A lot has happened since my last blog post, all the events listed were performed, and had a wonderful retreat to Westray in Orkney Islands. In fact, so good, that I have booked three more - for April, July and September. So, if you want to spend some time in a beautiful place, getting a lot of writing done, surrounded by serious writers who are super supportive, then get in touch.
But what I want to write about now is my near-future plan for October of this year...which involves spending the month at Kripalu - a yoga center in the Berkshires that I love - for intensive yoga teacher training. I will be there for a month.
Aside from the fact that the training itself will be transformational, and I will be certified to teach after over 17 years of practicing Kripalu yoga, this is also happening precisely 17 years after I was meant to spend a month at Kripalu doing a seva program. I had just begun practicing yoga and wanted to immerse myself in it. I was excited and nervous about the prospect of spending a month someplace I had never been, but I had been assured it was a great place. I was ready for an adventure after what had been a challenging year getting over a difficult breakup of a 13 year relationship, which had the effect of making me question Everything. I was ready for this new life, this new world.
Then less than a month before I was meant to go up to Lenox, September 11, 2001 happened, in my city. I have written about this many times, and if you want my best description, you can read it here.
But what happened after is, I could not leave the city. I was afraid it would disappear. Many were fleeing, but I was holding on for dear life. NYC was my home, the only place on earth that I had ever felt at home, and now all I could smell was burning plastic, metal and bodies - even up in Yorkville where I lived at the time. The smell made it up the East River. The smoke was visible, even though I was miles north of the attack. I had many friends who had been closer, some who lost people, and all of us saw the missing signs everywhere. People had tacked up photocopies of smiling pictures of friends and relatives, every fire house had at least eight photos up it seemed. There were candles under some of the photos in little planters, near trees, on steps up to brownstones. None of them were missing. They were all dead, incinerated.
I could not move. Would not move. Was not afraid, as far as I could tell, but of course I was. In yoga class, I felt the terror, but mostly was in a dissociated fugue state, that I arguably lived in for years, and to some degree even exist in to this day.
I cancelled the trip to Kripalu. I ended up doing a lot of other things, including moving to the UK in 2003 for what I thought was temporary stay that ended up lasting 8 years. I left in August 2003, right after the blackout, which ended the morning I flew out, I remember seeing a guy - probably drunk - stagger in front of our Super Shuttle Van at 4 am in Times Square. The driver swerved to avoid him, but it was eerie. My cats had looked at me bereft when I walked out the door. Everything was deeply weird.
I won't go into those eight years, because that's a novel in its own right, but the fact is I missed all the 9/11 anniversaries after the first one in 2002. And because of the way it was being used politically, I refused to participate even then in any event that showed my grief publicly. I was enraged that our grief was being used as an excuse to ramp up a war. So, I shoved it down. Then I was in the UK where no one wanted to know and most were cynical about 9/11. Individually some people wanted to know my actual human scale story but most decided to launch into diatribes about how it was an inside job and/or how Americans now know how it feels, etc. So, I learned to shut the fuck about it.
Then I shut it down into a tiny, hidden part of myself. Hidden even to me.
This part would emerge when I visited NYC and sometimes was near downtown and would see building going on and feel nauseous or start shaking, and I would have to leave.
I shut. it. down.
So, when I was back here in September 2011, realizing I was going to move back to NYC, and the 10th anniversary rolled around, I was kind of shocked by how moving it was to me, how emotional I got. I was wary now of saying this to my New York friends, because they had now been through Years of this grieving or ignoring it, depending on their mood or capability. So, once again, I kept it to myself.
I have begun to realize over the years of being back in NYC that some part of me is still damaged from that day, some part of me I have not allowed out somehow, a wound I have protected.
One of the original ways of shielding that wound was to Not go to Kripalu in October 2001.
So, when I realized I could go up in October 2018 for teacher training if I received a scholarship (which happily I did), I decided it was time to finally do this thing. While this won't heal everything, it's a start. I will finally allow myself the immersion I so craved then, but then somehow feared.
I don't know if the buried emotions will come up or not. There has been a lot of trauma in my life since then, including difficult losses, and there is one right now on the horizon. I have no idea what will happen.
But I am dedicating the training and any yoga teaching I do to people who were like me when I started yoga in my late 30s: scared and kind of suspicious and sure I could not do it. I want to work with people who suffer from PTSD or just plain old bad body image or a sense of being "bad" at physical things. And maybe people like me, too, who just can't shake certain wounds.
I want to embrace vulnerability, my own and others'. I don't know if I can actually do this or am just talking trash. In reality I hate vulnerability. My own that is. Total loss of control. It sucks. But it's also the only place life can become, well, life. So there's that.
We shall see what happens.
But this is a baby step towards healing. I was torn asunder on 9/11/01. More than I knew. I don't think I will necessarily get put back together, because not sure that's possible, but maybe, if I'm lucky, I can at least find the bits and pieces that were lost, even if they are in shards and make into some kind of whack collage.
There are worse fates.
Tuesday, August 14, 2018
Tuesday, May 29, 2018
If you know where you're going, it isn't anywhere new...
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Wednesday, May 23, 2018
The war is over...and I don't know how to live outside a war zone
I have not written here in a while. But as I was walking along in Inwood Hill Park tonight where the Harlem and Hudson Rivers meet, and watching the reflection of the setting sun (the sun itself was behind the cliffs that rise up here on the top tip of Manhattan between the park and the Hudson where the old growth forest still grows), I could hear someone play an electric guitar...not particularly well, but enough to evoke the 1970s and evenings as a child, sometimes riding in people's vans or old cars, and the odd comfort of that, teenagers or young adults playing Led Zepplin and me in the back somewhere doing whatever, but not in charge and knowing somehow for that moment everything was OK.
I then remembered this realization I had the other day when I was meditating that yes indeed the war is over, but I have no idea how to live outside a war zone. I don't mean that literally in the sense of being in the middle of an actual shooting war (aside from the time we lived on 106th and Amsterdam back in the early 1990s when in fact there were many gun fights outside our window - some with automatic weapons - so bad the police would not show up because - and I quote - "we are outgunned")...but as a child, not guns, but other war zones - some violent physically, some mentally, some verbally, some emotionally, but it was always a crisis and starting as a very young child I had to have my shit together. For instance, my mother has told me, when I was a baby and she and my father would fight violently, so I would hold my breath until I turned blue, which would finally make them stop.
That kind of thing. Rinse. Repeat.
Shift characters, locations, details but the out of joint song in which I had to keep my shit together, be vigilant at all times, and therefore could rarely be a child remained the same.
So, yeah, no, I'm not what you would call laid back. All the yoga and meditation in the world can't undo that shit. It can Help. A lot. It can keep me from inflicting it on others, and at times if I'm lucky myself, but it's not precisely a good run up to peacetime living.
I'm not going to recite my childhood. Anyone who knows me or has read this blog or my plays can catch the gist, but the point remains: no tools to live in peacetime.
Which means all the time living on overdrive. Shocking that I became an alcoholic, I know (ha!). But what is a miracle is that I got sober at 23. And still am. At 54. That shit is weird. But even so, still, no windshield and not really, you know, laid back.
BUT the difference is - when I had this realization while meditating, this time I didn't think OH NO, I HAVE TO DOOOO SOMETHING ABOUT THIS. I HAVE TO HAVE A 10-POINT ACTION PLAN TO DEFEAT MY CRAZINESS. No. I did not go through that. Instead, I just breathed and heard a gentle internal voice say: and that's all you need to know right now.
You don't have to DO anything about it.
Just let it settle in. And I am. And just this. The NOT doing, the letting it settle in, is changing my life. It's kind of a miracle. Not by trying to change my life. Instead by Not trying to change my life. The miracle of acceptance. You accept a thing, hold space for it, and voila, it changes. With no effort. If I resist it, it just gets bigger and more intractable.
And so now, somehow, when feelings I usually find excruciating come up - certain types of sadness or boredom or anxiety or whatever - instead of trying to run away, I just breathe them in. I hold space. I witness. I allow the feelings. I look and see what's there for me to see, feel, experience. And then, yes, it all changes. By not trying to change it.
It's bizarre.
Which is all by way of saying when I heard that guy playing the guitar, I let the pleasant kind of nostalgic memory of those peaceful moments in my childhood wash over me. I felt the nostalgia, the desire to be young again, to have life ahead of me instead of at least more than half in the rearview mirror, and also the knowledge that there were these moments of respite - for all the crazy and the crisis. And that while I might not know how to live outside a war zone, I can allow myself these moments and don't have to judge or overanalyze.
Of course it doesn't help these days how much actual crazy there is in the world and violence and rampant injustice and plain old meanness and cruelty. But the fact is in one form or other that's always been there. I can allow the feelings of powerlessness in and rage and all of it. I can act as I can act, which I do, politically. I can write sometimes, create theater, do my little part. I can spin out, I can step up, I can step aside, freak out, be calm, get angry, cry, wonder what the actual fuck, have a moment of calm, take a walk, stay under the covers, call someone, meditate, stay alone, go be with people, dance, do yoga, write, take a nap, watch stupid things on Netflix, write in this blog, submit work, get rejected, get accepted, feel accomplished, feel like a failure, feel loved, feel lonely, wonder again what the actual fuck, and then breathe and let it all in - when I remember to do so.
This is the gift of getting older, staying sober for a long time, meditating every day, doing yoga when I remember (not as much as I should in other words) and trying to be a decent person - I begin to be able to accept the whole package.
I was also thinking walking home: I want to live long, because I need to figure it out, and then I laughed when I heard an internal voice say: that'll only happen when you stop trying to figure it out. Which, like, of course. But what a seduction it is. For someone such as me anyway.
At night when lying down going to sleep with crystals on me (yes I've turned into That person - try not to hate me), and I sense, my God/dess, so much energy in my head, my mind churning and churning Trying to Figure It Out. And so little energy in the rest of my body. So then breathing into that mysterious rest of me - the part - pretty much all of it - that I routinely ignore. Letting the crystals bring me to those parts of my body. Wondering will I ever allow my body to be fully animated? I don't know. Part of the war zone thing, levels of dissociation I'm not sure will ever go away. It's waaaay better than it used to be. At least I know my body is here. I can even feel it sometimes. A number of years ago, I woke up more fully to my actual emotions (as opposed to the word facsimile cover story that masqueraded as such). But I have a feeling my physical body is the most resistant to my awareness and acceptance. I am only aware of Problems - either physical aches and pains or with How I Look (always wrong) etc. Not sure I will ever be able to embrace my corporeal self, but that's got to be Ok. I don't want to doom myself to this dissociation either. We'll see.
I can breathe now. I can at times be touched. Sometimes easier than others. But I have always been "touchy" - kind of prickly in a somewhat sneaky way. On the surface, I am warm, but it's a patina, something to a certain degree I taught myself how to do. But underneath there is the shrinking away scared little kid, never sure anyone or anything can be trusted and always ready to pick a fight. It's complex. I certainly don't think I'm alone in this.
I'm afraid to even write any of this and publish it in public. What will people THINK?! GASP! As if...but still.
So, here I am. This is me today. Tomorrow or the next day I will post a bunch of things with schedules of events, a staged reading and two readings, all in June. But this is a different post. So be it.
As the African prayer goes: It is. Thank you.
Even if that means I never do know how to live in peacetime. I am here. And there is beauty - and even moments of peace - in the midst of the ever whirring chaos in my brain and sometimes heart.
I then remembered this realization I had the other day when I was meditating that yes indeed the war is over, but I have no idea how to live outside a war zone. I don't mean that literally in the sense of being in the middle of an actual shooting war (aside from the time we lived on 106th and Amsterdam back in the early 1990s when in fact there were many gun fights outside our window - some with automatic weapons - so bad the police would not show up because - and I quote - "we are outgunned")...but as a child, not guns, but other war zones - some violent physically, some mentally, some verbally, some emotionally, but it was always a crisis and starting as a very young child I had to have my shit together. For instance, my mother has told me, when I was a baby and she and my father would fight violently, so I would hold my breath until I turned blue, which would finally make them stop.
That kind of thing. Rinse. Repeat.
Shift characters, locations, details but the out of joint song in which I had to keep my shit together, be vigilant at all times, and therefore could rarely be a child remained the same.
So, yeah, no, I'm not what you would call laid back. All the yoga and meditation in the world can't undo that shit. It can Help. A lot. It can keep me from inflicting it on others, and at times if I'm lucky myself, but it's not precisely a good run up to peacetime living.
I'm not going to recite my childhood. Anyone who knows me or has read this blog or my plays can catch the gist, but the point remains: no tools to live in peacetime.
Which means all the time living on overdrive. Shocking that I became an alcoholic, I know (ha!). But what is a miracle is that I got sober at 23. And still am. At 54. That shit is weird. But even so, still, no windshield and not really, you know, laid back.
BUT the difference is - when I had this realization while meditating, this time I didn't think OH NO, I HAVE TO DOOOO SOMETHING ABOUT THIS. I HAVE TO HAVE A 10-POINT ACTION PLAN TO DEFEAT MY CRAZINESS. No. I did not go through that. Instead, I just breathed and heard a gentle internal voice say: and that's all you need to know right now.
You don't have to DO anything about it.
Just let it settle in. And I am. And just this. The NOT doing, the letting it settle in, is changing my life. It's kind of a miracle. Not by trying to change my life. Instead by Not trying to change my life. The miracle of acceptance. You accept a thing, hold space for it, and voila, it changes. With no effort. If I resist it, it just gets bigger and more intractable.
And so now, somehow, when feelings I usually find excruciating come up - certain types of sadness or boredom or anxiety or whatever - instead of trying to run away, I just breathe them in. I hold space. I witness. I allow the feelings. I look and see what's there for me to see, feel, experience. And then, yes, it all changes. By not trying to change it.
It's bizarre.
Which is all by way of saying when I heard that guy playing the guitar, I let the pleasant kind of nostalgic memory of those peaceful moments in my childhood wash over me. I felt the nostalgia, the desire to be young again, to have life ahead of me instead of at least more than half in the rearview mirror, and also the knowledge that there were these moments of respite - for all the crazy and the crisis. And that while I might not know how to live outside a war zone, I can allow myself these moments and don't have to judge or overanalyze.
Of course it doesn't help these days how much actual crazy there is in the world and violence and rampant injustice and plain old meanness and cruelty. But the fact is in one form or other that's always been there. I can allow the feelings of powerlessness in and rage and all of it. I can act as I can act, which I do, politically. I can write sometimes, create theater, do my little part. I can spin out, I can step up, I can step aside, freak out, be calm, get angry, cry, wonder what the actual fuck, have a moment of calm, take a walk, stay under the covers, call someone, meditate, stay alone, go be with people, dance, do yoga, write, take a nap, watch stupid things on Netflix, write in this blog, submit work, get rejected, get accepted, feel accomplished, feel like a failure, feel loved, feel lonely, wonder again what the actual fuck, and then breathe and let it all in - when I remember to do so.
This is the gift of getting older, staying sober for a long time, meditating every day, doing yoga when I remember (not as much as I should in other words) and trying to be a decent person - I begin to be able to accept the whole package.
I was also thinking walking home: I want to live long, because I need to figure it out, and then I laughed when I heard an internal voice say: that'll only happen when you stop trying to figure it out. Which, like, of course. But what a seduction it is. For someone such as me anyway.
At night when lying down going to sleep with crystals on me (yes I've turned into That person - try not to hate me), and I sense, my God/dess, so much energy in my head, my mind churning and churning Trying to Figure It Out. And so little energy in the rest of my body. So then breathing into that mysterious rest of me - the part - pretty much all of it - that I routinely ignore. Letting the crystals bring me to those parts of my body. Wondering will I ever allow my body to be fully animated? I don't know. Part of the war zone thing, levels of dissociation I'm not sure will ever go away. It's waaaay better than it used to be. At least I know my body is here. I can even feel it sometimes. A number of years ago, I woke up more fully to my actual emotions (as opposed to the word facsimile cover story that masqueraded as such). But I have a feeling my physical body is the most resistant to my awareness and acceptance. I am only aware of Problems - either physical aches and pains or with How I Look (always wrong) etc. Not sure I will ever be able to embrace my corporeal self, but that's got to be Ok. I don't want to doom myself to this dissociation either. We'll see.
I can breathe now. I can at times be touched. Sometimes easier than others. But I have always been "touchy" - kind of prickly in a somewhat sneaky way. On the surface, I am warm, but it's a patina, something to a certain degree I taught myself how to do. But underneath there is the shrinking away scared little kid, never sure anyone or anything can be trusted and always ready to pick a fight. It's complex. I certainly don't think I'm alone in this.
I'm afraid to even write any of this and publish it in public. What will people THINK?! GASP! As if...but still.
So, here I am. This is me today. Tomorrow or the next day I will post a bunch of things with schedules of events, a staged reading and two readings, all in June. But this is a different post. So be it.
As the African prayer goes: It is. Thank you.
Even if that means I never do know how to live in peacetime. I am here. And there is beauty - and even moments of peace - in the midst of the ever whirring chaos in my brain and sometimes heart.
Sunday, April 15, 2018
Waiting on my room...
I may have written a very similar blog post about a year and a half ago.
I am back at Kripalu, a yoga retreat where I have come since 2003. 2003 was a potent year. It's also the year I found the Orkney Islands (well many people for millennia have "found" the Orkney Islands but you get the idea...).
Now - as in December 2016 - I am waiting for my room. Over the years, the place has grown and become more hotel-like and hence rooms need to become available. On the other hand, the view to mountains and lake is the same, and an undercurrent of deeply healing energy.
I came today on purpose, because it's the 11th anniversary of my miscarriage, the one after my wedding on our honeymoon. In Cornwall. It was a beautiful day, and a very sad and painful day for me and my then husband. I never got pregnant after that. Should not by rights have been pregnant then. I was 43, no IVF, had had an operation on my uterus to make it possible, but that somehow seemed to make me feel worse for a long time. So it was all a surprise, a happy one, and then it wasn't. I was 12 weeks pregnant, so it was painful, too, physically.
So for the first time since that happened, I have taken myself away from all that is familiar (well Kripalu is familiar, but not home and I'm not here with anyone I know) to walk through or screech through the feelings as the case may be.
Coming up by bus I felt the closer we got an almost exquisite sense of loneliness. I say exquisite not as in beautiful but as in so rarefied I almost didn't know what it was. Like distilled water, not mixed with any other emotion, either worse or better.
I then doubted whether this was a good idea, but then I realized, oh, of course, this part of grieving is that. It is lonely business. People can wave at you from their own shore and tell you about their own experience of such grief, and be holding you with love, but still you are alone in this ice floe.
It is grey and cold up here today, too, as if to kind of make the point. Underline it. On other hand, the weather in Cornwall was beautiful, the whole damn week that followed, too. We stayed there. What else to do? Go back to London and see everyone from the wedding and have them be pitying towards us. That somehow seemed worse. Would it have been? I don't know.
I think I was - I definitely was - in shock. So through all the blood and pain I hiked and hiked. Pad after pad soaking, trying to find places to throw them out. Why? Afraid of the pain? probably. Afraid of being alone and crushed by grief and loneliness. Definitely.
So, here I am. Alone. Waiting for my room.
Last time I was here, I posted a photo of this same view, and my stepfather David responded to it. He loved Kripalu, too. He died a couple days later, the day I returned - so that turned out to be our last communication. I found out the next day, as we all did. He was alone. He must have called 911 because an ambulance had come and brought him to the hospital, where his friend finally found his body. He was probably dead when he arrived. Massive heart attack. Out of nowhere. Boom. Alone.
So, coming up here felt way harder than usual. Was afraid even.
But as the volume goes down on the outside the world, the pain has a chance to surface. I do know from experience not just fortune cookies that experiencing pain mitigates suffering, but in the middle of it of course it can be hard to remember.
I haven't written a blog post in a while but this felt like the right time, if for no other reason than I am in the cafe drinking coffee and waiting for my room.
My temporary home for 3 days.
This is the view. I never tire of the way the mountains layer in color and form in the distance. One of the best things about getting out of the city is the ability to see distances. Even if misty and obscured. There are literally shades of grey here today. And dark greens and blues...but mostly grey tinted by blue...
There is a lot of wind today - intimations of Orkney. Where I will be again this summer. These refuges I have been so lucky to find later in life. Where things change a lot, but there is something underneath deeper than these changes that remains.
It is precisely that to which I can attune more easily in these places and to which I attune more and more each year.
That is where that which can hold me through the healing resides. It doesn't make it less painful, but it makes it possible.
I am back at Kripalu, a yoga retreat where I have come since 2003. 2003 was a potent year. It's also the year I found the Orkney Islands (well many people for millennia have "found" the Orkney Islands but you get the idea...).
Now - as in December 2016 - I am waiting for my room. Over the years, the place has grown and become more hotel-like and hence rooms need to become available. On the other hand, the view to mountains and lake is the same, and an undercurrent of deeply healing energy.
I came today on purpose, because it's the 11th anniversary of my miscarriage, the one after my wedding on our honeymoon. In Cornwall. It was a beautiful day, and a very sad and painful day for me and my then husband. I never got pregnant after that. Should not by rights have been pregnant then. I was 43, no IVF, had had an operation on my uterus to make it possible, but that somehow seemed to make me feel worse for a long time. So it was all a surprise, a happy one, and then it wasn't. I was 12 weeks pregnant, so it was painful, too, physically.
So for the first time since that happened, I have taken myself away from all that is familiar (well Kripalu is familiar, but not home and I'm not here with anyone I know) to walk through or screech through the feelings as the case may be.
Coming up by bus I felt the closer we got an almost exquisite sense of loneliness. I say exquisite not as in beautiful but as in so rarefied I almost didn't know what it was. Like distilled water, not mixed with any other emotion, either worse or better.
I then doubted whether this was a good idea, but then I realized, oh, of course, this part of grieving is that. It is lonely business. People can wave at you from their own shore and tell you about their own experience of such grief, and be holding you with love, but still you are alone in this ice floe.
It is grey and cold up here today, too, as if to kind of make the point. Underline it. On other hand, the weather in Cornwall was beautiful, the whole damn week that followed, too. We stayed there. What else to do? Go back to London and see everyone from the wedding and have them be pitying towards us. That somehow seemed worse. Would it have been? I don't know.
I think I was - I definitely was - in shock. So through all the blood and pain I hiked and hiked. Pad after pad soaking, trying to find places to throw them out. Why? Afraid of the pain? probably. Afraid of being alone and crushed by grief and loneliness. Definitely.
So, here I am. Alone. Waiting for my room.
Last time I was here, I posted a photo of this same view, and my stepfather David responded to it. He loved Kripalu, too. He died a couple days later, the day I returned - so that turned out to be our last communication. I found out the next day, as we all did. He was alone. He must have called 911 because an ambulance had come and brought him to the hospital, where his friend finally found his body. He was probably dead when he arrived. Massive heart attack. Out of nowhere. Boom. Alone.
So, coming up here felt way harder than usual. Was afraid even.
But as the volume goes down on the outside the world, the pain has a chance to surface. I do know from experience not just fortune cookies that experiencing pain mitigates suffering, but in the middle of it of course it can be hard to remember.
I haven't written a blog post in a while but this felt like the right time, if for no other reason than I am in the cafe drinking coffee and waiting for my room.
My temporary home for 3 days.
This is the view. I never tire of the way the mountains layer in color and form in the distance. One of the best things about getting out of the city is the ability to see distances. Even if misty and obscured. There are literally shades of grey here today. And dark greens and blues...but mostly grey tinted by blue...
There is a lot of wind today - intimations of Orkney. Where I will be again this summer. These refuges I have been so lucky to find later in life. Where things change a lot, but there is something underneath deeper than these changes that remains.
It is precisely that to which I can attune more easily in these places and to which I attune more and more each year.
That is where that which can hold me through the healing resides. It doesn't make it less painful, but it makes it possible.
Friday, March 23, 2018
Briefly...
Hi all,
Just writing to say I am writing. I am writing now - after many years of writing for public consumption here, stage texts, many FB posts, and two books - for myself. A very private project. I don't know if it will ever see the light of day.
However, that is the mode I am in, so not sure how many blog posts there will be for a little while.
The outline of what I am doing is a deeply personal excavation project. I need to kind of protect the space around it in order to do it.
I will periodically announce things here, and who knows, maybe write some posts, too, but there is a shift, it feels right, and wanted to give you who have read this page a heads up.
Just writing to say I am writing. I am writing now - after many years of writing for public consumption here, stage texts, many FB posts, and two books - for myself. A very private project. I don't know if it will ever see the light of day.
However, that is the mode I am in, so not sure how many blog posts there will be for a little while.
The outline of what I am doing is a deeply personal excavation project. I need to kind of protect the space around it in order to do it.
I will periodically announce things here, and who knows, maybe write some posts, too, but there is a shift, it feels right, and wanted to give you who have read this page a heads up.
Sunday, March 4, 2018
31 years of not killing myself one day at a time....
I have not been blogging much because I've been working on some new writing, something that may in fact never see the light of day but seems to be important for my psychic survival.
Somehow this relates to being 31 years sober as of yesterday. Because while I do talk about this process periodically, it's mostly something I do in private.
I can say this about that however: it requires a continual excavation of the self and a commitment to helping others do the same, to find a way to walk through each day without a drink or a drug to dull the pain. Or whatever else one might want dulled.
I am exhausted and not sure why I am writing this now, but today was a gift, was able to share some of what I have learned with a dear friend, go to yoga and feel my heart and how tight it is right now, how my shoulders are protecting it, how they probably always have been, how painful that is and how compassionate I need to be with myself even so. There is good reason for that protection. It is tempting to be disappointed in myself that I still hide out, still fear people, still fear a lot of things. But that is as ridiculous as being disappointed in anyone else for being afraid, which I rarely am, not if they are aware of the fear anyway.
Sobriety is a paradox of both having to become aware of my darkest and most vulnerable parts, but also somehow give them space, not reject them, because that causes denial or dissociation. It seems to be for me these days about holding space for infinite complexity including massive contradictions and conflicts within myself. I am committed to not exiling parts of myself because they are not convenient or are embarrassing or whatever. This can be challenging and sometimes a pain in the ass to be honest.
However, as I walk through this journey day by day, both internally and in some cases within my writing, I feel I land more firmly on the earth, touch down even to the ocean floor of my own psyche, that vast silence filled with strange creatures and detritus thrown from the surface that just kind of landed there.
I have some deep frustrations with some external situations over which I have limited control, some shame over certain career achievements not having been reached. So much shame I don't really want to say that out loud, fearing judgment. But since this is all about being transparent with myself, it seems absurd not to say it.
But the larger fact is for all this, I don't want to drink or take any substances today, and I'm not acting out in other ways to ease the pain or confusion. Sometimes that seems like a ridiculous thing to say out loud after 31 years, but since I am aware of people who have gone out drinking after 10-20-30 years sober, and some who have died as a consequence, it's not a small thing.
Long term sobriety is not glamorous, it's life experienced - everything all the time - with the volume turned to 11. As I have said before - life without shock absorbers...and no windshield.
However, there are moments like today when I can talk to a dear friend such that my experience of this walking can give relief, maybe shed light, or other times I can talk to someone who is new to this life and help them stay sober another day. Then all the muddling through and the seemingly at times absurd lengths I go to be honest with myself and others that frankly at times seems to verge on self-destructive, has meaning.
I wish I could say which way to go forward with my life was crystal clear. It's not. I have lived one day at a time for so long now I don't think I know any other way. Each day is about being more or less in tune with a sort of internal divining rod that I let guide me.
I do meditate every day. I try to do some yoga and walk. I write most every day. I try to be a decent human being. This year I'm also doing a fair bit of political work for obvious reasons, like - you know - survival, but am grateful for having found a way to do that that is both relatively simple and incredibly effective.
I hold space for others who are going through tricky changes and who are discovering their voices - in life and art. I spend a lot of time - that I love - working with other writers - as a teacher, coach, editor and friend.
I wonder what has happened to my theater work as a director, I seem to only be writing now for the most part. I kind of miss the rehearsal room but my internal divining rod has led me away from that for the lasy while. Will it lead me back? I don't know.
So much I don't know.
But I am sober. I have walked through a lot of life this way, more years than I was alive when I hit my bottom at 23 - a horrifying sense of not even existing in some way - not to mention not being able to even get drunk anymore. I wish I could tell you it's all been a glittering triumph or that I was a paragon of mental health, but that would be a lie. It's been a journey, one that still continues. A bumpy ride at times, other times exhilarating and seemingly effortless, some years full of grief and low level depression, and some moments even now, 31 years later, when it feels like there is a trap door that has opened up beneath me that I tumble down wondering when I will hit a bottom, seemingly lost and thinking: wait, what? I'm 54, shouldn't I be you know More Together Than This?
I try not to take these moments of confusion, which at times are painful, out on anyone, but sometimes I do, mostly the people closest to me of course. One of the things I am examining so closely now is how I navigate such things and why. Imprints from a chaotic childhood as an only child amongst multiple caretakers most of whom had wildly different value systems from one another and most of whom were not really meant to have kids but there I was - the proverbial inconvenient truth. Sometimes consequently, I feel safest when alone, because only then do I have to account to no one. That is an illusion of course, because it's not like all those people and experiences just vanish when I'm by myself.
Alcoholism amongst other things is a disease of isolation, it wants you alone in a room and dead. So, this is one of my primary conflicts, both desiring being alone and knowing at times I need to resist that urge. To allow others to see me in more vulnerable states, which I find so shameful, especially fear.
I was told when I began recovery: you need never be alone again. I did not understand it then. But I do now. I might feel lonely. I meet be alone, but I am not alone. I am connected to so many people and to whatever powers this internal divining rod and a sense - astonishingly enough and more and more - of a place amidst the cosmos. Hard to explain that and won't even try at close to 4am, but it's a great piece of knowledge - not as in facts but as in something far deeper.
Finally, also, a sense of happiness seeing people younger than me agitating for a new and better world. I remember so vividly being that age and agitating my heart out, but it was the Reagan era and no one listened. What a joy it is to see these young people be heard. It gives me great joy. My friend Spencer once said he felt that those of us who don't have our own children have a certain love to offer the world and young people specifically that those with children have to reserve for their own kids, and I feel that now more than ever. I feel an optimism for the future that I have never felt before. I don't know if I'll be alive to see it in full flower, because when I mean future - I mean Future as in 30-50 years from now, but there is hope.
I mean to do my best to help keep the world alive for this new generation to take over. I used to joke with my theater work I felt like those medieval monks who hand copied the Greek and Latin texts in monasteries to keep them alive until those ideas finally fueled the Renaissance. And I see now it's not just the theater, it's my whole life that is this, living and creating, in hope for this new world that now seems possible - a tiny glimmer on a horizon - one that I will make whatever is left of my life's work to not see extinguished.
What does this have to do with sobriety? A lot actually, because in staying sober and helping others do the same, it's the same kind of thing. Passing on what I have been given, keeping alive something that is only kept alive by free action of people who are never paid, except in the gift of our own sobriety, our own lives.
But now I have rambled enough for the time being. Thank you for reading, for bearing witness, for holding space.
Somehow this relates to being 31 years sober as of yesterday. Because while I do talk about this process periodically, it's mostly something I do in private.
I can say this about that however: it requires a continual excavation of the self and a commitment to helping others do the same, to find a way to walk through each day without a drink or a drug to dull the pain. Or whatever else one might want dulled.
I am exhausted and not sure why I am writing this now, but today was a gift, was able to share some of what I have learned with a dear friend, go to yoga and feel my heart and how tight it is right now, how my shoulders are protecting it, how they probably always have been, how painful that is and how compassionate I need to be with myself even so. There is good reason for that protection. It is tempting to be disappointed in myself that I still hide out, still fear people, still fear a lot of things. But that is as ridiculous as being disappointed in anyone else for being afraid, which I rarely am, not if they are aware of the fear anyway.
Sobriety is a paradox of both having to become aware of my darkest and most vulnerable parts, but also somehow give them space, not reject them, because that causes denial or dissociation. It seems to be for me these days about holding space for infinite complexity including massive contradictions and conflicts within myself. I am committed to not exiling parts of myself because they are not convenient or are embarrassing or whatever. This can be challenging and sometimes a pain in the ass to be honest.
However, as I walk through this journey day by day, both internally and in some cases within my writing, I feel I land more firmly on the earth, touch down even to the ocean floor of my own psyche, that vast silence filled with strange creatures and detritus thrown from the surface that just kind of landed there.
I have some deep frustrations with some external situations over which I have limited control, some shame over certain career achievements not having been reached. So much shame I don't really want to say that out loud, fearing judgment. But since this is all about being transparent with myself, it seems absurd not to say it.
But the larger fact is for all this, I don't want to drink or take any substances today, and I'm not acting out in other ways to ease the pain or confusion. Sometimes that seems like a ridiculous thing to say out loud after 31 years, but since I am aware of people who have gone out drinking after 10-20-30 years sober, and some who have died as a consequence, it's not a small thing.
Long term sobriety is not glamorous, it's life experienced - everything all the time - with the volume turned to 11. As I have said before - life without shock absorbers...and no windshield.
However, there are moments like today when I can talk to a dear friend such that my experience of this walking can give relief, maybe shed light, or other times I can talk to someone who is new to this life and help them stay sober another day. Then all the muddling through and the seemingly at times absurd lengths I go to be honest with myself and others that frankly at times seems to verge on self-destructive, has meaning.
I wish I could say which way to go forward with my life was crystal clear. It's not. I have lived one day at a time for so long now I don't think I know any other way. Each day is about being more or less in tune with a sort of internal divining rod that I let guide me.
I do meditate every day. I try to do some yoga and walk. I write most every day. I try to be a decent human being. This year I'm also doing a fair bit of political work for obvious reasons, like - you know - survival, but am grateful for having found a way to do that that is both relatively simple and incredibly effective.
I hold space for others who are going through tricky changes and who are discovering their voices - in life and art. I spend a lot of time - that I love - working with other writers - as a teacher, coach, editor and friend.
I wonder what has happened to my theater work as a director, I seem to only be writing now for the most part. I kind of miss the rehearsal room but my internal divining rod has led me away from that for the lasy while. Will it lead me back? I don't know.
So much I don't know.
But I am sober. I have walked through a lot of life this way, more years than I was alive when I hit my bottom at 23 - a horrifying sense of not even existing in some way - not to mention not being able to even get drunk anymore. I wish I could tell you it's all been a glittering triumph or that I was a paragon of mental health, but that would be a lie. It's been a journey, one that still continues. A bumpy ride at times, other times exhilarating and seemingly effortless, some years full of grief and low level depression, and some moments even now, 31 years later, when it feels like there is a trap door that has opened up beneath me that I tumble down wondering when I will hit a bottom, seemingly lost and thinking: wait, what? I'm 54, shouldn't I be you know More Together Than This?
I try not to take these moments of confusion, which at times are painful, out on anyone, but sometimes I do, mostly the people closest to me of course. One of the things I am examining so closely now is how I navigate such things and why. Imprints from a chaotic childhood as an only child amongst multiple caretakers most of whom had wildly different value systems from one another and most of whom were not really meant to have kids but there I was - the proverbial inconvenient truth. Sometimes consequently, I feel safest when alone, because only then do I have to account to no one. That is an illusion of course, because it's not like all those people and experiences just vanish when I'm by myself.
Alcoholism amongst other things is a disease of isolation, it wants you alone in a room and dead. So, this is one of my primary conflicts, both desiring being alone and knowing at times I need to resist that urge. To allow others to see me in more vulnerable states, which I find so shameful, especially fear.
I was told when I began recovery: you need never be alone again. I did not understand it then. But I do now. I might feel lonely. I meet be alone, but I am not alone. I am connected to so many people and to whatever powers this internal divining rod and a sense - astonishingly enough and more and more - of a place amidst the cosmos. Hard to explain that and won't even try at close to 4am, but it's a great piece of knowledge - not as in facts but as in something far deeper.
Finally, also, a sense of happiness seeing people younger than me agitating for a new and better world. I remember so vividly being that age and agitating my heart out, but it was the Reagan era and no one listened. What a joy it is to see these young people be heard. It gives me great joy. My friend Spencer once said he felt that those of us who don't have our own children have a certain love to offer the world and young people specifically that those with children have to reserve for their own kids, and I feel that now more than ever. I feel an optimism for the future that I have never felt before. I don't know if I'll be alive to see it in full flower, because when I mean future - I mean Future as in 30-50 years from now, but there is hope.
I mean to do my best to help keep the world alive for this new generation to take over. I used to joke with my theater work I felt like those medieval monks who hand copied the Greek and Latin texts in monasteries to keep them alive until those ideas finally fueled the Renaissance. And I see now it's not just the theater, it's my whole life that is this, living and creating, in hope for this new world that now seems possible - a tiny glimmer on a horizon - one that I will make whatever is left of my life's work to not see extinguished.
What does this have to do with sobriety? A lot actually, because in staying sober and helping others do the same, it's the same kind of thing. Passing on what I have been given, keeping alive something that is only kept alive by free action of people who are never paid, except in the gift of our own sobriety, our own lives.
But now I have rambled enough for the time being. Thank you for reading, for bearing witness, for holding space.
Monday, February 19, 2018
I'm still alive!
Sorry to have been so absent for so long. It's been a lot this beginning of the year. The good news is everyone I know and love is still alive so far - a plus. Also my freelance life writing, teaching workshops, editing and coaching is moving apace. I am still seeking out an agent and sending parts of my two books to various places, and to some small publishers. However, my play Shit! was chosen for a play development program at IATI downtown, and will have a staged reading in June
My hope for the world at the moment centers on the kids from Parkland High School in Florida who are taking a tragedy and turning it into a movement. Those young people remind me a lot of the freshmen I taught at Fordham when I was adjunct teaching. This is a new and powerful generation, and I am proud of them and will do all in my power to support their work.
In terms of writing and my own life, I am waiting on a number of things, and may have some news soon, but since not sure when that will happen, I wanted to at least post the invite here for the reading of my amazing writing workshop coming up this Tuesday at Indian Road Cafe uptown in Inwood (NYC). Come along if you can. All the women in the workshop have impressed me with their excavating of deeper territories, accompanied by a sense of humor, born from experience...I too will be reading.
We are beginning a new session of the workshop in mid-March, so if you want to join us, give me a shout (using email on flyer below), everyone is continuing on, but we can bring in two more members. Meanwhile, if you would like one-on-one help with your writing, I am working with people all over the world now as a coach and editor. I'd be happy to help you move along your own projects at whatever stage from very beginning to needing a final edit!
And, there is ONE spot left for the writing retreat I am leading to Westray (one of the Orkney Islands in Scotland) in July. If interested, get in touch. This island is magic, and you can get stuff done there that would seem impossible in real life. I don't know why, but it's true. Here is link to my post when up there this past summer: https://julialeebarclay.blogspot.com/2017/06/in-orkney-in-heaven.html
My hope for the world at the moment centers on the kids from Parkland High School in Florida who are taking a tragedy and turning it into a movement. Those young people remind me a lot of the freshmen I taught at Fordham when I was adjunct teaching. This is a new and powerful generation, and I am proud of them and will do all in my power to support their work.
In terms of writing and my own life, I am waiting on a number of things, and may have some news soon, but since not sure when that will happen, I wanted to at least post the invite here for the reading of my amazing writing workshop coming up this Tuesday at Indian Road Cafe uptown in Inwood (NYC). Come along if you can. All the women in the workshop have impressed me with their excavating of deeper territories, accompanied by a sense of humor, born from experience...I too will be reading.
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| John made this lovely poster! Need a designer? Give him a shout! |
And, there is ONE spot left for the writing retreat I am leading to Westray (one of the Orkney Islands in Scotland) in July. If interested, get in touch. This island is magic, and you can get stuff done there that would seem impossible in real life. I don't know why, but it's true. Here is link to my post when up there this past summer: https://julialeebarclay.blogspot.com/2017/06/in-orkney-in-heaven.html
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