FOR ALL THAT I STILL LONG FOR...

Come out of your wound closet and join the human race already!

This is the kind of taunting my mind riddles me with before my feet catch ground most mornings. Haunted, at sunrise, by the abstract undertow of a voice trying to reach the surface. As the day moves forward this abstracted voice (that I'm assuming belongs to me) will ping pong amongst the highways of my mind until, out of pure exhaustion it coagulates and surrenders into a general state of anxiety.

But today I can hear what the voice is trying to say.

Today it says: “I’m afraid you won't have children.”

I start this morning by watching an old Western on You Tube, digging for some relevant themes around men fighting for gold, themes that might inspire the subject of a new TV show that I'd been hired to write. But the chronic commercial breaks (brought to you by free programming) eventually deliver me, and all the vulnerabilities of the morning, into the arms of one of those self-help gurus and his perfectly timed commercial pulpit. He begins talking. I begin listening. And a wilder panic ignites about the way in which I’m choosing to -

spend this morning

spend this time

spend this one wild and precious life.

And in an instant, I know I can no longer afford to live the way I’m living.

He’s talking about how women are sold lies about their worthiness from a young age - a collective societal sin that convinces us that our true value lies in competing with men in the workforce, and then tragically, much later in life, we find ourselves wondering what the point of all that work is - that somewhere, after age 30, a woman begins to ask her self: "Shouldn't life be more meaningful than the pursuit of money and success? Shouldn't I have a purpose richer then building my own golden tower? And then right below that question, the most painful whisper of all: "What about kids? A family, maybe?"

He preaches on about how this primal need for a life hallmarked by more than just competing in the world’s endless economic Olympics is uniquely feminine. That the masculine, although also interested in family dynamics, could easily sustain a meaningful life from 80 hours of work a week, where the feminine would eventually begin to ask, “But… to what end and for what?”

If I didn't feel this radical self-helpers words to be true (perhaps to some, even sexist) to my very core, I wouldn't be so upset about his philosophy.

I’d be able to intellectually dismiss him: find data that supported why the path I was actually walking was better…more…THE RIGHT ONE!

But his voice is resonant with the one I’ve successfully suppressed.

The one I sleep on every night.

The one that rudely wakes me at three in the morning and sends me to the kitchen for a snack, so that I might feel full enough and/or numb enough to survive the emptiness of another night alone with all my "success", with all my modern woman-good-feminist-dreams-come-true...

And I'm not not a feminist.

But my body lives in a rhythm beyond the confines of the society in which it was born into. It wants a home deeper and richer than any of the ones my salary could rent.

My womb knows that if I was a mother, that I’d value my motherhood as my greatest accomplishment. Beyond logic, beyond sense or reason, beyond personal ambition.

Most days are occupied with the things I've filled my live with. You can say that those things are my life, but they're just the things I've always put in my cart. And I suddenly don't want to buy them anymore.

I feel the You Tuber’s prophecy disrupting the narrative, his words rummaging through all those items that make up my so-called-life.

At my lowest times, it feels I’ve even traded some of my most self-redeeming items ( the theater, my improv team, open mic nights in New York City watering holes, my personal essay writing), that I’ve traded those purer versions of me for a pay check in television writing. And although sometimes aspirational, when sailing on the greater grace of a unique wind, a project who’s wingspan feels worthy of all the precious time I’ll spend creating all that fiction — it’s those emptier moments that really bury me, when TV land devolves into something much more plastic - trading the sacred and ancient craft of storytelling for some "sellable content a streamer might buy.”

Okay. Yes. I'm being hard on everyone involved here.

I’m writing from my inner critic -- the voice in me that comes to take a shit on all that I do, in order to police the course, to aggressively remind me when I'm even remotely steering in the wrong direction:

"Wake up! Back in your lane, that pure one, that dreamer, that truth seeker, that girl that believes that if she followed her heart, that her heart would lead to creative fulfillment, an artistic career, a real man she loved that loved her back for real! And children she would cherish more than life itself."

I have always felt so far from the life I want to be living, even though I've only ever pursued the life I wanted to live.

And the only thing that grounds my self pity is that mantra of a feigned gratitude we cloak over our lowliest moments "Well, at least I still have my health." But this kind of comparison to those less fortunate as the only buoy to help resurface the joy is perhaps our most toxic form of gratitude. It's just the other side of that greedy coin of comparison. A coin toss game not worth playing. A wiser sick person could very well look at me in those moments and say "Well, at least I still have my joy!"

I want my joy back.

I want to rebel against my life with delirious delight. To feel real joy for all that I have made of it and even more for all that I have failed with it. For all that I still long for, and for all that I may never come to know. That I may humbly love the life force animating through my body, here, now, living boldly amongst the unrequited dreams, against that thread bare hope, that although frighteningly pathetic at times, still illuminates the inherent potentiality that is the very gift of my life because —

To be alive is to want.

To be alive is to long.

To be alive is to navigate the approaching cliff’s edge of our own mortality and to race towards it with openness, exhilarated by the whipping wind of death against our delicate skin, as life's chariot races toward that mysterious finish line -- and then to erupt with spontaneous laughter as the first wheels tip over that precarious edge, hysterical now, because we finally realize, after all the deaths along the way, that this very terrifying finish line is actually the most magnificent threshold we'll ever cross. A new beginning arriving but only at the final hour.

I long to linger through my days, inviting this sacred connection to the only voice I can rely on, my own. And not to commodify it, quantify it, or force it to be art, or current, or relatable, or appropriate, or anything other than the catching of the divine whisper of a new day - and to be in that very sprit of that catching with the kind of romance one might have whilst hunting for fireflies on a warm summer night, bewildered by those fleeting sparks of light that have finally made there way into your jar.