I haven’t written anything on this blog for the past six months, despite the fact that I declared to everyone in my last post I’d be writing a ton now that I’m unemployed yet again.
I’m going to create! I had announced. I’m going to unapologetically live my best artist life and write every single day and share it with the world!
I did write a lot after posting that. I’ve written thousands and thousands of words these past six months about everything from my solo adventures at the Venice Beach drum circle and psychedelic trance parties in Berlin to tangential esoteric musings on my relationships with nature and with social media and with my friends. I’ve taken writing classes, read books on writing, experimented with writing styles, and have spent more hours than I can count holed up in the corner of the Hollywood-hip late night coffee shop by my house, typing away on my laptop alongside all my fellow patrons working on their movie screenplays and music tracks and stand-up routines. Because I can’t shake the feeling, the deep knowing, inside of me, that I’m supposed to be doing this. That writing about my life and my thoughts and my dreams will somehow help. Help others in ways that I can’t yet see or comprehend.
So why haven’t I released any of it?
You know, the usual. Indecision. Self-doubt. Perfectionism. Fear of judgment. Fear of commitment. Fear of failure. The same stuff that’s held me back my entire life from pursuing my dreams.
What if you post things that make people think you’re naive and silly and a bad person?
What if you spend all this time writing things and no one reads any of it?
What if you spend all this time writing things and you find out you’re actually terrible at it?
What if you end up broke and a failure because you were doing this when other people were doing real-people things like becoming doctors and lawyers?
The day before New Year’s Eve, my uncle died. Suddenly. He had a heart attack in the shower. That was like, a week ago.
A lot of people are very familiar with death. Not me. Until this point, death was still something that happened to other people’s family and friends. It was an abstraction. A far-away concept.
I guess in a way, it still is. When my mom called late at night to break the news, my body sort of shut down. “I’m so sorry to hear that,” I said vaguely to her. I should feel sad right now, I thought. But I can’t feel anything at all. And then: maybe it’s better that I can’t feel anything. Maybe the numbness will keep the sadness away.
Death is so abrupt. Like one moment your beloved uncle is cooking some epic pad see ew for you and the next he’s a pile of ashes in a little vase. One moment he’s this person texting you juicy Game of Thrones theories and the next he’s being referred to in the past tense.
Was. My uncle was. Stupid past tense. The morning after my mom told me he was dead, I sat down by myself and considered all the things my uncle used to be. My uncle was incredibly smart. And incredibly funny. And generous. And he geeked out over all the same things I did. Like when he took me to see Wicked at the Pantages and we both had tears streaming down our faces during the part where Elphaba and Glinda sing “For Good” and when we blazed at my house after my parents went to bed and listened to the seventh Harry Potter book audio tape and broke into hysterics over the epicness of Jim Dale’s British narrator voice.
And then, remembering all the things he was and knowing that he wasn’t those anymore, that he wasn’t anything anymore, I started crying a lot. Ugly tears. Body-wrenching sobs.
And I realized that feelings aren’t things you can pick and choose from. If you want to be alive, you have to accept the pain with the joy. And there’s something beautiful about that, about the fact that you’re feeling so much. That you’re so alive. So I kept sitting with the pain and kept crying and kept contemplating what my uncle’s death meant to me.
He was apparently a super talented writer. His sister, my aunt, would often say he was the most naturally gifted writer she had ever met, which meant a lot coming from a professional writer for the LA Times. He would shrug and say the characters in his stories had a life of their own. They were talking to each other in his mind and he was just transcribing what they were saying. Really? I would say to the two of them, leaning across the table in my eagerness. Dude, I want to read your stuff!
My uncle wrote a lot, just like me. But I never got to read a single word he put to the page. I don’t want to let anyone see the things I’ve written, he would say to me. Just the thought of it gives me anxiety.
He had a lot of self-doubt and perfectionism and fear of judgment and fear of failure. Just like me. But he was starting to overcome it – a few months ago, my aunt proposed that she and he and my other aunt all write a novel together and their faith in him helped him agree to it. Their loving support gave him new motivation and bravery to create. Gave him all this new energy and inspiration and then – boom. No more time. No more chances.
The way his life ended is what’s so jarring to me. It wasn’t this fairytale ending at all. It wasn’t the kind of situation where you could say well, at least he lived a full, happy life. You couldn’t say that. Because he never got to create the kind of life he really wanted to live. He was too paralyzed by fear, by some other mental obstacles and trauma he would sometimes hint at but never did tell anyone about.
It’s so jarring because we’re so similar, the two of us. All of this artistic potential and all of this fear getting in the way of it. The only difference is that his fear went on for three decades longer than mine. On and on and on, carving patterns of paralysis deeper and deeper into his psyche until his time ran out.
My uncle liked my writing a lot. He thought my blog was hilarious. He even used the word brilliant. That’s one of the last things he said to me, in fact. It’s brilliant. He never showed me his work, but he never failed to give me the highest praise for mine. He told me again and again how bright my light was. But he couldn’t see his own.
It’s pretty stupid, that the two of us would be so stymied by something as ridiculous as self-doubt.
Because when I examine the insecurity, I can see so clearly that it’s just a pretend thing our minds have made up. It has no actual basis in reality. There’s no real point to the fear. It’s very likely we’re our own worst critics of our work, and even if others judged us, how would that judgment actually hurt the quality of our lives? Even if we failed to produce anything anyone liked, so what? At least we tried. At least we followed our hearts. At least we lived as fully as we possibly could. Isn’t that the whole point?
I’ve been working through artistic self-doubt all year, and I’m proud of how far I’ve come. I’ve stopped caring about what I look like when I dance, I’ve started to say that I’m a singer instead of just saying that I “like to sing”, and I’ve even turned my hair into a canvas for countless new braided updos. I’m even drawing and painting again, a passion I hadn’t engaged since like, eighth grade. And every time I cast aside the fear and dive into artistic expression, I feel exhilarated. Joyful. Alive. We’re all artists, you know. It’s just that most of us have convinced ourselves we’re not because we don’t get paid to create. So we consume instead. We consume Netflix and our Facebook newsfeeds and restaurant food, stuff other people get paid to create for us, but how nourishing is it for our souls?
The day after Christmas, as my uncle was preparing a Thai dinner for our whole family, I decided I’d make a cocktail to go along with it. I threw mezcal into a shaker with grapefruit juice and wondered aloud if cayenne pepper would be a good addition, if lime would be nice to include.
He asked me, in incredulity, if I was just making up the drink as I went.
“Yup,” I said.
“And you’re gonna serve it to eight people without any idea how it’s going to turn out?”
“Umm. Yeah.”
“Damn. I have to make a dish at least four times by myself before I feel like it’s good enough to feed to anyone else.”
My mom chimed in at that moment, saying that her chef friend told her that there were no mistakes in cooking, because “cooking is art, and there are no mistakes in art.”
I winked at him and told him I was engaging in experimental art. He laughed. And then a few days later, he died.
And then the night after that, after all the crying happened, I sat in a circle with fifty people at a meditation retreat in Big Bear. We discussed how we could each live a more fulfilled and awakened life in 2019, and what gets in the way of that. “I could pay more attention to the quality of each moment of my day,” I said, to head nods. “I could get off Instagram and stop wasting my time with mindless consumption.” I paused. “And I could stop worrying about what people think of me. I could stop listening to the voice of fear in my head and finally commit to creating the things I want to create and get them into the world.”
We then wrote down our mental blocks on little pieces of paper and threw them into a fire to free ourselves of them once and for all. I wrote down self-doubt, fear of failure, and fear of struggle. And then I burned them. For both of us.
As the clock counted down the minutes to the New Year, all fifty of us set intentions for 2019, lighting a candle at the altar as we each spoke ours into existence.
I will give my gifts to serve the healing of our planet.
That’s my intention this year. In 2019, I intend to give my gifts as fully and freely as I know how to. To inspire hope, to spark creativity, to cultivate love, to connect people to each other and themselves and the Earth again, all for the purpose of contributing to the healing of a world that’s growing more and more chaotic by the day.
It’s hard. It’s hard to survive as an adult in this world that we’ve inherited, let alone thrive in it. It’s harder than I ever imagined it would be. It’s lonely and exhausting and paralyzing and scary. But we’re not alone. We’re all in this life together. And we can help each other to be brave, to move through the fear and the despair to find the light inside us that will enable us to create, from our hearts, the more beautiful world we truly want to live in.
Writing is one of the ways I choose to do this. Even though it’s scary, even though I have no idea if anyone will like it. It’s what my heart wants me to do. It’s what my uncle would want me to do, too. So I’m finally breaking my six-month blog hiatus with this first offering of 2019. Unpolished and imperfect, but it’s okay. This one’s for you, Chuck.
