19

Jul

The season of waiting.

“Perhaps the reason you are drawn to flowers is not only for their outer beauty, but because they remind you beautiful things will bloom after the longest seasons of waiting.”

– Morgan Harper Nichols

That quote is from an art print I recently bought and hung over my desk. It’s part of a trio of prints by the artist and poet Morgan Harper Nichols that are now affixed to my wall, arranged in a diagonal cascade of color against what was once a blank white space. The top one features bright brushstrokes and reads, “Note to self: you can do this.” The print I quoted at the beginning of this blog, with white typeface against a backdrop of golden yellow, sits proudly in the middle. And at the bottom, one word stands out across a swirl of seashell pink and ocean blue: “Breathe.”

That’s what I am currently trying to do: breathe through a season of waiting. It hasn’t been easy. I have felt heavy much of the time. I have been creatively stagnant. I haven’t written or published anything new on this blog in over three months, a fact which has made me feel more guilty with each passing day.

What have I been doing with myself? In this season, time has been hard to track. As spring slid into summer, the hot, humid Savannah days have blurred together to the point that they’re almost indistinguishable.

The months of April and May found me clawing my way through my second quarter of graduate school. Like every university everywhere, Covid-19 thrust the Savannah College of Art and Design into a virtual learning environment virtually overnight, with lectures, discussions and interactions with my professors and classmates all mediated through a computer screen. With university facilities and local businesses shut down, there were no libraries or coffee shops to escape to, and I spent eight to twelve hours a day in my room with the door closed, trying not to go insane. Between crafting digital media copy (one class) and reading about public relations strategy (another class), I devoured New York Governor Andrew Cuomo’s daily press briefings and daydreamed about a not-so-distant past, when I was just a subway ride away from the lobby of a cozy hotel in the West Village, or the vaulted ceilings of the Rose Room at the New York Public Library. During one of many socially distanced walks under a canopy of live oak trees, I watched teenagers throw frisbees in Forsyth Park and fantasized about making a jail break. But where would I go? There was nowhere safe to run to. There was nothing to do but stay.

If there’s a word to describe how I’ve felt these last few months, it would be “suspended.” As outbreaks of Covid-19 continue to spike in various cities and states across the United States, plans have been put on hold. Friends will not be visiting, and I will not be making my summer pilgrimage across the country to the rocky shores of Case Inlet. It’s the first time in many years that I won’t spend part of this season looking out across that silvery slip of water from the picture windows of my grandfather’s house. My grandfather’s house has, in fact, been rented. By people I don’t know, but whom my uncle assures me are very nice.

As I write this blog, I’m keenly aware of how self-pitying it sounds. To be honest, fear and loathing of my own self-pity is what has kept me silent for so long in the first place. So I feel compelled to tell you that in spite of my complaints, I know how lucky I am. That my life is good and my problems – while real to me – are tiny and insignificant compared to what so many others are currently suffering through.

I recently had a long talk with a close girlfriend who has been a rock though some of the most difficult moments of my last decade. She supported me though the deaths of my parents, supplied me with endless mugs of herbal tea and an oceanside sanctuary to rest my head when I left my marriage, and counseled me though heartbreaks I thought I’d never heal from. During our conversation, she remarked how hard it must be for me to have to stay in one place, when my M.O. for the last many years was to hop on a plane whenever things got uncomfortable. She was right: travel has been my balm through pain and grief. It has been both a needed distraction and a tool for avoidance. “Maybe being grounded for a while will be good for you,” she suggested.

It doesn’t feel good, but as much as I can, I’ve been trying to look at this season of waiting as an opportunity. An opportunity to heal from the things I haven’t and to prepare for the next, more grown-up phase of my life. To that end, for the first time in almost five years, I decided to go back into therapy.

It was surprisingly easy to find a counselor, given the resources provided to me through SCAD. During the slow summer months, I’ve been able to schedule weekly sessions – for free – with a licensed therapist. And though – like seemingly everything else these days – they’re conducted on Zoom, the sessions have been a lifeline to me, helping me navigate both the uncertainty of the current moment, and all that lies ahead.

There is beauty in the waiting. There is pain too. And amidst all that is unknown, there is the conviction that something has irrevocably shifted. That whoever we will be on the other side of this tenuous moment we are all living through, we won’t be the same.

And maybe that’s OK.

Until next time, friends.

4 years ago Short URL 10 Comments

Change/Creativity/Savannah/Well-Being/Writing

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19

Jan

Montauk.

The sea wants to kiss the golden shore//
The sunlight warms your skin//
All the beauty that’s been lost before//
Wants to find us again.*

I woke before my alarm, song lyrics in my head. I heated up a mug of hot water, squeezed a slice of lemon into it, and put my headphones in. From the weathered armchair in the corner of my living room, I watched the sun rise over New York. I watched the clouds turn pink, their color deepening before dispersing, bathing the buildings in gentle light before bidding them goodbye. I watched from my eighth-floor window as a crammed subway train made its way downtown, filled with people going to jobs I didn’t have, leading lives I didn’t live. I watched the day begin, and then, I wrote.

I’m not sure when the shift began. I think it was twelve days earlier, on the way to Montauk, when from outside the window of my eastbound train, from over a bank of snow, I first glimpsed the Atlantic Ocean. And later, on a Long Island beach, when I climbed over more snow to get to sand and stood, watching the waves crash, watching the water recede and return, breathing in cold salt air, that for the first time in a long time, I felt like myself again. There was no grand epiphany, just a quiet voice whispering, “Remember?” And I did. And then I went back inside, to work.

I came to New York to write. And though I’ve been writing every day, I haven’t enjoyed it. The process has been torturous, and slow, and has often felt – to me – without purpose. But as a friend of mine once said, “Sometimes we make the story so big, we can’t tell it.”

When I tell you that writing saved my life, I’m not exaggerating. A few years ago, when I was in the worst part of my depression, when the world felt like it was collapsing around me, writing was the only thing that gave me any relief. I’ve always harbored a secret worry (not so secret any more, I guess) that I feel more than most people. That I feel more than what is normal. So, when real tragedy struck, the emotions were so big they threatened to drown me. That was when I first started experiencing panic attacks. When I couldn’t swallow food without feeling like I was choking. When I struggled to get out of bed.

I should have asked for help. But I didn’t. I wrote. And as I wrote, I learned something. I learned that if I could find a way to articulate my emotions so that other people could feel them too, if I could turn them into real, tangible things in the form of essays or blog posts, if I could get them out of my body and into the world, then they wouldn’t swallow me. Call it sharing my pain in order to survive. I don’t know if it worked, but it sure felt like it did. And it made me feel a hell of a lot less alone.

I don’t write to survive any more, but sometimes I forget that. Sometimes, I’ll be working on an essay or a section of dialogue or a scene in a play, and something will come out that’s intense or unexpected and knock me sideways and I’ll have to stop for a while. And I’m reminded that the thing that brings me the greatest joy can still, occasionally, be dangerous.

When I went out to Montauk, the weather had already begun to turn. By the time I got back to the city, the snow had melted, the streets had cleared, and it was – dare I say – pleasant. I took the subway downtown to look at a theater space, and using Google maps as my navigator, I experienced a feeling that can only be described as relief. There was no headache, no bitter cold. Being outside, walking around, was fun. Were people on the streets actually smiling? In New York?

I guess that’s the thing about winter. The storms can be brutal. But on the other side of them? Beauty. And every so often: moments of pure, unfiltered joy.

Until next time, friends.

*Lyrics from the song “Ordinary Love,” by U2

6 years ago Short URL 4 Comments

Creativity/Grief/Mental Health/New York/Well-Being/Writing

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29

Oct

The loneliest place.

“When you recognize that you will thrive not in spite of your losses and sorrows but because of them,

that you would not have chosen the things that happened in your life, but you are grateful for them,

that you will hold the empty bowls eternally in your hands but that you also have the capacity to fill them?

The word for that is healing.”

– Cheryl Strayed

I didn’t cry on the way to the airport. Julio, my Lyft driver, wouldn’t allow it. His questions began the moment he loaded my suitcase into the trunk of his Kia Optima.

“Sarah, why you leaving? You no like Miami?”

I explained to him that I did like Miami, but I had come there for a film festival and now that it was over, it was time to return to New York.

The questions continued. Did I like Reggaeton music? Did I have a boyfriend? Did I know how to dance? “Next time you come to Miami,” he said, “I will teach you how to dance Reggaeton.”

I laughed, but wondered if I should be worried. Who was this guy? What did he want from me? But a few minutes later, we were at the airport, and as Julio bid me a cheerful farewell, I realized it had all just been playful banter. And I felt grateful, because I had been too busy deflecting his questions to cry.

It wasn’t until much later, after the flight to LaGuardia, after the cab ride to Morningside Heights, after picking up the mail, unpacking my suitcase, and grabbing dinner at my favorite speakeasy on Broadway, that – safely inside my eighth-floor apartment, the door bolted behind me – the tears I had been holding began to fall.

I had been holding them since the night before, since the Casablanca-themed awards ceremony for the Bogart Film Noir Shorts Competition, where we had accepted an award for our film Speak No Evil and my soon to be ex-husband dedicated that award to my dead parents. Emotions rising, he choked on the words, and I pressed my lips together and looked away. I’m one of the most sensitive people you will ever meet, but sometimes, I avert my eyes. I have to.

He was right. We never would have been there, at that film festival in Coral Gables, if my parents hadn’t died. More accurately, we never would have been there if I hadn’t used money I inherited from them to help finance our film. So, when he spoke this truth – more elegantly than I just did – I averted my eyes. I had to.

I’ve played the “If my parents hadn’t died” game many times over the last few years. It’s a self-destructive game, but one that I’m quite good at. If my parents hadn’t died, I never would have produced that film. If my parents hadn’t died, I never would have written that play. If my parents hadn’t died and we hadn’t sold their house in Olympia, I never would have gone on that exhaustive search looking for a place called home, the one that led me to wander cobblestone streets in Prague at winter, and hike a sweltering trail through a Mexican jungle, and take a ferry boat to a remote island in the Pacific Northwest to sit in a circle with strangers and share intimate stories from my life. And if my parents hadn’t died, I most certainly never would have trashed most of my belongings, sold my car, packed up what remained of my life, and moved to New York.

A couple of weeks ago, I sat on a patio near Lincoln Center with a friend from L.A. and tried to analyze why New York – a city of eight million people – felt so lonely. “It’s the loneliest place on earth,” she declared. I had only been in town for a few weeks and yet, I couldn’t disagree with her. “I guess there are so many people here it just desensitizes you,” I offered. And then I repeated something that I’d heard someone say: “Apparently, you can cry in public and no one will look twice at you.”

My friend paused, taking me in. “Wait,” she said, “You haven’t cried in public yet?”

I hadn’t. Just like my return trip from Miami, I had been holding in the tears. But sure enough, shortly after she said it, it happened. It was late at night, and I was headed home on the subway after a long day. A busker boarded the train. “Ugh,” I thought. Another stranger asking for money, another reason to avert my eyes. But to my surprise, he lifted a violin to his chin and began to play one of the most beautiful songs I’ve ever heard. It was a sweet, plaintive melody that sliced right through me; the type of music that reminds you you’re alive. When he finished, I handed him a dollar, and he looked at me with such sincerity and said, “God bless you my dear,” that my eyes immediately filled up and spilled over. I got off the train, tears running down my face, too tired to wipe them away, and I walked home. And as I passed two police officers who barely acknowledged me, I realized what I’d heard was true: you can cry in public here, and no one will look twice at you.

I’m glad I came to New York. As homesick as I am for people I love and places I miss, it feels right to be here. Even the fact that it’s lonely feels – somehow – right. Maybe, paradoxically, the “loneliest place on earth,” is exactly where I need to be to feel less alone. Because in a city of eight million people, my worries and problems and fears seem less significant. In New York, I can be as odd and as quirky and as real as I want and all it means is that someone may pause for a minute, shake their head at me, and then go on about their day.

If my parents hadn’t died, I wouldn’t be here. And here is a place where I’m learning that maybe, I don’t have to avert my eyes. Here is a place where everything feels acceptable, which also makes anything seem possible. Here is a place where my writing is growing riskier and more honest and more dangerous, and I like that. Here is a place where I’m finally giving myself permission to be who I am and say what I feel.

Here may be the loneliest place on earth. But here – at least, for now – might be the only place for me to be.

Until next time, friends.

7 years ago Short URL 9 Comments

Change/Family/Grief/New York

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15

Jul

Loose ends.

“be easy.

take your time.

you are coming

home.

to yourself.”

– Nayyirah Waheed

I just started rehearsing a new play. Well, a play, and a monologue, two short pieces I’m directing this summer as part of a larger show. But the play, a one-act called Closing Time at Graceland, is the reason I’m still in L.A. Because when I started writing it (or rather, when it started writing me), something about the story stuck in my bones. Without realizing it, I wrote a longing-tinged love letter to my past. To opportunities missed. To the road not taken. To the dreamy hopefulness of youth, and the realization – that only comes with age – that hope is expensive.

I watched countless auditioning actors perform the play’s bittersweet climax and never once failed to feel a lump rise in my throat. I’m sure my emotional state had something to do with the timing: we held auditions in the weeks before and after I packed up my Cashio apartment; weeks I spent going through old photos and mementos, journal entries and play scripts, saying goodbye to my neighbors.

These last few weeks I have been engaged in a persistent tug of war between holding on and letting go. I’ve been reaching out to friends and making plans, checking items off my “things to do before I leave L.A.” bucket list, sorting through boxes of stuff in my summer sublet, and continuing to work on paring down my belongings to the bare minimum.

I have six weeks left. I feel the need to tie up all the loose ends, to see all the people I want to see, do all the things I want to do. I know that’s impossible. I’m still a person who craves closure, even though I’m not sure I believe it exists. As a writer, I prefer an open ending, probably because I’ve learned that few things in life ever truly resolve.

It’s the calm before the storm; these last sleepy, hot July days represent a lull in the calendar. Time in which to work behind the scenes and get my life in order before the chaos of August descends – the play, the parties, the fast push to the big departure date – signaling the end of an era.

I should be working harder than I am, but I feel heavy, unmotivated, and exhausted, prone to short bursts of energy followed by long afternoons where it’s tough to find a reason to leave the apartment. Friends ask how the New York plans are going, and instead, I steer the conversation toward the play I’m working on, my upcoming storytelling show, the new David Hockney exhibit at The Getty. Because this moment – this one that I’m currently living – is the one I’m preoccupied with.

Do I feel guilty about the fact that I don’t have more boxes checked with regard to the future? Yes. Does it make me uneasy when people ask me where I’m going to live in New York and how I’m going to pay my bills and I still don’t know? Yes, and yes. But here’s the truth: I wouldn’t be taking this leap if I didn’t have faith that somehow, some way, it will all work out. Perhaps for the first time ever, I trust myself. I trust the decision I’ve made. And I trust in my intuition that everything will come together when I need it to.

For a recovering (meticulous) planner, this type of faith in the unknown marks real progress. I’m scared as hell, but I’m proud of myself, too. So, for now, I’m going to enjoy where I am. I’m going to enjoy the last few weeks of this beautiful, sweltering Southern California summer. And I’m to going to continue to tie up those loose ends, wherever I can.

Until next time, friends.

 

7 years ago Short URL 5 Comments

Change/Los Angeles/New York/Theatre/Well-Being

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22

Jun

Rain.

“And once the storm is over you won’t remember how you made it through, how you managed to survive. You won’t even be sure, in fact, whether the storm is really over. But one thing is certain. When you come out of the storm you won’t be the same person who walked in. That’s what this storm’s all about.”

– Haruki Murakami

I was getting my nails done when the rain started falling. The Weather Channel and the app on my iPhone had been threatening for days that a storm was coming, but the warnings had thus far been inaccurate, and so I stopped believing in the forecast. But suddenly there it was, only a few hours before the staged reading of my play War Stories, the reading that I’d been preparing for all week, the reading that was the main reason for my trip.

By the time I left the salon, wearing only sandals, a tank top, and cotton shorts (owing to the hot, humid weather), the rain was coming down in angry, torrential sheets. As I headed out the door onto Broadway, my friend Rachel gave me my first New York rain advice: “Stay away from the curb.”

In truth, I’d been feeling angst-ridden all day, well before the rain arrived. Though my week in New York had been mostly wonderful, there had been difficult moments too, moments that made me question whether I’d made the right decision to move there.

And now, trudging along Broadway, head down, rain pummeling my bare skin and seeping into my sandals, text messages started coming through my phone. Well wishes from dear friends in L.A. that tugged at my heartstrings. The fear and doubt crept in. “What am I doing?” I thought. “I’ve made a mistake. I want to go home.”

Of course, it wasn’t a mistake. The rain stopped. The skies cleared, leaving behind pockets of fog that wrapped themselves around skyscrapers and leant an air of magic and mystery to their ascent into the heavens.

And the reading I was so worried about? It was great. Better than great. Friends showed up. The actors who read the script were wonderful. And the post-read audience Q & A was practically painless, free from the incisive East Coast critiques I’d been fearing. It turns out that people in New York – or at least these people in New York – liked War Stories. They liked it more than I thought they would.

Later that evening, sitting down to a tapas dinner in an elegant, delicately-lit restaurant in the West Village, I asked the friends who were gathered there to go around the table and explain how they knew me, as a way of introducing themselves to each other. And as they did, I realized that while I don’t know a lot of people in New York, the people I do know are pretty spectacular. And I’m damn lucky.

I am lucky in a lot of ways. I’ve had a big life. I’ve lived everywhere from L.A. to London, Anchorage, Alaska to enchanting small towns in the Pacific Northwest. And I’ve traveled to many, many more beautiful places. And now, I’m preparing to pack up my life and move to the most exciting, maddening, terrifying, exhilarating city I can imagine. And when my friend Maeve, an opera singer who I once performed with in our high school choir in Olympia, WA, announced, about me, to the table: “You’re ready for New York, and New York is ready for you,” I knew that she was right.

I know that nothing in life is permanent. Things work, and then they fall apart. The parts of my past that are wonderful and are over are chapters of my history that I still own, just like I own all the bad and tragic parts too. Nothing is black and white. It’s all bittersweet. And it’s all beautiful. Because it’s all life.

Last week, I was reminded not to worry so much about where I’m going, but instead, to lean into this moment and give it everything I have. I was reminded to breathe and to trust that there are forces bigger than I am at work that will support me as long as I continue to believe in myself. And I was reminded that though rain is an inevitable part of life, the sun always pushes through the gloom eventually, making everything lovely again.

Until next time, friends.

7 years ago Short URL 16 Comments

Career/Change/Los Angeles/New York/Performing Arts/Writing

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06

May

New York.

“So I went to New York City to be born again.”

– Kurt Vonnegut

I’m not sure exactly when it happened. It may have been catching up over drinks with a friend – who I met two years ago at a film festival in Alaska – in the crowded White Horse Tavern, yelling to be heard over the blaring jukebox, as she told me I was sitting in the chair rumored to be occupied by the ghost of Dylan Thomas. It may have been the historic old theatre I toured – one of many – during which the endearingly eccentric theatre manager regaled me with stories of past productions as we climbed rickety, dust-covered stairs into the rafters to look at her enormous inventory of lighting equipment. It may have been the afternoon I wandered through Washington Square Park daydreaming among tulip gardens, or the night I woke to the crackling of thunder and was treated to a magnificent lightning storm outside my seventh-floor window, or the number of coffees and lunches I shared with former Angelenos, all of whom told me what I already felt to be true: that their creativity and productivity had expanded tenfold since they’d moved to the opposite coast.

It may have even been that very first day, on my way into the city from JFK, the taxi cab snaking through traffic in the rain, crossing the Williamsburg Bridge and plunging into that glorious skyline of concrete and glass, all shiny and gritty and hopeful. But whenever it happened, all I know is that somewhere in the space of the week I spent in New York to visit theatres and research moving my play War Stories there, something within me shifted from “I think I could live here,” to “This is home.”

Truth be told, I’d been feeling anxious about the trip right up until the moment I arrived. I don’t know a ton of people in New York. One of my oldest and dearest friends keeps a place there, but lately she’s been working mostly in California and wasn’t planning to be back in the city until the last two days of my visit. Other than her, most of my New York connections are soft:  actors and writers I know from L.A.; high school friends I haven’t seen much of – or at all – in years; people I’d never met but who were introduced to me through mutual friends. The week before I left, I reached out to everyone I could think of, most of whom responded with: “Call me when you get here and we’ll make a plan.” And so, on the bright, early morning I left L.A., I had very few appointments on my calendar, and no idea how this whole New York experiment was going to work out.

But as soon as I arrived, a funny thing happened:  everything fell into place. The emails and texts started rolling in. Could I come participate in a screenplay reading in Williamsburg? Yes. Meet for dinner? Yes. Coffee? Yes. Brunch? Yes. On my second morning in New York, an email came through from the owner of the theatre where I produce most of my work in L.A., telling me to call a friend of his who owns an Off-Broadway theatre in Midtown. He was expecting to hear from me, he said.

And on it went, all week, like a snowball rolling down a hill, gathering momentum, growing bigger, faster, stronger. I took three, four, five, meetings a day, and everywhere I went, I met lovely, hard-working, creative people. People who were engaged and interested and who seemed to genuinely want to help me. I couldn’t believe it. What was this myth I’d heard about New Yorkers being rude? That was certainly not my experience.

I should have been exhausted from all the scheduling, the emails and information exchanged, the city blocks covered on foot. But I wasn’t. I was energized. I was inspired. And it made me realize that this feeling was exactly what I’d been craving, exactly what I’d been missing these last few years in L.A. This is where I’m supposed to be, I thought. And before I left New York, I had made my decision. I was moving there.

I know that relocating won’t be easy. I know that New York can be a hard place to live, that the winters are cold and the summers are hot, that the apartments are tiny and expensive as hell and that the pace of the city can be exhausting. And I know that I still have a whole lot to figure out, like finding a job and a place to live. But I also know that the energy and excitement that I felt pulsing through my veins when I was there is something I can’t ignore. I know that last week, New York went from feeling like a near impossible dream to something that is very, very possible. And I know that if I’m serious about producing theatre there, then I need to be there. I need to spend the time to do it right, to develop a plan and a marketing strategy and do all the work that’s necessary to be taken seriously in a town where theatre is a serious business.

I moved to L.A. as a girl of eighteen, and I’ve now lived here – other than a brief stint in London and some extended stays back home in the Pacific Northwest – half of my life. I love L.A. and I know it won’t be easy to say goodbye. But the die has been cast. The decision has been made. And I’ve already begun to set the wheels in motion. And if all goes well, then by sometime this fall, I will be calling New York City home.

Until next time, friends.

7 years ago Short URL 45 Comments

Career/Change/Creativity/Theatre/Travel

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