Heart Centered

I have started and stopped a number of entries over the last year. I keep losing my train of thought, so I’m going to stream of conscious it a bit today and see what comes through.

2023 was quiet for me. My job in music is on half-hiatus; happily I am fortunate to work for a very generous person and have not lost income as a result. I have taken the extra time to work more diligently on this book that I’ve been festering about for years and I am 3/4 of the way through. I’ve got about 80,000 words and I’m still going. I don’t care if anyone reads it once it’s done. I just want to have finished one project in my life, then I will spend the rest of my days playing video games in a spaghetti stained tee shirt.

I have always experienced hibernation and then super social phases, contraction and expansion. The first 17 years of my life were introverted and solitary–music, drawing, reading, writing. I like a quiet existence and it brings me comfort, but there is another side that enjoys action and busts out here and there. I had a therapist who said I have two halves to one whole, one is quiet Mary, the other is Cycle Slut Raff. I have been working to integrate these two parts of me throughout this lifetime.

This has been a long period of hibernation, starting with the onset of covid quarantine. I have enjoyed it–knocking around my apartment, walking the dog, making dinner for Sam, just living peacefully. And I have learned some things in this quiet space that I would like to share with you.

First, all of this talk of 3D to 5D energy finally makes sense to me. For those of you unfamiliar with the concept, many spiritual teachers have been predicting a global shift in consciousness for quite some time. I didn’t get it fully, like what does it mean to move to a new “dimension”? Is that a new world? Is time and space altered? Then I heard someone say that it is not a new dimension so much as it’s a new, higher frequency, a speedier vibration, in which we are using more than just our five senses. It is the frequency of love and intuition that vibrates differently than the more dense energy of struggle and strife that we are accustomed to here on earth, in these bodies.

I can feel lately that there is something deeper taking over the wheel, and many of the worries of the mind are falling away. I’m not saying that I’ve suddenly become this magically blissful spiritual being, but I am at least calmer and less quick to react, which is huge for me. So I’m going to give you what is working for me, what I believe, and you can take it or leave it as you see fit. I’m not trying to sell you on anything.

Humans are in the middle of some real chaos. But we’ve always been in chaos, we just didn’t have the internet to show it to us in 3 minute clips. The upside of seeing it is that it is forcing many to wake up. More people are realizing that if we don’t learn to operate from a place of true understanding, we will continue this cycle of pain and suffering forever.

But what does operating from that place look like? For me, it is about shifting to feeling from the heart-center rather reacting to the noise in my mind. This is hard for me when it comes to people. If I see an animal, any animal, I open up immediately–heart automatically engaged with no effort. I say hi to every dog I pass on the street. Sometimes it’s just under my breath, but it’s there. Often I don’t even notice the person walking the dog. If a rat runs past me, same thing. I don’t get freaked out, I wish them well. I hope their short lives aren’t too hard. I like them all.

People on the other hand, not so much. I have a running monologue in my head when I’m out:

“Look at this dipshit blocking the sidewalk with his giant backpack. I fucking hate backpacks.”
“Did she look in the mirror when she put on that skirt??”
“Move. Move. MOVE!”

It’s constant. I am full of resentment toward the unwashed masses. Much of it is due to the fact that I live in NYC and we’re too mashed up together. But I am and will probably never be a people person. I am not interested in your baby beyond wanting it to be loved and cared for. I hate small talk. I’m uncomfortable around new people. I try to see people as beautiful but they make it so hard with their disposable plastic bottles and sidewalk spitting and constant selfies and shoving their fat asses onto the train without letting anyone off first. I have to catch myself in mid-internal rant and actively work to shift myself. I will find a doorway or a bathroom and shut my eyes and take a few deep breaths in order to get back out there with a renewed effort to cut the judgment and remember that under the personality and body there is the light of a divine soul.

I do this selfishly. I am determined to raise my frequency because it moves me, and the animals, and the children that ruin everyone’s flights forward. I know through experience that the more centered and loving I am, the happier I am. Then after that, I can feel that my energy radiates outward and can shift things either up or down for others. Like if I’m feeling shitty and react or speak in a way that makes someone else feel shitty, that will pass from them to the next person and outward. And vice versa, if I’m feeling open, I pass that on to the world around me. Those micro-movements can sometimes be the difference between a good day or a bad one for everyone in the vicinity.

I can finally feel that separation is an illusion. We hear that all the time but what does it mean? For me it means that everything we do or say or think ripples outward, infinitely. It informs our lives: what kind of jobs we have, what kind of friends we attract, what kind of abundance comes in. It is ALL connected.

I have been watching videos of people who have died and come back, and though experiences vary, many of them talk of a life review on the other side. We get to feel exactly how we have affected everyone and everything with whom we came into contact, good or bad. This filled me with some dread. There are so many things I absolutely do not want to relive. Bill Burr has a bit about shouting memories down in the shower, which is something I have always done. Like you have to noise it out of your brain. But once I got over the initial life review panic, I thought about the “legacy” that I would like to leave behind, sparking me to think about how my words and actions affect people and the air around me.

I’m trying at least. Here are some practices and mindsets that are working for me that might help you too:

–State your intention:

We have free will, so in order for your guides or angels or whatever to step in and help facilitate, there must be a clear intent on our part. Just state what you want out loud. I use this for everything, like “I choose to have an easy trip”, or “I choose to have a productive discussion.”

You’ll be shocked at how well it works. Not every time, sometimes there might be other factors at play and not having an easy trip might be the catalyst to something your soul wants to experience. But it’s wild that this simple trick smooths out so many roads. And even if you don’t believe in my woo woo stuff, it’s a quick way to set your mind in a positive direction.

–Accept that maybe you’re not supposed to have something:

I heard Carolyn Myss say that one of the largest causes of unhappiness is people wanting what is not theirs. Meaning expecting that if they want to be famous or a billionaire or date some specific person, that it should be within reach and that when it arrives it will make them happy. Our souls make specific plans before we get here, and maybe there’s a reason you’re not supposed to be famous. Maybe it wouldn’t even be good for you in the long run. And maybe you’re jamming up a real destiny that could make you much happier by focusing on the wrong things. Be willing to see things as they are.

–So along those lines, listen to your intuition and go where you are guided.

If roads keep opening up in a new direction, take a baby step toward it. Once you open your mind to a possibility, if it’s supposed to be yours, the path will open up when you look for it.

–Know that you have to clear out the old shit, and that’s not always comfortable.

In order to “upgrade”, we have to release old, dense energy from past trauma, from old beliefs, from vows or promises, in this life and all of our others. This can manifest in depression, in physical ailments that might not fully make sense, in feelings of disconnection and confusion. So give yourself breaks, be gentle with yourself, feel all the feelings. It helps me to imagine the feelings flowing through me and then out the top of my head. Don’t cling to your past stories. Allow yourself to evolve and become someone new.

I believe that we are on the cusp of a mass awakening. I don’t know if it will be in my lifetime, but I can feel it stirring. This will not be a revolution that comes from protesting or voting, although those things are important, but it will be a revolution of the spirit, the inner. Then the outer always follows to reflects the inner. We will reach a time where people look back at all of our violence and shake their heads in disbelief at our caveman ways.

I went through a period of panic attacks over all of the pain in the world. I would wake up in the middle of the night almost unable to breathe, thinking about all of the animal abuse happening in that very moment, and then that would expand to children, and then to everyone suffering in that moment until I felt nothing but hopeless, staring into the void.

Now when those feelings of hopelessness come up, I focus on my breathing and I visualize a light in my heart. I expand the light into my apartment, then out into the world further and further until it envelopes the earth and then heads out into space. I cannot control what is happening in the world, but if my little light shifts consciousness just a tiny bit, it at least feels like I’m doing something positive. It allows me to sleep and exist in this world with some peace.

My mother and many of the teachers I listen to are saying the same thing–that we are here to act as light bearers. We are not necessarily meant to DO the change as to BE the change. Meaning that the act of operating from the frequency of love and awareness in our small daily interactions and thoughts are enough to help move us forward as a whole.

I should add though, that there are people out there that will prey upon your kindness or good will as you work to elevate. The person I wrote about in my last blog is still causing harm to people, and most likely will continue to do so until they die. When we are normal nice people we give the benefit of the doubt, and that can be dangerous when dealing with a not so normal or nice person. Some people are just broken and they often mask evil intent quite deftly. So it feels important to add that working to operate from an open heart doesn’t mean ignoring red flags or putting yourself in harm’s way. Listen to your intuition and protect yourself. If something feels icky, it is icky. As this energy speeds up, the people who have always profited from darkness are ramping up their bad behavior in order to maintain their power and control.

They will not win in the end, but we’re not at the end. We’re in the messy, fucked up, insane, shitty middle where suffering and unfairness abounds. My Great Aunt Nonno used to say, “It’s a great life if you don’t weaken.” That always rang true to me. Being alive isn’t easy. It often sucks. But we’re here and we’ve gotta navigate it.

I am a novice and wiser people out there are handing out the information. But this is what is on my mind right now, and it feels like I have to put it out there in order to be able to move forward with any other topics in this blog.

If you are seeking more information along these lines, there are a number of awesome people out there. These are just a few that I regularly watch, there are hundreds more.

Next Level Soul Podcast – this guy has some very interesting guests speaking on a number of topics: https://www.youtube.com/@NextLevelSoul

Matt Fraser – he is super cute and very good if you are new to these ideas. https://www.youtube.com/@MeetMattFraser

Lee Harris – I find him calming and he gives clear information. https://www.youtube.com/@LeeHarrisEnergy

Eckhart Tolle – he speaks on some very deep levels and he’s one of the OG’s on the topic of soul. https://www.youtube.com/@EckhartTolle

Dolores Cannon – this lady is wild, and goes very deep like Eckhart. https://www.youtube.com/@dolorescannon2012

My mom’s blog. She doesn’t love it when I post it because she feels that seekers will find it on their own and she doesn’t want to get hammered by crazies. But if you’ve read this far, you’re probably okay and could use some of her wisdom. Just don’t send her any weird or angry messages. https://www.onenessofall.com

Much love to you, my friends.



Still Learning

As many of you know, I’m a Vanderpump Rules fan. I’ve been watching it since it first aired some ten years ago, and was richly rewarded for that devotion when all things Vanderpump exploded this season. This is not going to be an entry about this particular reality show, but it did lead me to some interesting insight into my own life, which I would like to share.

The grand villain of VPR is a douchebag, manipulating and lying his way through some truly garbage behavior, with gusto. And the internet has gone crazy. Most of the world would forget about it if he would own up to it, but he continues to lie and has never apologized with sincerity, and continues to get dragged. His ego will not allow him to admit defeat and it is his undoing.

During my obsessive viewing, listening to podcasts, instagram posts, insider gossip, and anything else related to this scandal, I was exposed to discussion and information about clinically diagnosed narcissistic behavior. Most fans believe, and I have come to agree, that this particular guy is a narcissist. We can’t know that with certainty just from watching an edited show, but if you go down the list of behaviors he fits nicely into the box.

This is a list of narcissistic traits that I got from Duke Health online.

  1. Sense of self-importance
  2. Preoccupation with power, beauty, or success 
  3. Entitled
  4. Can only be around people who are important or special
  5. Interpersonally exploitative for their own gain
  6. Arrogant
  7. Lack empathy
  8. Must be admired
  9. Envious of others or believe that others are envious of them

While awash in all of this info regarding a person that I feel like I know, but don’t really because it’s a TV show, I had a lightbulb moment. I realized that I had one of these people in my world, who ticks off every number on this list. I was heavily influenced by them for quite a while, yet had absolutely no idea it was happening or had happened until just now, some years after no contact.

For clarity I will call my own villain Patient Zero.

Weeks later, I remain stunned by this awakening enough to feel compelled to write about it. I know I can be oblivious and have loved many a problematic person. My broken ass likes a challenge. And bad people can often be charming and entertaining; it’s a survival skill and aids in their ability to do their bad work. But at this late stage in the game, at my age, with plenty of therapy and spirit work under my belt, I thought I was a decent judge of character and no longer easy prey to negative influence. It’s disconcerting to know that I am still vulnerable. And it helps me understand how rational, intelligent people end up in cults.

I am currently having conversations with two friends that I fell out with during the time of my friendship with Patient Zero. In both of these cases we recently came together and compared notes. We discovered that we had very little actual beef with each other, and that we had instead all been individually fed lies with the end goal being isolation from one another. Primarily MY isolation.

It worked for a time, until none of us were useful to this person and we were all dumped. Once that happened, and with more time, we were able to clear the cobwebs and find our way back to each other. But I could have easily lost these people forever and indeed I did lose them for a time. And I wonder if there are others that I don’t know about.

I know that most of you will start guessing on who I’m talking about. It’s human nature and gossip is fun. But it’s really not important and I am not writing this in order to out anyone.

Last month I went to a show and the minute we entered the venue I was verbally attacked about my recent surgery, by someone with mental health issues that I would never expect to read anything I write. It was bonkers and somewhat funny, but I was completely taken off guard. As was Sam, who said, “Fisticuffs already? We just walked in!”

Happily I was able to diffuse a ridiculous situation: one old lady attacking another old lady about the state of her face (pilot for Real Housewives of Downtown!?). But it was a reminder that while I write with friends in mind, not all who read what I write are friendly. I am not afraid to be honest, I choose to be as open as possible for good reason. But I have to remain acutely aware to tread lightly when it’s not directly about me.

I’m so blown away by this experience, and by how much time and distance was necessary to see it clearly. I was duped for YEARS and I didn’t sort it out in my head until YEARS had passed..

How does that happen? Very easily, I’m learning. It’s important to know that no matter how smart we are, there are smarter, crafty, fucked up people in the world who will happily manipulate our triggers, our desires, our insecurities, to satisfy their own needs. Despite the fact that I am had been trolled plenty in this life, I still tend to assume that people who want to be friends just want to be friends.

During that time period I also blew up a relationship that meant a lot to me, that I intended to keep for life. It was a midlife crisis that needed to happen and I’ve written about it enough. I’m doing fantastic now and I think that was me clearing out buried damage, with the relationship being collateral in the demolition. But it’s taken me a lot of sadness to get over it, a lot of guilt, a lot of self-hatred, a lot of despair that I am fucked up beyond repair.

I don’t blame Patient Zero for any of that. I made my choices, no one else. But I do see that I was buried in someone else’s toxicity and being purposely and gleefully pushed around a chess board with lies and half truths. I am convinced that this person got off on the games with all of the people in their life, feeling smarter and more in control than all of these intelligent, well-meaning people who had no idea what was really happening.

I was convinced to let go of people that could have helped me get clearer, faster. They were talked into doing the same with me: whispers in our ears, over the phone, through other people, all the time. Thank God we were all discarded when we were no longer of use, which then freed us up to compare notes.

All of it, I realize now, was a form of abuse. I was abused in a friendship. That one sentence is difficult for me to reconcile. I don’t like feeling weak or easily influenced. But I was, and I thought it was all me, that I was crazy. I was behaving like a crazy person, but not without some expert guidance down that slippery slope.

So I guess I’m here to say, yet again, in another form, that if it something doesn’t feel right, it’s your intuition telling you to pause and examine yourself and the people around you. And if it seems to good to be true, it probably is. And if you have a tendency to love charming assholes, you’ve gotta be on high alert when a new one rolls in looking all shiny and ready to party.

I know this life is a soul journey and I remain open and full of gratitude. I don’t want to live paranoid. But I’m also still learning. To the people that I hurt during that time of chaos, I truly apologize. I was having a hard time and not my best self. To the friends who patiently waited for me to get clear, who spent hours over many bottles of wine poring over details and reassuring me that it would be okay, I thank you. To the people who warned me repeatedly, I hear you now and I respect your wisdom. Thank you and I’m sorry it took me so long. Next time a villain shows up, I will be better prepared. And maybe by sharing this you will be too.

Namaste, bitches.





Outing Myself

I got a lower face and neck lift in November and have been conflicted about going public with it.

I always try to be as honest and open as I can on here. I love the AA saying, “we are only as sick as our secrets.” That has always proved true to me. Plus I believe that we all have the same feelings, doubts, and pains (barring sociopaths, narcissists, psychopaths, bad brain, etc.), and that we bridge gaps and help each other heal by discussing our own thoughts and feelings about our experiences. Those experiences can vary wildly from person to person, but the reactions and feelings really don’t. Writing has shown me that I am not unique and anything that I have felt has been felt by many others.

The problem with being open online is that you make yourself vulnerable to people with bad intent. When you have haters, and I have a couple of doozies (maybe all of us do?), they will distort and weaponize any bit of information gleaned from social media or gossip. I’m risking abuse by talking about a choice that not everyone might understand or agree upon. But I don’t want to live my life in fear of what someone with negativity in their heart thinks. I learned long ago that people will make up all kinds of crazy shit no matter how nice you try to be, so we all might as well just live our lives and ignore the rest.

One of the reasons I feel semi-obligated to talk about this at all, is that no one ever tells us about their own cosmetic surgery, despite the fact that it’s a booming business. Everyone wants to pretend it’s natural, which then causes the rest of us to compare ourselves unfavorably to celebrities who tell us it’s all diet, exercise and facials. We feel flawed or less then, and it’s not fair. Although it is understandable–Pamela Anderson talks about it in her Netflix doc, how she didn’t know that she was supposed to keep her implants a secret and it became the only thing anyone ever wanted to ask her about.

I want to make it clear that for me, it’s not about wanting to look young, which is the usual accusation from people opposed. There is nothing in this world that can replicate the soft collagen of youth and I like being my age. But I want to feel good in my skin and I haven’t felt that for the last couple of years. My face has been getting longer with time, and I didn’t like the droop. And my neck wasn’t making me happy either, I couldn’t wear turtlenecks (which I love) anymore because my neck looked unattractive at the top of the sweater. At a certain point it stops being about enhancing with clothes and makeup and becomes more about disguising and distracting. I don’t enjoy that struggle.

Also, for realz, I don’t know why anyone would be surprised. I’ve never planned on aging gracefully and no one close to me expects any different. When I announced my plan to my siblings, my sister said she was going to tell on me to mom. Which she did, and my mother, who is all about natural and would never dye her hair or do anything to her face, didn’t bat an eye. She knew this was coming.

I had been researching surgery for a few years because I had it in my mind that 60 would be the year, and I turned 60 in October. I still can’t believe I’m this old. It was daunting at first: I don’t have any close friends in NYC who have done anything like this, and I didn’t want to travel outside of my home. Many people I know have gone elsewhere for all kinds of surgery because it’s cheaper. But I wanted to recuperate in my house with my animals, and I wanted to make sure that if someone was going to be cutting up my face, they came well recommended and I could get their help if something went wrong..

I went to two consultations; both doctors that were recommended by a friend’s dermatologist. The first one was fantastic, a great guy with great results–he was upbeat, young and confident in his work. But he is also stupid expensive, like more than many yearly salaries expensive. Like I’d be in debt for a decade expensive. Notable is that part of that high cost is that after surgery you’re sent to a hotel with a nurse who watches over you for 48 hours.

The second guy I saw was still expensive but much more reasonable at less than half the first price quote. This is because he uses local anesthetic with a knockout cocktail of valium and some other pills, saving the high cost of an anesthetist. As much as I would prefer to be fully asleep during any operation, I liked the idea of not having to deal with the aftereffects of anesthetic and having to flush it out of my body afterward. His before and after photos were equally as great as the first guy, and I’m a big one for intuition and I liked the energy at his office. So I chose him. I’m still in debt, but it’s a much less terrifying amount.

The reactions I got when I told people of my plans were either excited or horrified. The excited people were my inner circle, women my age who have been considering the same thing. The horrified people were mostly people who have never experienced botox or other injectables, who don’t really know what any of that kind of thing entails, who think of Jocelyn Wildenstein or the show Botched when they think of surgery, or who simply believe in aging naturally. Which, for the record, is great, just not the path I’m taking.

I think where we live plays a part in all of this too. I live in a city where it’s common for women to do things to their face. If I had remained in the woods of Michigan it might be different and look out of place, so reactions from different parts of the country vary as well.

A few days before my surgery I saw a Facebook post from an acquaintance who looks cool, but has never been a person interested in makeup or beauty. She had a close up of her bare face, along with a paragraph about how aging naturally is the more noble way to go. It was pretty judgey, but most social media posts about plastic surgery are judgey. It doesn’t help that Madonna is purposely fucking up her face for attention, but that’s another conversation. I realized after seeing that post that that there would be some serious judgment if I were to talk about it. But what’s the alternative? To lie and pretend that I’m a natural miracle? That falseness feels yucky to me.

Three weeks after my 60th birthday I went in, and the surgery was intense. I let them film it; if you aren’t too squeamish and care to see the inside of my face, it’s here at Madnani Facial Plastics:

https://www.instagram.com/tv/Ck0uh5dPFru/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link

Local anesthetic has its pitfalls. I was so drugged up in the beginning that I fell asleep. But it’s a long process and sometime throughout the pills began wearing off and I got panicky. I felt what I thought was sawing, which didn’t help (it was actually pulling and stitching). I knew Sam was in the other room waiting for me and I tried to call his name to get me off the table. But as I became more cognizant I knew that wasn’t going to be feasible so I croaked out instead that I was freaking out. The nurse tossed a couple more pills in my mouth and I was happily out again.

I went in at 6:30 am and it was done by about noon. I was wheeled into a car and Sam took me home. He said he only recognized me by my tattoos and the fact that I was still trying to give orders, despite that I was delirious and couldn’t talk.


The next day I had to go back for a bandage change. My hair was matted down with blood and my ears were plugged up with bloody gauze, but overall it didn’t feel too bad. Thank you, hydrocodone.

I spent the next week propped up in bed high on painkillers. I really love an excuse to watch TV all day while high, but it was a lot. You’re in pain, you can’t lay down fully, you feel like your head is in a box because your ears are covered and you have to keep changing the wraps. It gets boring pretty quickly. My worst day was about five days in because I hadn’t listened closely enough to the direction to take laxatives. Without getting into specifics, I’ll just say that I considered going to the emergency room on that day and will never make that mistake again.

The photo below was maybe three weeks into healing. My face was very numb and my eyes dragged down by the swelling. I couldn’t turn my head to the side or up and down and I couldn’t open my mouth very far. But for the most part it wasn’t too terrible and passed pretty quickly. The bruises took well over a month to heal, I used arnica and took pre and post op vitamins and bromelaine, which helped speed it up, but I did look weird for a while. I went to get my nails done and my Chinese nail lady, who I’ve been seeing for years, asked quietly, “Who did this to you??” I had to have one of the other technicians give me the Chinese word for facelift so I could explain that I did it to myself. To which she huffed indignantly and patted my hand, which may be the most eloquent and best reaction yet.


I don’t have before and afters yet from the doctor, but I tried to take a similar selfie to one I took last summer so there is some way to see what’s been done.

This is last July pre-op.

The one below is a couple of days ago. I took it in the strong light in my bathroom and didn’t filter anything, so it’s not gorgeous. But I wanted to get something clear with a similar nighttime makeup so people can see the difference. I should probably add that I had a fat transfer under my eyes and laser skin resurfacing, so that’s part of what you’re seeing too.

I am very happy with the results. I feel like I’m still myself but I can wear turtlenecks again and I’m not panicky when people pull out their phones to take photos. Which is exactly what I wanted. I have zero regret.

I am happy to answer any questions that anyone wants to ask. A facelift is a frivolous, first world conversation and I understand that I lead a blessed life, that age catches up to us all, and I’m not trying to give this too much time or energy. But I would like to help move this conversation forward in a way that frees us all to be who we want to be, surgery or no surgery. There is too much shame and self-loathing in this world over frivolous bullshit, too much fear wrapped around aging or not looking a certain way. If I can take some of the guesswork out of navigating it, I’m willing to expose myself to that end.

Namaste, beauties!

Kim and Beep

I had a reading the summer from a psychic friend who said that I could be writing entries for this blog more often, as it helps some people. Sometimes I feel like I’ve said pretty much everything I have to say, and I don’t like forcing it unless there’s a specific train of thought eating into my mind. But he said it can be as little as a few words, so maybe I’ll get a little more casual and not turn it into a giant entry all the time. If there’s something you’d like to hear from me, feel free to ask.

Anyhoo, as most of you know, there was a memorial for our beautiful Kim Montenegro on Saturday. It was lovely, thanks to the hard work of Paty Huthert and Dennis McHugh, and I spoke, so I thought I’d copy what I said here for those of you who couldn’t get to Philly.

I also put my beloved cat Beep down last week and then had a birthday. I really don’t care about birthdays anymore, Lord knows I’ve had enough of them, but it is a time to assess and see friends. So it was a big week, too much really, and I’m grateful for all of the messages. Life just throws shit at you sometimes and you have to roll with it. I was so drained yesterday that I had to hibernate; I couldn’t bear to try to form words or respond to texts. But I’m feeling more rejuvenated now and better able to respond.

Kim’s absence will be with me for the rest of my life. She was a sister and a force of nature and I am not the only person feeling her loss. I asked her and Codie to help Beep with his transition and I did feel a warm presence when he left his body, which was a tough moment for me. I don’t know if it was one or both of them or someone or something else, but it was calming to feel there is more to life than what we see with our eyes and that we don’t completely lose our loved ones in death. It’s not perfect, but at least positive.

Thank you to Paty for making sure I got some of her ashes in this perfect pouch that she would have loved.

——————————————

KIM

It’s impossible for me to talk about Kim without thinking of the word “beauty”. 

Kim taught me to appreciate beauty in a deep way–not just in the superficial meaning of the word, although we did adore pretty people and things. Kim understood true, life-affirming beauty: the heart of a person, the way a home can look and feel, delightful smells, delicious food, and the value of doing something right the first time. 

The first time I met Kim, in the mid-80’s, she said, within the first ten seconds of laying eyes on each other, “Hi! You’re so beautiful! Who are you? Will you be my friend?”

I had never been greeted like that. What adult just happily asks a total stranger if they want to be friends? I was shy at the time and this openness and generosity of spirit threw me. She was so fearless, and it immediately shifted my energy from guarded to open. I fell in love with her on the spot. We became inseparable at that show and for many years. I wanted to look like her, dress like her, talk like her. I wanted everyone to know that this amazing creature was with me, my friend. She was the most exciting and entertaining person I knew and I loved taking trips to Philly where we’d ride around in that boat of a Buick, smoking cigarettes and waving at the guys who shouted at us. It was heaven to me.

I quickly discovered that she greeted most people with that level of enthusiasm. She would walk into a crowded room and light up everyone with her warmth, saying, “Hi! Hello! I love your jacket! You have pretty eyes! What’s your name?”  She genuinely liked humans, something completely alien to me, and she saw beauty in everyone and wanted to get to know them. She SAW you. She listened. I was constantly dragging her out of places while some random and annoying person cried on her shoulder or tried to invade our party. She was regularly pulling stray lunatics into my apartment and life, then when they became too much, which they inevitably did, I’d have to act as bouncer and bad guy because her heart was too soft to do it. She had absolutely no discernment when it came to people and it was a huge pain in the ass sometimes. But it was also a testament to how much love she gave so freely.

Kim taught me to appreciate quality, to really look around the room at furniture and art, to savor what we saw and heard and consumed. She taught me how to fold those fucking jeans exactly the way she wanted them to be folded. She wouldn’t let you bag her groceries because she had her own rules about it. The level of control could be exhausting, but we all reaped the benefits of that attention to detail. Her orbit was a warm place to reside. She remembered little things. She always made sure we looked into each other’s eyes when we raised a glass of wine. When we went to restaurants she would tear the crust off of the bread and eat it while handing me the soft middle, because she knew I didn’t like the hard parts. It was a minor gesture but its meaning was grand. I never see a loaf of crusty bread without thinking of it.  

Romances came and went, and we had our disagreements and downtime, but at the end of the day there was always a safe space of kinship. I could always trust her. Kim was imperfect, stubborn, and self-destructive at times. She often didn’t get out of her own way and it was frustrating. But she was also a blazing star, a shining beacon of creativity, affection, intelligence, honor, hard work, hilarity, fun, and enthusiasm. Her energy was infectious, there were times it felt as if we floated in a shiny bubble of her making. She was as easy to love as she was easy on the eyes. 

The last time I saw her, when she wasn’t really verbal anymore, everyone at the table had a glass of prosecco and she did her thing–raised her glass and looked deeply into my eyes. I knew what she was saying and that it was the last time I would have this, and I think instinctively she knew too. I held her gaze, raised the glass and said, “I love you. You know that, right?” And she laughed her sweet laugh and nodded.  

I know that this was not my first lifetime with her, and I know I will see her again in whatever form we take. I am grateful she didn’t languish for years, she would have hated the idea of being a burden to anyone. And I’m so grateful to her close people for the work and heartache they went through to make sure her last days were good. I am grateful for all of it, every minute, good and less than good. I know that this world will never be the same for me without her in it, and I will never be able to raise a glass of red without feeling her in my heart. But I also know that she would want us all to live our lives to the fullest and to remember her with joy. So that is what I shall endeavor to do. 

Goodness

I recently realized that I am grateful to be at an age where I have only 20 or 30 more years to be in body on this plane, maybe less if there is some surprise around the corner that I don’t foresee.

This is in no way brought on by depression or a non-love of life. My life is the best it’s ever been. It’s peaceful and abundant. At the moment I am typing this on the terrace of my dream apartment with the exact dog and cat I want sitting next to me. I have no personal beefs going with anyone, the villains seem to be ruining their own lives lately, and everyone in my close orbit is lovely and supportive. I have a job I genuinely enjoy. I’m healthier than I’ve ever been, barring being at the end of recuperating from my first case of covid, which even that was mild.

But a yearning is growing, a yearning for the peace and ease of a different kind of existence free of guns and maga and sadness and illness and bad religion, maybe free of gravity and body, something bigger, grander. Not this minute, or this year, or this decade. I still have things I want to do in this life that I love. But I can feel a pressing of sorts, like I’m pushing at a membrane of consciousness that wants to break free. Maybe it’s not death at all, maybe just a readiness for a deeper kind of existence?

I don’t know. As I wonder if our country is in the middle of a fall of what might turn out to have been a very short empire, I can feel myself becoming disconnected. Not in a bad way, more in an oversaturated, I can’t foam at the mouth about it anymore. I haven’t given up the fight, I’m just internally quiet somehow. Like I can feel how temporary everything is, including me.

I get a lot of information from dreams. I have never been especially gifted psychically, but I travel a lot in my sleep and all kinds of magic can and does happen. I once accidentally flew to an alien planet and crash landed into a meeting of sorts. Happily the surprised aliens seemed amused and very gently flew me back to my body, like putting someone’s escaped dog back in their yard. Then after my father died unexpectedly I was able to process a lot of sadness and unfinished business in my sleep. We had long, meaningful conversations that I believe really happened. But even if it wasn’t real, only my subconscious talking back to me, it helped. I have come to believe that we can, and do, get important inner work done when our conscious mind is shut down.

I don’t like to write about my most recent ex (six years ago now) too much because he has a new life and deserves privacy, and because it’s in the past. And honestly he probably doesn’t deserve the airtime. But he brought me some real awareness in a dream last night that I think could be helpful to share.

He visits me in dreams regularly. I believe this is because he stopped speaking to me and moved onto his new relationship at lightning speed while there was still a lot left to process after our own thirteen years. At least on my end, as it was a devastating loss for me. And I took on all of the blame and felt like a genuinely vile person. I lost my mind during that period and completely self-destructed while I put him on a pedestal as the Good One.

I was raised in an atmosphere of Catholic self-loathing and a denial of intuition. I was herded into behaviors and thoughts that didn’t resonate with my inner voice and actual needs and personality. And because of that I had to relearn how to trust that intuition and sometimes have a hard time seeing my own desires and behaviors clearly. So I have always assumed deep down that I am irreversibly flawed and undeserving and that’s why I make such a mess of relationships.

There are SO many moments and events in my life that I wish I could do differently. I am not a no regrets person. I regret saying something shitty to a kid at a teen party in 1979. I still think about the look on his face and wish I could take it back. I have all kinds of self-blaming little anecdotes like this categorized and filed away in my brain. So you can imagine the internal dialogue that goes on with the big stuff. It’s exhausting.

Anyway, at some point I got irritated with these regular nighttime visits from this person who doesn’t care a whit about me during waking hours, and I said to myself, as I am a big believer in stating intentions out loud: “Enough! I choose to stop these stupid dream meet ups that lead nowhere and just make me feel sad. You are UNINVITED.”

It’s been great for a time, no visits. Until last night, when this fucker called me on the phone in my dream. Called me on my dream phone! Even in my sleep I knew this was a pretty clever way to get in. I looked at the dream phone as a truly comical and unflattering photo of him came up, and rolled my dream eyes and after a moment of internal debate I answered.

I said impatiently, “What??” And as soon as I said that he was in front of me in person and we were talking again.

After some of the usual jokes he said, “I couldn’t be alone. I needed someone.”

I responded lovingly, with no heat or sadness: “I know. But I had to go. I couldn’t do what I needed to do within that. It had nothing to do with how much I loved you. Because I did, and I miss you every day.” He smiled and nodded.

I woke up right after that, fully awake and blown away. Because I finally, finally felt clear. This entire time I have been operating under the belief that my simple badness made me destroy that one chance at growing old with someone. That I am and will always be too broken and this is simply the great tragedy of who I am. Which is, stamped with a big label: 100% Damaged Goods.

This is in no way a slight on Sam, btw, for anyone who is wondering what the hell I’m talking about because I have him. Our relationship is equally important to me. He, and it, have been instrumental in helping both of us heal from past trauma, and it has been an incredible gift after a lifetime of dysfunction to get a do-over with someone worthy, where I finally do and say the right things without creating more regret. And he is steadfast in a way that has taught me how to trust. We are always kind to each other and there is a lot of love and support. It’s just not a traditional partnership and we live apart and it remains very free.

Back to the dream train of thought – I have always considered myself a nontraditional person. I never wanted kids or a house, I never really cared about having a big wedding. I just wanted to move to the big city and live a rock and roll life. Which I did and continue to do, albeit with a much earlier bedtime these days. But underneath the rebel outerwear, I continued to carry judgment about myself and relationships that were very traditional.

I always assumed that after a period of wild oat sowing I would find “the one” and that would be it. But I kept choosing the wrong people well past that phase and if they weren’t terrible then I would take on the role of the terrible one and destroy it myself. So when I did finally find the one, despite my best efforts I still managed to smash it into a million pieces just like all the others.

What I hadn’t considered was the idea that our soul, or higher self, or whatever you want to label it, has plans for us that don’t necessarily have anything to do with what our brain tells us we should have or do. Right after that break up happened I saw a fantastic tarot reader who told me that I was doing inner work and that’s why it had to be this way, that I hadn’t run into the ditch but was on course. I wanted to believe her but I also secretly believed that maybe she just didn’t know how royally I had fucked things up.

Now I’m realizing that there was a reason I was pushed in the deepest way to break from my ideas of who and where I was supposed to be. And who all of us are supposed to be, which is attached or at least desirous of attachment. And that maybe those assumptions actually had very little to do with what I truly needed or wanted, just like when I was a kid.

This seems pretty basic looking at it written down, but to me it’s not. Because it means that I am not broken, which is something I never even dared to consider. It means that although I definitely careened through those events like a monkey on a motorcycle, I was on my path. It means that my soul simply had another plan for me (and maybe his did too) that I only thought was flawed because I viewed it through eyes clouded by upbringing, society, expectation, fear of loneliness and pain, fear of hurting people, all of that. And that maybe, instead of just being chaotic devastation, it was meant to be a graduation of sorts.

Essentially, I couldn’t trust in my own goodness.

So on a more global, or at least friends-who-are-reading-this scale, I am telling you some embarrassingly personal stuff because I know from writing experience that if it’s happening to me, it’s happening to someone else. What if some of those things that you and I are inexplicably driven to do, that land you in foreign, often uncomfortable territory, are a step toward something deeper and more spirit enriching?

And what if we forgive ourselves for not being who we thought we should be – richer, prettier, in a happy marriage, admired by our peers, whatever. What if we’re supposed to have all these horrible and wonderful twists and turns and if we open up to or at least forgive ourselves for change we didn’t ask for, we will have an easier time processing the sadness and loss that inevitably comes with that change? What if we let go of all of these expectations and just try to be our best selves no matter where we land? And what if, if we are trying hard to be our best selves, we simply trust in our own innate goodness and allow life to unfold with a few less regrets?

Epic, for me at least. So I guess I’m grateful this asshole found a way to get in last night.

Love to you my friends. Please be safe and kind to each other in this bananas world we live in right now.

Epitaph

Ah, 2022. We keep thinking we’re going to get a break, but that certainly doesn’t yet appear to be on the horizon. After years of covid and the cult of Qrump, war in the Ukraine feels like such a dirty trick. So much of this feels like a dirty trick.

I have been immersed in a spiritual narrative for quite a long time, which I have mentioned here often, in which I am told and have believed that we are moving from 3D energy into a more aware and enlightened 5D. Which means that all of the pain and chaos that people are currently experiencing is a clearing of dense energies that need to go in order to make that happen.

But I don’t give a shit anymore. I just don’t. When I think about lives and a country being destroyed to assuage one madman’s ego, about all of the greedy madmen like him operating with abandon, and all of the similar things that I don’t see on the news that are happening around the world, I just feel rage. Rage toward whatever god or “source” or collective consciousness or grand scheme that has deemed it all “necessary” and continues to drag its feet on righting its plentiful wrongs.

It’s too much. It’s simply too much for me to continue to bask in the luxury of confidence in some kind of vague promise for a future that has not appeared. I don’t want to believe in anything at all right now because it hurts too much to hope. For now I feel duped by that train of thought. I don’t want to ponder the universe anymore. The cosmos can go suck a bag of dicks. I simply want to do my best to be compassionate in whatever circumstances surround me and hope that that makes my pocket of the universe a little more bearable for the people in the vicinity.

A man I knew and cared about was murdered this last weekend. He was homeless and I didn’t know his name.

For those of you not in NYC, it’s bananas here right now. The homeless are legion and completely out of control. People are being stabbed and shot daily, a woman had poop smeared in her face while she waited for a train in broad daylight, people are being pushed to their death on tracks, hate crimes toward Asian people are off the charts, a well-known and much loved vocal coach, who was a friend of many of my friends, was pushed to the ground for no reason. Her brain was damaged beyond repair and she died a day or two later. She was 87 and simply walking down the street. No rhyme or reason, just random, devastating violence.

I want to tell you about the man I knew.

I moved into my current neighborhood at the start of 2019, right before covid hit. I live very near Canal Street, which is a highly trafficked thoroughfare in Chinatown. It’s full of tourist shops carrying phone cases, t-shirts and keychains, jewelry shops with glittering diamonds in the windows, and Chinese women and men hawking fake designer bags. I love it, it’s classic high energy NYC, although I don’t go near it during peak hours because it’s impossible to get around the gawking families who don’t understand how sidewalk etiquette works here.

I saw this man the first day I walked the dog down Canal. He was a big guy, black, with very dark skin and gray, matted dreads. He had a sweet, round face and it occurred to me that he’d make an awesome black Santa. He sat very still on a folding chair, leaning a bit on the wall behind him with a wheeled suitcase parked next to him. He didn’t react to the bustling activity around him, just stared straightforward into the traffic.

I walk my dog two or three times a day, so I saw him often. After a few days I started waving hello. He didn’t seem particularly interested in engaging, but he would wave back politely. Slowly we progressed to saying hi or good morning. When covid hit hard I began giving him money. There was no one on the street and every business was closed, so I wondered and worried on how he would survive.

But survive he did. He would sit still all day in various spots around the neighborhood, and at dusk he would roll his suitcase away to hunker down for the night. I marveled at the sheer physical punishment of it. What would it feel like to sit so still all day on a folding chair and then sleep on the hard, frozen ground all night? My back ached just thinking about it.

He called me “Lady”. He’d say, “Hello, Lady. How are you doing today?”

I would say, all nosy and annoying like the aging white woman that I am–

“I’m great! Are you okay? Do you need anything? Are you going to be warm enough tonight?”

He would respond with a smile and say, “Fine, fine. I don’t need anything. You have a nice night.”

Despite the fact that I would occasionally see him looking in garbage cans, he never asked and always looked a little surprised when I handed him cash. He was consistently the same quiet, stoic man. I wondered, why is he out here? He’s not high or acting crazy, he’s well-spoken and clearly intelligent. How did he fall through the cracks?

One day I saw another man give him a haircut, which he needed as his dreads were one big mass. The man doing the cutting was dressed well and I could tell the act was one of charity and kindness. It made me happy to know that other people in the neighborhood helped him out. I heard that local restaurants fed him too.

Sometimes he would sit across the street from my building and I would wonder if he saw me hanging out on my balcony typing on the laptop or drinking coffee. The disparity in our situations was not lost on me, but I didn’t know what to do about it. I wanted to wave but that didn’t feel right somehow, so I just went about my business.

It was my intention, when things got warmer, to take the time to ask for his story. I wanted to know how he got on the street, if he was from somewhere else (he seemed to have a slight accent), and what I could do for real, if anything. He was good at deflecting the occasional probing question, so it seemed that he was not interested in volunteering much information. I enjoyed our repoire and I didn’t want to make him feel exposed or put on the spot, and I was unsure of how to proceed. I pretended not to see when he looked in garbage cans, and continued to exchange our usual pleasantries when we passed, figuring I’d have more time to wear down his defenses.

Meanwhile, the homeless situation is raging and it’s violent and dirty and scary. We are all walking and taking the train without headphones these days, on constant high alert for danger. It has crossed my mind that some of these assholes just need to be taken out. Like poop smearing guy, who has been in and out of jail for violent offenses and is unrepentant and vicious in court– just a rabid, reprehensible individual. But then I would remember MY gentle, vulnerable homeless friend, and remind myself that it’s not helpful to think that way.

Early Monday morning a crossing guard that I am friendly with said, “Did you hear? The homeless man that was shot near here was the quiet man.”

I asked, “OUR guy? The man with the suitcase?”

She said yes, and my heart cracked. I felt hot tears in my eyes, She told me that they knew more about it in the cafe down the street if I wanted to ask. I cry at the drop of a hat these days, so I took some deep breaths and pushed my rising emotions down to be able to ask without blubbering. Another neighbor walking her dog said hi and I shakily told her what I’d heard and that I was going to check. I stepped into the cafe and asked, and the owner nodded his head sadly. It was indeed our guy.

I stepped back out and told the waiting neighbor. We both waved goodbye because we were too overcome to speak any further.

He was shot in the head in the early hours of the morning while he was quietly asleep in his sleeping bag laid out on the cardboard he carried with him. The man who shot him was seen on camera kicking him first to check if he was awake. It wasn’t discovered that he was dead til many hours later. He laid dead on the street with people walking past for the better part of the day.

The next night I attended a high end shopping/showing event for McQueen. It was fabulous and the attendees were lovely. It was a privilege to be there and Wendy, always generous, bought me a gorgeous bag that I will cherish forever. But I had a moment, as I stood there with my glass of champagne, surrounded by beautiful, expensive people admiring beautiful, expensive things, where I felt an urge to smash everything in front of me. To tear it all down, break everything to bits, pull the expensive curtains off the walls, kick the glass shelves into oblivion and then simply sit in the middle of it weeping. In that moment it all seemed vapid and so deeply, devastatingly, horribly unfair.

I take comfort in the fact that he most likely didn’t feel or know what was happening. I take comfort knowing that he will not be sleeping on the sidewalk anymore. But I am also so very sad that this was his end. He deserved a more respectful finale. He deserves to have his name in the press and that has not happened. Maybe they don’t know. For now he is just one of the many homeless people murdered for no reason other than they are easy targets.

I’m writing this down so there is one obituary out there for him. Every time I have walked the dog this week I have thought about how I will never see him again or have an opportunity to know him better. He was such a lovely being with a pleasing face and calm voice that always cheered me. He harmed no one. I wish I knew his name. Why didn’t I at least ask him his name?

One of my door persons told me he’s been in the neighborhood for a very long time, at least a decade. She said he got a little erratic at one point and then disappeared for a year. Then he came back and was his usual quiet self again. She thinks that he had mental health issues and was on a medication that calmed him. She guessed that maybe he had gotten so accustomed to living outside that he preferred it. He certainly seemed to be much less bothered by his situation than I.

He was a part of my day to day life and in my own way I loved him. I’ll never forget him and I am pretty sure that other people in the area feel the same. His life and death make me acutely aware that the homeless are not vermin, but people with all the same feelings and needs that the rest of us have, in more difficult and complicated circumstances. There but for the grace of God and all that. I don’t know what the answer is, but I know it begins with that understanding.

I don’t need condolences, which I know many you kind people will want to extend. I am fine and live a blessed life. I just want to let the world know of his life, to the extent that I knew it, and his passing.

I wish you all safety and peace in this very difficult time in our history.

UPDATE:

A few days after my post The NY Times published an article about all the men involved. My friend’s name was Abdoulaye Coulibaly. I find their demand for cash in order to read infuriating, but if you have a subscription it’s a well written and researched article. The main takeaway for me was that he did have family who tried to get him off the street, but it was his choice to stay. So that was a relief. He had people who cared and he knew it. And now he has a name and a history for the world to see.

Time Warp

I haven’t been thinking about this blog much as I’ve made it a priority to get the first draft of a book written this year. I’ve been dancing around it for a decade and I have plenty of time to write, so it’s my one assignment for 2022. Doesn’t have to be the final product, just something fully down so I can release this feeling of homework hanging over my head. I have procrastinated because I don’t want to relive much of my past. And I have forgotten details. But it’ll happen and until then my short attention span has to focus on one writing job at a time.

We are all exhausted and scattered at this point. Covid’s lengthy stay reminds me of when the movie Jaws was released when I was a kid, when popular films stayed in theaters for months. The movie was so huge that it sat there on the roster forever, you could see it as many times as you wanted in an empty roomful of seats.

But that was much more entertaining than covid. Now we’re all so drained from the arguing, the news, the anti-vaxxers and anti-maskers making everyone’s job harder, the constant sickness and death, the Trump cultists and their relentless attachment to racism, their bizarre JFK fantasies, the talking heads on the news on either side, the bickering over cancel culture, the arguments over binary or non-binary, which kind of mask to wear, the attachment to guns and devastating gun violence. I think I can safely say we have watched this movie back and forth and back again and we are more than ready to get out of this dark room and maybe never watch a movie again.

My spiritual sources (hi, Mom!) keep hammering that we (the earth and its inhabitants) are still in the middle of this shift from 3D to 5D energy, and all of this is necessary to burn off energies and belief systems from this and past lives that keep us from moving into a higher frequency. I believe it. But I’m over it and it doesn’t feel like it matters whether I believe it or not. I don’t want to read or hear any more well-meaning channelers or psychics telling me this is all part of the plan. I don’t give a shit about the cosmic fucking plan anymore. It feels like a dirty trick and I don’t want to hear any more airy fairy explanations on how it’s going to be great one magical day. Because it hasn’t been great now for too long and it’s all too much. IT’S TOO MUCH.

My sister and I, whenever we’re at a bad party or just annoyed by something, like to quote Winona Ryder in that wonderfully awful version of Dracula.

Then take me away from all this death.

Now everyone is asking for this in a non-joking and most decidedly literal manner.

In the cosmic plan’s defense, I always feel cranky and negative in January and February as I am very susceptible to seasonal affective disorder. But I can feel the exhaustion in my friends as well. Our enthusiasm for pretty much everything is at an all time low. We’re not talking about going out to dinner or taking trips, we’re just sending each other TikTok videos and grinding through each Groundhog Day, trying to be as upbeat as possible in order to make it through and be able to calmly smoke weed and watch Netflix as soon as the sun goes down. So exactly how much longer are we supposed to trudge through infection, insurrection, businesses failing, depression abounding, until we are miraculously ascended? It’s disheartening no matter what time the sun sets.

Anyway, so that’s where I’m at with this whole pandemic, country going to shit thing–whiny and petulant. How’s everyone else?

So what I really want to write about today is my friend, although I’m not sure exactly how to do it. I guess I’ll do what I always do and noodle through this until it feels post-worthy.

You see, one of my lifelong best friends, who is three months younger than me, has been diagnosed with early onset dementia.

I am 59 years old. I don’t like sharing my age or hearing anyone else’s exact age, because I believe the numbers box us in a way that doesn’t speak to who we truly are. People get too focused on their idea of what an age should look and feel like when there is a definitive number attached. But when I was attacked and stalked by a couple of angry lunatics a couple of years ago, their main insults were age-focused, they called me “grandma” and “desperate” hoping to injure me with it. They did not. But now I state my age publicly in order to de-weaponize it and remove any idea that there is any shame attached to getting older, for anyone, not just me. I like who I am, I don’t give a fuck if my age makes someone uncomfortable, go fuck yourselves, etc.

Anyway, dementia is a disease that usually hits the elderly, so she’s considered young for it. Nonetheless, it is moving at breakneck speed through her body and mind. It’s confusing and devastating and it has driven home to me how quickly things change in this life.

I’m not going to say her name here. The people who know already know, and I don’t want random google searches leading to this somewhat lowkey spot where I am only beginning to sort through my feelings about it. I want her to be known and remembered for her true self, not the impaired version.

We met at a streetwear trade show at the Javits Center in the 80’s when I worked as a model for Tripp/Trash and Vaudeville. If a buyer wanted to see what something looked like on a body, I was that body. It was fun and easy and the place was full of rock and roll beauties, both male and female. I met Ronnie Sweetheart there, although we didn’t date til a bit later, and she met Timo Kaltio and dated him. She was a clothing designer and had her own booth across the aisle from Tripp, so on the first day of the show I wandered over to see what she was selling. When I walked in she had her back to me. She was dressed in her own unique clothes and her body was a perfect hourglass. She fussed with something on the booth wall and when she turned around to me standing there quietly looking at her, her already big eyes got very wide.

She exclaimed, “Oh my God! You’re so beautiful! Who are you? What do you do? Will you be my friend?”

I had never been greeted this way by another girl. I can’t really say woman, because we were babies. I was reserved and shy with new people, but her open enthusiasm was so charming and infectious that I fell completely in love with her in an instant. After that meeting we were inseparable through the three days of that trade show, and for many years after that.

She was like this with everyone. I would curl inward when we walked into a roomful of strangers; I’ve always been self-conscious when out of my comfort zone, so I come off as bitchy. It’s easier to be scary than to feel vulnerable. My friend, on the other hand, was genuinely curious about everyone she saw. She’d say, “Hi! I love your hair!” or “Hi! I’m ——. what’s your name?” While I became more small and compact, she unfolded like an exotic flower for the room to admire. People loved her because she saw them.

We both have a love of all things French, and one time a psychic told me that she and I had lived a very happy past life in France as friends. He saw carriages and gowns and food, and it helped me make sense of our immediate connection. In this lifetime she and I still loved to get dressed up and wear expensive shoes and eat amazing food and drink too much and laugh. We had crazy, wild, hilarious adventures that I’ll write about on another day. Every minute with her was entertaining, even the not so great ones. Her energy enlivened me and my groundedness calmed her.

Over the years our coordinating dysfunctions took a toll, although we never stopped being friends. In the beginning I was very codependent (as I was and still can be with most everyone) and I would constantly fix things for her. She was one of the most capable, creative, detail-oriented people I’ve ever known. Her home was gorgeous, her aesthetic in furniture and decor was unparalleled, the clothing she made was perfection. I couldn’t bag the groceries if we went to get food because she had to have them a certain way. If you folded one item of clothing wrong the entire shelf had to be redone. But she was emotionally fragile and leaned on me when there was an issue. I would step in and talk to whoever needed talking to, arrange whatever needed arranging, that kind of thing. God forbid if she cried, I was on the offending problem or person with a vengeance.

Eventually it became too much for me and I could see it wasn’t healthy for either one of us. So I shifted, with middling results. She didn’t like it and told me I had grown cold. Then around the same time as I was reassessing my behavior in our friendship, she got pregnant. It wasn’t under the best of circumstances and she didn’t handle it well, and I didn’t have any interest in pregnancy or babies. I tried to be supportive, but I found the whole thing tedious and it showed. She accused me of being shallow. I wasn’t, I loved her just as much as I always did, but people change over time and that passion of friendship in our 20’s can’t be sustained as we mature. So we were never as close once that shift happened, but we did remain sisters.

While I worked hard to get healthy and improve my poor decision-making skills, she, although still a shining light, seemed to remain a teenager emotionally. She would make the same terrible choices over and over again, each time hoping for a different outcome. I would try to explain to her that you can’t date a turnip and expect it to behave like an apple. Or that if the business wasn’t working, she had to consider new ways to approach her career. She couldn’t do it. She had this sort of magical and romantic way of thinking that caused her to consistently choose the wrong people and things and then consistently be devastated when the outcome was exactly what the rest of us expected.

She would say to me, “I just can’t do it on my own, I need help.” And I would say, “Then stop choosing situations and people who can’t help. Choose what supports you. It’s YOUR choice, YOUR destiny, and only YOU can change things.” We spent hours on the phone going in circles. She just didn’t get it.

In her defense, I never had a growing child to raise, so maybe I just didn’t see it from her angle. But to me it looked like she was her own worst enemy. The boyfriends were selfish children; the business decisions financial suicide.

Over the last decade she became increasingly tired. She appeared exhausted all the time and we all worried for her. Then she got spacier. She doesn’t live in NYC so I only saw her every six months or so, but she seemed goofier when I would see her, much less focused. But I went through my own chaos five/six years ago, so when she visited New York it was too much of a party anyway. I chalked up the spaciness to that.

Finally, maybe two years ago she called me and told me that she was having brain issues. She couldn’t remember all of her words, she would get lost in a sentence or story easily and the most clear indicator that there was a real problem was when she told me she could no longer drive. I felt scared when she said it. She was hands down the best driver I have known and we went everywhere in her cars. She told me she was trying to see what could be done, going to doctors, but she couldn’t give me a cohesive report or diagnosis.

And then it felt like overnight the powerhouse was gone. She was no longer the same person, but a diminished version. Her attention to detail and ability to keep a beautiful house and make exquisite things disappeared. Her facial expression is still open and sweet, but vacant. And she can’t take care of herself. She needs someone to bathe and dress her, to put on her shoes, to wash her hair. Her energetic charisma is gone. The expensive lingerie she placed gingerly in tissue in her dresser will never be worn again. It’s heart wrenching.

It is my belief, not based in science, that she grew weary of the constant struggle and gave up. I think she finally got too exhausted from trying and simply checked out.

She had a good moment recently and facetimed me, which she’s never done before. I dove for my phone when I saw her name come up because it’s been nearly impossible to make that connection and I knew if I missed it I might not get it again. It was lovely to see her face. Her gray roots were long, which I know the old her would hate, but I just saw her, this soul that I love. She was sweet and airy as her words and thoughts drifted around. There were a lot of awkward pauses. But she was happy that she’d managed to figure out how to video chat and I showed her around my new place through the phone.

She kept saying, “You’re so pretty…you’re so pretty…”

I said, “So are you, my darling. You’re as beautiful as the day I met you.”

She just stared at me through the phone and giggled.

So this is a whole new bit of life’s bullshit that I am trying to process. My friend is gone but she’s not gone. I am brokenhearted, as are all of her friends, but I can’t indulge in mourning. Because she is not dead and everyone close to her has to remain strong to make sure that she gets the proper care while she lives. And we are all determined that people remember her for how amazing she truly is, not for how she might be right now.

I keep saying the same things to Sam over and over again because he’s so young and I want him to understand how time flies more quickly than we ever expect. I don’t want him to lose or miss anything. I tell him how things change on a dime. How it feels like five minutes ago I was riding shotgun in her car with my feet up on the dash, singing off key and dangling a lit Marlboro Light out the window, half-naked yet still overdressed, headed to hang out backstage at one rock show or another. Sam is infinitely patient with me and will listen to the same stories or opinions over and over again until I process them. He knows that I’m saying it out loud more for me than for him.

So the only thing I can do to make myself feel better is say it to you as well. Time is so fleeting. People don’t last forever. Take in every moment as fully as you can, love your people as fully as you can, even in this currently draining political and health climate when it feels like we have little left to give. I have to continue to try to do that with her in this current state because it’s the only option. And hopefully when we get to the other side we’ll have a good laugh about how silly and beautiful we were when we were young, and how we naively thought it would last forever. Maybe it does on the other side.

We Are The Cosmos Dreaming of Itself

My mom had this little bit of film from her and my dad’s wedding– the party before and some of the actual wedding preparations and reception, and I just had it digitized. It’s grainy and there is no sound, it’s also 7 minutes long, so it’ll probably be boring for anyone not directly connected. But for people like me who love old film, here it is. My mother is in the white sweater and my father is in the plaid shirt at the night before party but if you skip to the 1:50 mark it’s the actual wedding prep and party, which is a bit more interesting and looks like it could be research data for Mad Men.

To me, it’s poignant. They were so young, so clueless, so beautiful, and completely unaware of what life had waiting for them around the corner – five kids, my dad’s early death, my mother’s difficult rebirth from housewife and mother to sole breadwinner. It wasn’t easy, but that can be said for most everyone anyway. As my great Aunt Nonno used to say, “It’s a great life if you don’t weaken.”

I don’t react to death the way many people do. I don’t feel it fully right away, it kind of just colors everything over time. As a result I am still processing my father’s death, which happened a good 37 years ago, in 1984. I don’t think any of us come out of the deaths of loved ones unaltered, but I’m guessing most healthy people don’t file it in a box in the back corner of their brain and then have it manifest as bad behavior or overreaction or just simple sadness at the most inopportune times. Or maybe they do? Grief is such a weird, non-linear experience.

I was sheltered and oblivious to the ways of the world when I left Michigan to go to college in NYC. I chose Parsons School of Design, which is/was difficult to get into, and very expensive. My dad made mention of the cost, but I had never had to support myself and money was pretty abstract to me. Especially his. My parents made me get a high school job and tried to teach their kids the value of work, but my dad always bailed me out when I got in over my head. So with college I think I had an ego about knowing I could get myself accepted into this prestigious school and beyond that I didn’t consider that he was working very hard to support a large family.

My dad flew with me to do the interview, which had to be in person. I dragged him up and down St. Mark’s Place, which was a magical rock and roll fairyland in the 80’s. We walked past Iggy Pop and people with giant hair and Malcolm McClaren and Lauren Hutton walking arm in arm. I could barely contain myself, I was vibrating with joy a and excitement to finally be there after a young life as a mopey Edward Gorey character surrounded by cheerful muggles in pastel colored ski jackets with lift tags stapled to the zipper. My dad was sort of a Tony Soprano lite kind of guy, he was Italian and a bit macho but mostly just funny and charismatic and very loving toward his kids. He stood at the front of Trash and Vaudeville in his suit waiting while I tried to get the snotty staff to help me try on clothes that I didn’t need. One of them asked if he was my bodyguard. He was amused by that.

When it was time to move to NY he took one of the kids from his office and the two of them drove me and all my stuff for 14 hours to stay at the fleabag YMCA on 9th Avenue and 34th Street, an old school flophouse where Parsons had set up student housing amongst the nearly homeless. I sat in the back of his giant luxury dadmobile while a small Uhaul jittered around behind us, packed with hatboxes and milk crates full of record albums and all kinds of crap I wouldn’t need. When we got to the Y, he and I took the rickety, dead slow elevator up to my floor. We opened the door to my room, which was like, 8′ x 12″, to a stained mattress on a cot, a dirty window with a broken blind, and a lone cockroach lumbering slowly from one side of the room to the next.

I was so scared. I said, with tears in my eyes but trying to lighten the mood, “Welp. This is what I wanted!”

He said, “I don’t know how you’re going to get all your stuff in here, Mare.”

I knew he didn’t want to leave me there, but he did. I waved goodbye from the sidewalk as they pulled away, then I went to that tiny, shitty room and started unpacking the mountain of vintage shoes I would never wear.

Turned out I hated fashion design, which was my chosen field of study. I thought I would enjoy it because I loved drawing, clothes and sewing. Alas, I did not. The teachers were lovely for the most part, but the workload was unforgiving and tedious. I sat up into the morning for nights on end painting watercolor swatches that I could never get right. I couldn’t drape for shit, there was no fun or fashion at that point, though I did develop the awesome cool people social life I always envisioned for myself.

So sometime during the second semester, when I was full and well flailing academically and didn’t give a shit about college anymore because nightlife was infinitely more interesting, one of the other students knocked on my door to tell me I had a call. It was late in the night/early morning after I’d returned from a party, and my mother was on the house payphone. It was the only means of communication for a full floor of probably 40 students so I knew if she was calling enough to get through the constant busy signal it had to be important.

When I picked up she was crying, and said, “Dad’s gone.”

I asked, not comprehending, “Well, where did he go?”

He had had a heart attack and died almost immediately. My mom felt terrible because she was a registered nurse and hadn’t recognized the symptoms. He couldn’t sleep and went downstairs from their bedroom and she heard a thump and he was on the ground and I think gone by the time she got to him. It just seemed so out of the realm of possibility, although it really wasn’t. He was a slightly overweight, stressed out, pipe-smoking product of the time, meaning that he pushed through uncomfortable feelings and ignored warning signs. He was in his 40’s at the time, younger than I am now.

Like most families, mine had its own dysfunction. And I had been taking my mother’s side whenever there were disagreements. I didn’t understand or see anything the way it really was, I saw it with a child’s eyes. I was preoccupied with my new life and hadn’t spoken to him on the phone in months, it was always my mom. Then he was just gone and I could never say the things I would have said to him if I’d known that drive would be my last chance to hear his voice or feel his hug.

My diary entry for that day has one paragraph about his death, and then 3 or 4 about a date I had gone on. I felt a deep shame about that for many years. One day, many years after, I broke down and told my therapist about it and asked how  could I be so shallow? What was wrong with me? He reassured me that I wasn’t a sociopath, just someone who shut down because it was too big to process. I was so relieved.

So when he died I quit school, despite the fact that a family friend offered to cover the remaining tuition for the remaining years. I couldn’t get out of there fast enough. I gave away all of my pens and brushes and exacto knives and markers and paints and started this rock and roll life. And over the years following I would find myself in one crappy relationship or another, and often when it would get to be too much I would overreact and become irrational. Usually when I would get too  drunk and cry over a boyfriend, I would find myself talking to my dad.

One time I laid on my kitchen floor sobbing, completely inconsolable over whatever the latest shitty boyfriend had done, talking to my dad (or the ceiling) out loud. Suddenly a  light bulb shone through the haze. It dawned that this had little to do with the boyfriend and everything to do with my dad. I stopped sobbing, sat up and wiped my snot-filled nose with the back of my hand and thought, “Oooooooh.” Then I realized my dad wasn’t coming back and I still had terrible taste in men and I flopped back down and wailed into the floor again.

Good times.

One of the lovely things about transitioning into adulthood is getting to see your parents as people rather than extensions of your greedy child self. I have so much compassion for those two kids, doing what they were expected to do, marrying when they barely knew each other because that’s how you managed raging hormones and societal expectations back then. How could they not fuck up? I’ve been fucking up my entire life, the only difference is that I had the wherewithal to know it wasn’t a good idea to bring kids into my particular brand of crazy.

So I’ve never fully gotten over this loss. I don’t think about it all the time, I’m not mourning per se, but every once in a while I’ll be doing something mundane and some moment or thought will remind me of him and a wave of sadness will wash over me, like stepping into a hole that wasn’t there a minute ago. Maybe this is true with everyone and their  dead loved ones?  I do believe we are all permanently changed by loss. For me, each death or disappearance of someone I love softens me, makes me more gentle, more compassionate. But the price for that depth is sorrow.

I have had dreams where my dad came to me and we talked some things out, and I do believe it really happened. But that was still about me and my needs. So I carry this feeling that I failed him somehow. That I didn’t SEE him when he was alive. That I never told him how grateful I am and how awesome he was to all of his kids. That he was a special, amazing person outside of being a dad. That it was an honor to be his kid.

So this bit of film transferred to VHS, then digitized, means the world to me. It’s a window into my parent’s true selves at that age, before they became just mom and dad in the eyes of their kids. I feel so much love for these two babies trying  to be grown ups. And I am grateful that my mom and I have been able to talk about our lives as people outside of our mother/daughter relationship, to dissect things that have happened and to find common ground and the occasional forgiveness. 

I hope when I get to the other side I can see him again in all his magnificence: this handsome, vibrant being with the weight of kids and work and life no longer on his shoulders. I hope that I can tell him how desperately I missed him during all the ordinary and grand moments in my life, and how I wished I could have had conversations with him as an adult. But I am guessing that he has moved on to other lives, and maybe on the other side none of this Matrix classroom of suffering and confusion bullshit means a thing. Maybe we’re all just at peace and no longer fathers  or daughters or people who have to keep photos and videos  to remember and understand.

To that thought, I’ll leave you with this audio from a recent show called Midnight Mass, which is ostensibly about vampires, but surprised me with the one of the best explanations of life and death that I’ve heard. This monologue floored me:

Sending love to you, my friends.

Kali Ma

First, this entry started out about one of my BFF’s, Storm Large, as she just slayed on AGT and is back on again on Peacock tomorrow.

But my equally awesome friend Elizabeth Grey covered it so well already that it feels unnecessary to add anything else, so this entry morphed.

Liz’s piece is here, read it, you won’t be disappointed: STORM WATCHING

Okay, let’s get on with it…

My current life is somehow copacetic, joyful even. It’s a new feeling.

I have discovered that the more I focus on my own inner healing and awareness, the more the outer smooths itself out with little or no assistance. It’s like learning how to drive: when you first get behind the wheel you keep looking at the front edge of the car and it wobbles back and forth, then you learn that if you change your focus past the front bumper and onto the road, things straighten out.

I am not the first person to figure this out; we hear it all the time. But no one ever mentions that it takes forever. It’s taken me decades to see results, starting from the 90’s when I realized I was fucked and got a therapist and bought and slogged through every self help book available (“Women Who Love Too Much”, anyone?).

But maybe no one sorts anything too well until later in life? Who are these people who have their shit together in their 20’s? It’s infuriating. I feel like I’ve been navigating a dark room with a lighter for much of my existence, and I’ll take clarity wherever and whenever I can get it.

I’ve spent much of my teenage and adult life focused on romantic relationships. I can’t even look at my teenage diaries, they’re so cringey and obsessive over boys and relationships. Wanting them, gaining them, falling in love, falling out of love, losing them, fighting within them, feeling bad about my behavior around them, feeling mad about other people’s behavior in them, throwing them away, losing them, mourning their loss, trying to get them back, etc. Obsession has been my best frenemy and the murderer of so, so much sleep. It has been all-consuming of both heart and brain; it has caused me the most pain, drama and embarrassment in my life. And it has taught me much, so much about myself.

When I lost my ex, or rather made it too difficult for him to stay, I took it very hard. It wasn’t as much the loss of romance as much as the loss of the person altogether. If the one person who is supposed to be THE person decides to never speak to you ever again, then the logical conclusion is that you must be the worst person on the planet. And I always assume everything is my fault anyway. So I blamed myself for all the bad stuff, exonerating him in an unrealistic way that made it impossible for me to feel okay about myself. I mourned that loss deeply and with great confusion, and with it I mourned the loss of the hope that I could be a good, healthy partner to someone. I mourned the dream of happiness in one special person. And mostly I questioned my own value to anyone anywhere in any capacity.

I have always fought a battle between what my brain knows I should do and what some deeper part of me insists I’m gonna do regardless of that acuity. I have stood at the edge of many metaphorical cliffs saying to myself, don’t jump, it’s gonna hurt, don’t jump, PLEASE don’t jump.

But I always jump. And then as I’m plummeting downward toward the inevitable crash I think, “Christ. Here we are AGAIN. You ASSHOLE.”

I hate falling, but I can’t stop from jumping. I hate change, but I make sameness impossible. Why? Why can’t I just BE GOOD? Clearly this must be due to being a deeply flawed human; why else would I choose to love terrible people, choose to behave in destructive ways, choose chaos over peace? I have felt a great shame and sadness over my own craziness, real and imagined.

But I finally get it. And I’m finally at peace with all of it. And losing that relationship was the leap that put me here. Not because not having that person in my life brings me happiness, but because I learned through that chapter that I did not come here in this body and life to master the perfect relationship with one other person or even a series of persons. I am here to master the relationship with my spirit. My soul has shoved me past logic so many times because those lessons/tools/information were not going to come any other way. Of course I prefer to learn and evolve through joy, and sometimes I do. But for whatever reason I, like most people, usually need a little hard experience to get the point.

When I was in the throes of my deepest sadness and regret I got some therapeutic energy work done and the woman working on me said, “I keep hearing the words ‘I’m sorry’.” I burst into tears and said, “Those words are a mantra on repeat in my head all day and night.” Those words were too small to convey the oceans of sorrow coursing through my system, so they just looped around through my being 24/7, like the blood in my veins.

She closed her eyes and took a moment and said, “But I also just got a clear image of Kali dancing in your heart.”

Ooh, that’s fancy! I liked that, although didn’t immediately feel better. But the work did help and the image of Kali has remained with me. Kali Ma, the fearsome great mother who destroys to create and heal–gotta shout out a big thank you to my friend Carla Kali Ma Salls for first informing me about this amazing Hindu goddess well before I was paying real attention to the spirit realm and its archetypes. If you aren’t currently aware of Kali, do a bit of googling, you won’t be disappointed.

So I knew that vision was to inform me that my heart was strong and knew what it was doing even when the rest of me was not yet on board with the plan. And that I had made some painful, life-breaking choices to burn shit down, burn that baggage from this life and probably others, to release dense energy that needed to go in order for me to become more whole, more self-forgiving, more forgiving of others, lighter, and closer to my divine nature.

Some people reading this will say that this is grand talk from someone who has a boyfriend. To that I will say that this information doesn’t change depending upon whether anyone is in a romantic relationship or not, it just happens to be the particular theme for me in this lifetime. Everyone has those places in their lives that lessons seem to revolve around–money, jobs, health, children, friends or romance. It’s all relationships anyway.

But to answer anyone with curiosity on my personal details – Sam and I have been able to create a trusted support system for one another. He is solid in ways that I’ve not experienced before and I believe he came into my life to help me propel and heal during a time when I needed a soft place to land. It is a safe place for both of us. But because we are at opposite ends of the adult spectrum, our connection is by no means a traditional partnership. We both make a lot of allowances for each other’s freedom and we both know that eventually we will have to make some kind of shift to accommodate the differences in our ages and trajectories.

That’s fully okay with me. I want him to have all the good and bad experiences in life that he’s meant to have, like falling madly in love with someone his own age and running wild with it. It’s hard for a 20-something rock star to run wild with his 50-something girlfriend who is currently obsessed with caftans and prefers a nice glass of champagne on the patio to partying with bands til the sun comes up. I’ve already had all those crazy rock and roll adventures that are new to him and at this stage in life I aspire to Lisa Vanderpump, not Sable Starr.

Although who are we kidding? Maybe more Dixie Wetsworth?

Whatever the outcome I know that my happiness is not dependent upon a relationship status. This is somewhat new for me.

Personal details aside, this is what I wish to impart: those parts of us that are most flawed and cause us the most pain are meant to be there because they are our greatest teachers. We are here in this life and body to learn and experience, but we have to pay attention and listen for the messages if we want to move forward. Sometimes we are pushed to operate in uncomfortable territory and it is dreadful. When we are in the middle of the pain or upheaval it’s difficult to get the information and it always seems to take far longer than we’d like.

In the case of my ex it has taken me years to get clear on what that was all about, to forgive myself and forgive him, and to see how perfectly our imperfections operate in order to bring us closer to our deepest selves. Which is, in my opinion, the true version of God: divine law, divine nature, divine energy, divine love– where we can reside in peace and wholeness.

Forgive yourself. Forgive them. Listen to your intuition. Let go of expectations. Love your present as best you can. Don’t cling to your past or get boxed into a corner by your past stories. Do the work and it will get better. I promise.

Oh, and get fucking vaccinated if you haven’t already. Don’t be a dick.

I bow to you, my friends.

Death By a Thousand Cuts

I talked to a friend yesterday who told me that he ran into what I guess could be called a frenemy. Said frenemy is a woman that I worked with years ago– beautiful, intelligent, similar East Village history. It was not a great combo; I found her abrasive, unnecessarily defensive and territorial, overall a very difficult coworker. At the time I hated every second in her presence and I’m sure she didn’t adore me either. But I could see that she had some good qualities in dealing with other people, and I got over it with time. I thought she did too.

I liken this later time in my life to senior year in high school, when everyone has managed to get close to the finish line and the cliques don’t matter so much. There is a camaraderie of making it through together. It feels the same, for the most part, with all of those rivalries and beefs we had in our youth. The grudges have faded and we’ve matured enough to get past some of the issues that created them in the first place.

The last time I saw this woman was a couple of years ago at a memorial for another mutual friend. We had a nice conversation about what had been going on with us since that job, and I felt good about our interaction and was grateful and pleased that things were friendly. I thought we were great.

So friend who ran into said frenemy said that she told him that the last time she’d seen me I was crying in a dive bar. Now–the part about me crying in the bar is undoubtedly true. As mentioned many times here, I went through a very difficult period a few years ago, and I was drinking and crying all over the damn place. BUT, that was most definitely NOT the last time she saw me and she knows it. The last time she saw me I was not crying or intoxicated and, side note, was wearing really good shoes and an excellent dress.

I was at first confused, then irritated. I thought about sending her a message asking essentially, “Bitch, why??” Why must you perpetuate this ancient, dried brown bad blood by purposely talking shit? Why, whyyyyyyyyyy??? Then my second thought was that if I were to send a message then I too would be perpetuating and it would turn it into a “thing”. And I’m practicing not turning a thing into a thing or being a “right fighter” (thanks, Dr. Phil!), meaning that I understand that I don’t always have to have the last word, and that it’s not my job to harass people for not thinking I’m as awesome as I think they should.

So I let it be. But I like to fester on things for as long as humanly possible in order to maximize internal suffering. And as I was gloomily ruminating (gluminating!) over it, I happened to catch a woman on TV discussing a seemingly unrelated topic, specifically about how movies have often negatively shaped female comparisons and opinions about ourselves, that somehow felt related. Because I am guessing the answer to the why question is a lingering feeling of competition and a need to cut a competitor into more bite sized pieces. So it feels like I’m being nudged to work on this a bit.

The BLM movement has caused me to examine my own personal role in perpetuating racism and white privilege, and it’s been both eye-opening and saddening. I am sad that it’s taken 2/3 of my life to ingest this information, and to understand fully that I have to be proactive in all of my conversations, thoughts and encounters if I want to be a part of the solution.

So along with this I am now also realizing that I must do the same with women. It is imperative to change some ingrained, learned behavior if we are ever to disassemble another prejudicial system–the patriarchy.

This is more complicated for me. First, just typing the word feels yucky. Not because I don’t feel that it exists and needs to be dismantled, but because I don’t like winging it on subjects that feel too large for me. I like to stick to my own little dust-ups and the information I can glean from them.

But this is indeed a personal dust up, if only inside my head. It’s clear that for her there is some residual dislike. In my mind it’s unwarranted, but not unexpected, because women are always suspicious of one another, and often shitty as a result. We slice each other to ribbons with sharp little criticisms, bits of whispered disapproval. gossip that sometimes lies, often exaggerates or gets it at least partially wrong. We undermine our own personal integrity with publicly sanctioned, often whispered, sometimes funny abuse of each other, which rewards us with a temporary feeling of control or superiority.

I have always been a girl’s girl, but I can also act as insecure and mean as anyone else when feeling attacked or defensive. I love words, humor and getting into people’s heads, so I can easily tear someone up either to their face or behind their back with those three things. I want to do better, do the right thing, and I’m definitely closer to it. But I’m realizing that maybe just trying to be nice isn’t the point, isn’t as far as I need to take it.

So what does taking it further entail? I don’t want fake niceness with people I don’t like. It seems kinder to be honest with someone than string them along passive-aggressively. I believe that if I am speaking my truth that gives the other party the control and freedom to live their own truth. So even if it’s not enjoyable in the moment, it’s a cleaner way of living.

So maybe it’s the way we deliver that honesty? I don’t want to give up my dark sense of humor, it keeps me afloat. But what about all the tiny, unnecessary ways that we injure each other without self-awareness, often without the other person’s awareness, under the guise of humor, or even worse, faux concern? The way we judge someone we don’t know or don’t like by weight or appearance, the way we make some snide comment or joke that we quietly know is unfair or bending the truth. And even if it is the truth, couldn’t it be possible to convey that information with compassion and empathy instead of with a sting?

I’m still sorting it out. I feel much more of a kinship with Cersei Lannister than Gandhi. I would very much enjoy blowing up my enemies with green fire while sipping wine. I come up with terrible nicknames for people in my head that no one needs to hear. I tend to snicker when someone who has tormented me falls, probably because it puts scary things/people in a more manageable, less threatening box, which feels empowering in the moment. Winning a war is comforting.

But in the end it’s only a seductive illusion. At the end of the day it denigrates both parties energetically/vibrationally. So that means that in order to move forward I have to start viewing a person as a full entity rather than that quick, disdainful assessment and boxing up that keeps me feeling safe.

This is almost scary; it feels too vulnerable. I’m finding that the first step for me personally is just to keep my big mouth shut. Utilizing a filter is pretty new to me, but I’m guessing that if I get more adept at carefully choosing words, the thoughts might follow. So forgiveness in this case, I think, doesn’t mean pretending it didn’t happen, but it means I can let it die on the vine without retaliation or comment. And I’m grateful for the awareness that came with this little dig. I’m thinking about it, writing about it, and hopefully gaining knowledge from it.

I’m thinking that it could be possible to approach dislike with integrity. It isn’t about reaching for sainthood or trying to be liked by everyone, which can be a form of self-judgment anyway, like “I will try to be better, and then maybe I will deserve love, but I can never be perfect, therefore I can never be loved.” The snake eats its tail.

Any time someone decides that I am behaving in a way they dislike or disapprove, the first criticism leveled at me is always “For someone who spends so much time pretending to be spiritual, you sure are… [insert insult here].” Possibly. It seems strange to criticize someone for working to improve, but it’s an easy dig in my case. For me, any spiritual leanings are primarily about finding ways to live and think that remove pain and create joy, because I hate feeling bad and much prefer to feel happy. So the goal, whether you call it spiritual work or not, becomes simply about protecting one’s peace of mind: I don’t want to waste one more minute of my life dealing with competitive schism because it makes me feel bad.

And then if that feels palatable, we can move to the admittedly more global/spiritual level, and consider that if we shift our own personal consciousness to be happier, that in turn nudges the collective conscious closer to a world in which we don’t have to make a decision on whether to deal with bitchiness or not, because it no longer exists as a standard or readily acceptable means of relating to one another.

Women can do better, people can do better, and I think many of us are ready for it. I do believe that we are in the age of Aquarius and that a new world is slowly coming to fruition. But it’s at a glacial pace and I get disheartened sometimes when I look at things on the large scale. These little changes feel more doable. I can’t control the world but I can control my small piece of it, and maybe influence someone whose small piece is adjacent to mine, and then boom! Patriarchy dismantled, all animals and children are treated with respect and kindness, people notice my awesome shoes and forget they saw me crying in a bar in 2016.

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