Russian Roulette

"Open your eyes, look within.  Are you satisfied with the life you're living?" - Bob Marley

I stood in line tonight at the grocery.  As I idly scanned my Facebook feed from my phone while my groceries were being bagged, the elderly bagger named Louie nudged me and said, “We’ve been having a discussion tonight and I wanted to get your opinion on something.”  I looked up at him intently.  “Shoot.” I stated.  “If someone offered you a billion dollars to play Russian Roulette would you take it?  You’d only have a one in 6 chance of dying. 1 out of 6 bullets.”  Without hesitation I responded, “Not a chance in Hell Louie.  Not a chance in Hell.”  He winked. “Me either kid.  Me either.” And so we went on about our ritual.

For some reason, driving home the conversation stuck with me.  More so because I’m not sure if a few years ago I would’ve answered the question so quickly and with such unabashed confidence in knowing my retort.  A few years ago I was lucky to get through my days without wishing that this life would somehow just vaporize into thin air.  

Every step for many years felt as if I was running in cement.  Going nowhere fast and if something didn’t change I was going to be frozen there, a statue of myself ‘The Girl Who Couldn’t Get Away From Herself’ they would’ve called me.  Repeating the same patterns of behavior over and over again expecting different results.  Yes, the definition of insanity.  I was the poster girl.  I had everything externally, an insane career, piles of friends, jaunting around the world just because but on the inside…I was vacant.  A shadow.  Some sort of lost semblance of something that I was supposed to be but couldn’t find my way to. There had to be more.  I had to be more.  

And then one day, after something insignificant, out of nowhere I decided that I no longer needed to carry these weights.  I could be something different.  Something better.  As long as it took, I would pull myself out of this drowning of the self.  I would find light.  And so I did.

It wasn’t easy.  It required a concentrated effort to unravel myself from myself.  Every time I went to react, I chose to act instead.  I chose to consciously and purposely move instead of chaotically flounder.  What did I want the outcome to be was the penetrating thought with my every word, with my every movement.  If I wanted love, I had to project love.  If I wanted peace, I had to seek it.  If I wanted understanding, I had to understand.  If I wanted something to be beautiful, I had to first believe that I was, in whatever form.  If I wanted forgiveness, I had to forgive myself first and foremost.  

I dusted off the hope chest of myself and went through each shred of paper, photograph, poem, travel, lover, lesson and embraced them all….one by one.  I incorporated the pieces of me into a wholeness of the being that I was now.  I took the 14 year girl in me who had been stopped in her tracks with anguish and held her hand and let her know that she was ok.  I had this now and we were gonna be just fine.  I stared my 30 year old self in the face, hugged her really fucking hard and said, “You will get through this and be far greater than you could ever comprehend.”  And I let her rest.  

I decided to be a little bit more gentle with myself.  To drink less wine.  Absorb more air.  I decided to envision, visualize, believe.  I would whisper as I drove for miles in my car, in the middle of the night, “Wherever you are, the rest of my life, I love you, I’m grateful for you and I’m ready when you are…”  I allowed myself the ability to wait patiently, to flow with the current instead of fighting the tide.  I would get where I needed to go if I could just float.  Just be.

And slowly but surely, it came.  Because slowly but surely I was ready to see it, to embrace it.  To recognize it.

There are a thousand cliches of self help.  But in the end, it’s two words.  Help yourself.  Stop waiting for some lightening to crack from the sky of your being to jolt a change forward.  Be your own electricity.  Stop grunting and start being.  There is no elixir.  There is no magic moment. It’s one foot in front of the other, doing the next right thing.  Being the next right thing.  It’s about being a boomerang.  What you project out will be what comes back.  It’s about releasing yourself of instant gratification and having patience with the process. It’s about having a process.  

I still falter. I am human.  But I would so much rather this, the strangely beautifully confusing moments to be my story than the last moment being that I was stupid enough to lose out on the next chapter because I might be willing to play a stupid game of staring down the barrel of something I might not be able to come back from. 

This is beautiful.  This is life and this is enough.  I am enough.

Thanks for listening.

I Love You Still

Super honored to have a piece of my writing published via Elephant Journal xo

http://www.elephantjournal.com/2014/10/i-love-you-still/

A year ago....London calls, and home beckons...

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"And in the end, we were all just humans drunk, drunk on the idea that love, only love, could heal our brokenness." - F. Scott Fitzgerald

The dishwasher hums.  The washing machine churns.  It’s a Saturday night and I listen to him lull her to sleep.  A year ago this weekend I was in London.  I was leaving Noely, Tree and Simon at a train station as I took the journey to Hackney to end the last night, in the wee hours of the morn, in Johanna’s kitchen with her and Amanda.  Things have changed.  A lot.

A year ago at this time I was on an incredible spiritual journey.  I was deeply in therapy; I was working with a Shaman.  I had made a difficult conscious choice to change my life.  At whatever cost that came.  I had decided that I would be alone, for the rest of my life if that is what it all would mean, to find the only true love that I could ever really hold on to.  Myself.  A year ago today, I decided that although I was broken, I was not unfixable.  A year ago today, I decided to rewrite my story.

And so, surprisingly even to me, I did just that.  I took all of my broken bits, beautiful moments, tragedy and confusion and pieced myself together again, one stitch at a time.  Had I met him any sooner, I would’ve blindly walked passed him.  I wasn’t ready.  Not for him. Most certainly not for her.  I was only beginning to grasp the concept of letting go of all that which I could not control.  I was only beginning to grasp that this, all of this, was about so much more if I could only allow myself to see it.

To seek peace – at whatever cost seems like a strange concept really.  Shouldn’t it just be a natural state?  For many perhaps.  Not for me.  It had never been my way.  I always thought too much, felt too much, saw too much.  The majority of my life had been spent trying to save other people all of the while feeling completely selfish in doing what I wanted.  To clarify, some may have felt shorted by me, however I could never find a way to express that it was just that others needed me more.  Until I guess the moment arose that I realized perhaps I needed me more.

I dreamt of London last night and it wasn’t until I sat down to write tonight that I realized the timing.  A year ago today I was in the flurry of a soulful hurricane.  Myself, everyone around me igniting.  Everything I touched kept leading others and myself on a path.  In no grammatical eloquence I can only say it this way – it was the trippiest time of my fucking life.  The Universe was this orb following me.  Pushing me.  Putting me on airplanes, and in circumstances that tested everything about myself that I was supposed to learn and show others.  It was a release and absorption all at once.  The noise of it all was deafening.  

It would be a lie to say that I haven’t been distracted a bit over the past many months.  Of all of that.  The intensity.  The spirituality.  I have him now.  And her now, and my focus has shifted.  But it’s brought about challenge.  Another journey.  Another path. 

Tonight however I am consumed with that time.  The urge to remember that it is about so much more. I hold things within myself again, like I used to.  My back aches for no reason because I don’t know how to release.  I don’t know how to express love and confusion.  I don’t know how to show gratitude with all that I have but to acknowledge and embrace how far I have come.  I don’t know.  How do you hold on to who you have become and release the only thing you have ever known about yourself?  If that even makes sense.

Each night, when I go to sleep, and each morning when I wake, I feel peace.  For both I do with a boy who has decided to hop on my crazy train and embrace the fact that I talk to the Universe, drink too much wine, have more plans than we could ever have time for, buy way too much shit for his daughter than necessary, have long philosophical talks with most of my ex’s and dance randomly in my kitchen.  For that, I would trade nothing. 

However tonight, I wish he knew me a year ago.  Although he was to meet me only a couple short months later, I wish he knew me, as lights burnt out as I walked passed them, as I sought comfort in the stories of strangers, as all of this was unfolding, the finding of me so that I could finally know him. And maybe tonight, I miss me a bit, because she hides sometimes in the shadows of the now…but she is there, fire in her belly, passport in hand….ready…and perhaps the her of then is my clarity of now.  I don’t know.  I’m still learning.

A year ago tomorrow Amanda and I rode in a cab to Heathrow.  She said to me, “You’re a really beautiful person you know, I wish you believed it….” I cried and said, “I wish I did too.” Perhaps now, I believe it a bit more.  All of these things that I’ve done.  All of these things that I have seen.  They are a story within a story.  Perhaps even tonight is too and a decade from now it will be told in a different way, in a different version, with different people around.  But tonight, embodied by a year ago, I am wrapped in the blanked of my now and it is worthy of acknowledgment.

Thanks for listening.  

You Don't Know Shit in Your Twenties: Act - Don't - React

I'm pretty sure I spent the majority of my twenties being reactionary.  Every emotion, every thought.  It became an acquired discipline as I got older to just fucking breathe.  Let things go.

In my twenties, everything was so monumentous.  It was so defining.  I had no idea, the older that I got, things would just 'be what they are'.  They would ebb.  They would flow.  They would change and evolve and except for myself and my reactions to it all, there wasn't a lot that I had control over.  That evolution creates a sort of serenity.  A knowing.  A peace.

There are no answers.  I spent so many years of my life plaguing myself seeking reason.  Sometimes there is none.  And as you progress in life you begin to realize that resistance to the belief that you are exactly where you are supposed to be regardless of the discomfort, is futile.

So you succumb.  You succumb to realizing that not everyone or everything will ever be as good as you want it or them to be.  You succumb to realizing that sometimes, there are 0 answsers, only acceptance.  You succumb to accepting that love doesn't come in the form of a neat little package and most certainly, serenity doesn't come in disregarding the voice within. And you succumb to the fact that all of that, in it's annoying, uncontrollable everything, is all good. 

And so you learn to act.  Not react.  You learn to be, not be provoked.  You learn to judge little and accept more.  You learn to become situationally aware because you realize that it isn't all about you and your moments....it's about much more.  It's about two wrongs not making a right and a peaceful nights sleep knowing you did good that day far out trumping demon's the day after.  It's about just doing the next right thing for you and those around you - because well, that's what we're here for. 

And so you learn to age with grace instead of combat.  Because it makes more sense that way.  And as much as I spent so many years arguing against my future - I feel ok now....because I finally began to listen to it.  Find quiet.  Find gratitude.  Act.  Not react. I didn't know that for decades.  I do now.  It was worth the wait.

That's all.

Thanks for listening.