streetcar making its way down 1905 Market Street, complete with witty commentary about how nimble early San Francisco pedestrians were.

Born and raised amid the suburban strip malls of San Jose, San Francisco was my first real city – it’s where I saw my first show, first recognized my brother’s tender heart as he sobbed at his first glimpse of a homeless man, ate seafood on the wharf. At eighteen, I fled to New York for college and developed grand plans to live abroad (and in Vermont, for some reason) before putting down roots in San Francisco. But after graduating, I moved right back to the Bay Area and was drawn up the Peninsula like a homing pigeon to its grain-filled roost. San Francisco sucked me in ten years ago and hasn’t let go since.

One of my favorite things to do is step out my front door and start walking – three blocks up the hill to Alamo Square Park to dodge tourists and nuzzle any unwary dogs who stray across my path, down the hill to Haight Street for sausage and beer, across Market to lie on the grass in Dolores Park, clutching a morning bun and listening to the buzz of conversation above me as the sun seeps into my bones. When my life feels like it’s careening wildly off course – as life tends to do – I’ll find myself roaming park trails, staring at my green sneakers and puzzling through some overly contemplative thought process. (Known euphemistically as Figuring My Shit Out.) Soon I’ll find myself staring out over the city – the glossy buildings of downtown, church spires wrapped in fog, the Golden Gate in the distance – and thinking, “Even if nothing else in my life is going right, at least I have this. At least I live here.”

I love that San Francisco is a city of adventurers, hearty spirits that can’t be put down by earthquakes or fire or the tragic closing of Roland’s bagels. San Francisco embraces people who know exactly who they are – and offers them stores full of shiny white platform go-go boots in a size eleven and apartments where purple stone lions peek out from Victorian facades. I love San Francisco’s vibrance – technology and history set off by Hunky Jesus competitions and massive pie fights, and all of it surrounded by unexpected flashes of blue water and red bridge. I love taking the cable cars and sitting next to Indian women in bejeweled glasses who squeal with glee as they spot the guy with three pets – the rat riding the cat riding the dog – ambling down Powell. I love walking down the Embarcadero at night and looping up to Chinatown where the red paper lanterns flutter in the breeze. I even love owning seventeen Old Navy sweatshirts because the schizophrenic weather patterns defeat me over and over again, even though I really should know better by now, and my options – yet again – are spend $12 or freeze.

I still cling to visions of a farmhouse in Tuscany or spending summers in Spain, but I can’t imagine leaving San Francisco for long. Because I love this city in a way I’ve loved nowhere else.

On Moving In With Another Human

I just moved in with my boyfriend, a rather annoying term for a 41-year-old but there aren’t any clear, less-annoying alternatives.

For two people in their forties, neither of whom have lived with a partner type person in over a decade, this is a big deal.

We’ve had to make room for grief, blow ups, and whoops-didn’t-know-that-was-still-there past trauma along with my dishes and big red chair.

(The cats, on the other hand, have been entirely unaffected. One could even say insultingly blasé. Dear cats: You should be made aware that I am an utter delight to live with. Please be appropriately grateful for the opportunity.) (The cats are not grateful.)

We are a loving, well-matched, and (I have to say it) rather adorable couple.

We also have our share of challenges. Sometimes we fight and I think "Why am I doing this?" And then sometimes he rubs my head when I'm anxious and brings me a pumpkin curry when I'm hungry and I think "Oh, that's why."

It’s the little things, the small daily choices, that make all the difference. That build trust for two people who haven’t been given a whole lot of reasons to trust in the past. We’re like scared cats, inching out from under the bed, like “Hey, maybe this isn’t so bad. Maybe I will survive this. Maybe I’ll even get salmon and belly rubs.”

We’re breaking out of our comfort zones, learning how to live with another human, learning how to be real partners, learning how to be tender with each other’s sensitivities.

It’s not for the faint of heart. Which makes sense because life is not for the faint of heart. Love is not for the faint of heart. Our lives and hearts are growing and strengthening, and I give us credit for that.

So here’s to us. And to you, for whatever ways you’re growing and strengthening and loving right now.