“To be beautiful means to be yourself. You don’t need to be accepted by others. You need to accept yourself. When you are born a lotus flower, be a beautiful lotus flower, don’t try to be a magnolia flower. If you crave acceptance and recognition and try to change yourself to fit what other people want you to be, you will suffer all your life. True happiness and true power lie in understanding yourself, accepting yourself, having confidence in yourself.” ~Thich Nhat Hanh
Fifty years ago today I came out of my mother and into this world. It’s been a bit of a calamity ever since. I’ve left some marks, made a ruckus – made you remember some things and forget some others. Perhaps I made you feel something; perhaps I made you feel nothing. In the end, it was usually the ones I wanted most to reach who wanted nothing to do with me, and maybe that will be the greatest lesson of this half-century of living.
Fifty finally feels like the perfect moment for definitively not giving a fuck. Some might say I’ve been here for a while, and that’s fine for them to think, but the truth is I was hanging onto a fuck or two with the foolish hope of… something. That hope has happily flown out the window with the arrival of fifty. There are, at long last, no more fucks to give – and that feels like freedom. That feels like fifty. And that feels just fine.
“To dwell in the here and now does not mean you never think about the past or responsibly plan for the future. The idea is simply not to allow yourself to get lost in regrets about the past or worries about the future. If you are firmly grounded in the present moment, the past can be an object of inquiry, the object of your mindfulness and concentration. You can attain many insights by looking into the past. But you are still grounded in the present moment.” ~ Thich Nhat Hanh
Considering all my supposed vanity, how strange that this should be the first letter I’ve written to myself. For all the self-help techniques espoused by new-age writers, somehow I’ve managed to avoid the vain indulgence of such an exercise, because it always felt pointless to put down in words the silly things I voice to myself internally. That inner-dialogue is persistently consistent, pausing only for meditation and sleep, so there never seemed a need to translate it into written form. Strange for someone who purports to love writing…
I think I’ve also left you alone for all these years because I sort of assumed you could take care of yourself. You always have, even as a young child. When left to your own devices you would find ways of mentally entertaining and surviving various difficult predicaments – the typical pratfalls of childhood – through wit and whimsy and make-believe. Your imagination ran wild from your earliest days, and it remains one of the most potent exit strategies for an increasingly-worrisome world. I reserve my deepest pity and sympathy for those young creatures who have bartered their imagination for a cel phone and screen time. How sad to be so disconnected from the world! On your 50th birthday, I think you deserve a small pat on the back for maintaining your connection to nature – to plants and animals and the wonder and beauty of any given day. May it prove as reliable for comfort for the next fifty years as it has for the first…
I know you didn’t want to celebrate fifty in any grand or bombastic way – too typical, too predictable, too much like too many others – but you need to hear what I’m saying.
Do you hear what I’m saying?
Do you know what I’m saying?
Those words once rang in your head during your first year of college, when you thought you were going crazy, when you thought you might not last. That’s partly why I insist upon you honoring this day: because there were moments – several of them – when you almost chose not to be here. You came close to snuffing out all the goodness and awfulness and sweetness and sadness of these wonderfully wickedly woefully wildly winsomely few decades that followed the darkness. That choice – that option to be or not to be – has occasionally reared its head, and thus far whatever angel or spirit or sliver of self-worth that perches on your shoulder has guided you right on all your ways. You cannot take reaching this age for granted, because I know all of the struggles that sometimes barely brought you to this point.
Perhaps I should have written to you sooner. There were so many moments when you needed someone – anyone – so badly, and I let you do it all on your own. I thought it would make you stronger. I thought it would help you survive. And maybe all it did was come close to killing you. I’m sorry for that, I’m sorry I left you to fend for yourself all these years, I’m sorry I wasn’t there… even when I was.
Despite my absence and despite my silence, or perhaps because of them, my faith in you never wavered, and you turned out all right. I know you don’t always think that. You’re still too hard on yourself, but you’re getting better about it. That’s difficult, because I also know there were pivotal moments when you should have had unconditional, unwavering, and unquestionable love, and it simply wasn’t there. When you lack that at certain key steps, it’s almost impossible to make up for it on your own. There’s only one word that matters in that sentence though: almost.
And so, in however many years that may follow this half-century demarcation point, I want you to remember all the possibility and opportunity that ‘almost’ affords, remember all the hope and power that reside in a ‘maybe’, and remember all the love that lives within your ‘self’. Going forward, that’s all you’ll ever need.
Happy birthday my friend. ~ A.
“I have lost my smile, but don’t worry. The dandelion has it.” ~ Thich Nhat Hanh
I thought I was prepared to let go of the first half-century of my life, as if there is any promise or likelihood that there will be a second half-century. How many people do you know who live to be a hundred? And who would want that?
Knowing what little I now know of second acts, and the second half of one’s life, I am not quite ready to say goodbye to the best of my days.
I’ve never had such feelings before, never entertained, not seriously at least, the fear and terror of leaving it all behind. It was as if there was always the hope and possibility of turning back, like I could, if things got really bad or unbearable, get back to the places of youth and beauty and promise, even if it was all in my head. There’s something irrevocable about 50 that I didn’t feel at 30 or 40 or even 49. And part of me finally feels a little afraid, a little regret, a little hopeless… at all that came before, and all that never came at all – the dreams and plans and aspirations, the wishes and wants and wonderings, the way I thought it would have all played out by now.
I’m sorry. I do apologize for this post. I don’t like to be this vulnerable, and for almost five decades I’ve pretended not to be. The truth is that this world has knocked me about a bit. It’s left its bruises, its dents, its scars – it’s left its hurt on and within me. It’s impressed its betrayals and abandonments, its cruelty and wickedness, upon my heart. It hasn’t been as wonderful as these posts have often portrayed it to be – and I haven’t been as powerful or sure as I’ve pretended to be.
“Art is a kind of innate drive that seizes a human being and makes him its instrument. The artist is not a person endowed with free will who seeks his own ends, but one who allows art to realize its purposes through him. As a human being, he may have moods and a will and personal aims, but as an artist he is “man” in a higher sense – he is “collective man,” a vehicle and molder of the unconscious psychic life of mankind. That is his office, and it is sometimes so heavy a burden that he is fated to sacrifice happiness and everything that makes life worth living for the ordinary human being.” ~ C.G. Jung
“Therein lies the social significance of art: It is constantly at work educating the spirit of the age, conjuring up the forms in which the age is more lacking. The unsatisfied yearning of the artist reaches back to the primordial image in the unconscious, which is best fitted to compensate the inadequacy and one-sidedness of the present. The artist seizes on this image and, in raising it from deepest unconsciousness, he brings it into relation with conscious values, thereby transforming it until it can be accepted by the minds of his contemporaries according to their powers.” ~ C.G. Jung
“The artist’s life cannot be otherwise than full of conflicts, for two forces are at war within him; on the one hand, the common human longing for happiness, satisfaction and security in life and on the other, a ruthless passion for creation which may go so far as to override every personal desire… there are hardly any exceptions to the rule that a person must pay dearly for the divine gift of creative fire.” ~ C.G. Jung
“I should advise you to put it all down as beautifully & as carefully as you can – in some beautifully bound book. It will seem as if you were making the visions banal – but then you need to do that – then you are freed from the power of them…. Then when these things are in some precious book you can go to the book & turn over the pages & for you it will be your church – your cathedral – the silent places of your spirit where you will find renewal. If anyone tells you that it is morbid or neurotic and you listen to them – then you will lose your soul – for in that book is your soul.” ~ C.G. Jung
An impossibly-high life spinning wildly out of control,
a life that gave in to desperation and depression,
a life that burned of its own blood and toil.
A rage released.
He had tried so hard for so long, and eventually it proved to be too much.
He was lost again, given over to the dark forces of greed and corruption and the glitzy trappings of a decadent world.
Stumbling wildly along a path of destruction, tumbling down a steep hill of depravity, and fumbling fabulously toward a blazing finish, he will go down in glorious ruin.
“Having taken the child on a trip into a wondrous world, at its end the tale returns the child to reality, in a most reassuring manner. This teaches the child what he needs most to know at this stage of his development: that permitting one’s fantasy to take hold of oneself for a while is not detrimental, provided one does not remain permanently caught up in it. At the story’s end the hero returns to reality ~ a happy reality, but one devoid of magic.” ~ Bruno Bettelheim
At this turn of The Divine Diva Tour: A Fairy’s Tale, we dive deeper into the darkness, featuring the first hints of the old ultra violence, and a nightmarish in-and-out of reality. The tortures we inflict upon ourselves when we choose the way of art, the transformations in which we indulge when fueling our creative fire – these are the demons that start rearing their heads as we encroach upon the final harrowing stretch of this fairy’s journey.
Back when I did this project in 2005, the demons that swirled in my head were largely of my own making, and as such entirely manageable and easy manipulated. This was all creative play. True, it had its roots in real trauma and buried memories, but I wasn’t quite ready to give real voice or expression to any of that without a proper mask or veil. These characters stood in for the real me, and in some aspects they took the blows of the real world.
While I can see that now, with the 20/20 hindsight of twenty years of lived experience, back then I don’t think I did. At that time it all felt real, and it all felt terrifying. What a luxurious stance of privilege and power, even if I didn’t realize it.
Because of that, posting this project now feels slightly quaint and innocent, which takes away from some of the drama and trauma that informed it. Distance does lend enchantment, and blunts the sharpest edges. And though there was no real danger of being cut then, somehow I still have scars.
The murkiness is the true terror – the not knowing what might have happened, the possibility of blocking it all out; there may not have been anything of danger or harm in the pool of inky water that blocks all light, but the idea of not seeing the safety is enough to remove it. And a child devoid of safety or security is a child deprived of love.
“Style is a shield; style is a sword; style is a crown; and style is also an automatic invitation card to the party at the end of the world.” ~ Quentin Crisp
Summer’s seduction is approaching its final turn. Cloaked in pastels, it still might trick you into thinking it’s endless, or that it’s harmless, when it is neither of those things. If a pretty flower is poisonous, its prettiness doesn’t remove the poison, it parades it. Fuck with it at your own peril.
Whenever my birthday approaches, I feel the end of summer is near, which makes it all the more dangerous. When there is nothing left to lose, when summer approaches its last stand, the thorns and knives begin to cut. Don’t be fooled by the pretty pastels, don’t think we are soft because of our silence.
The woman taking my blood scoffed at my white pants.
“You don’t like them?” I asked incredulously and with more than an edge of hurt.
“No, I do, I like them a lot! But…” and she motioned to the needle in my arm. “Blood!”
Oh, I thought to myself, I’ve gotten way more blood out of way more things than a pair of white pants. She put a bandage on, and much more tape than I thought necessary. “You can take it off after half an hour,” she said before adding, “Well, forty-five minutes, since you’re wearing those pants.”
It still touches me to be given the slightest bit of care like that, especially from a stranger. Exactly how thirsty was my childhood? I sat in the car, alone with my white pants and bandage, wondering at what had become of this summer. Whenever they draw blood, I get a little philosophical, waxing contemplative on the simple fact of life.
When our house got power-washed earlier this summer, whatever cleaning mix they used ended up all but destroying our beautiful maidenhair ferns. They’ve only just started to come back from their almost-massacre, thanks to a regular watering schedule I’ve employed amid the recent stretch of hot and dry days. Fresh new growth at this time of the year is an unexpected and welcome surprise – and the second-act of this maidenhair fern reminds me that it’s never too late to begin again.
It also recalls the difficult lesson that sometimes you have to burn it all down to the ground before building from the ground up.
There are those days when the text exchanges with my besties run the gamut from death and cemeteries to couches and ejaculate, sometimes without any gentle or lubed transition.
Currently crooning over rapt audiences from her make-shift Argentinean balcony in London’s West End, Rachel Zegler earns her first Dazzler of the Day crowning thanks to her impassioned portrayal of Eva Peron and a stunning turn in Steven Spielberg’s film adaptation of ‘West Side Story’. Zegler is no stranger to illuminating any project in which she appears, such as recent outings in the Shazam and Hunger Games franchises. Personally, I’m on board for any vehicle which affords ample singing opportunities, because it’s her voice that truly soars.
There are times when you know it’s best not to speak, and that speaking at those times will result in people getting hurt, even if what you are saying is entirely true and factual and actually happened. There are times when speaking such truth, even when it’s demanded of you, even when the perpetrators of such atrocities are begging you to speak about their own actions, will only ever end with you getting hurt. When this happens repeatedly and consistently over the course of decades, it’s impossible not to think at least part of it is diabolically intended to fuck with your mind.
I don’t wanna hear I don’t wanna know Please don’t say you’re sorry I’ve heard it all before And I can take care of myself
I don’t wanna hear I don’t wanna know Please don’t say “Forgive me” I’ve seen it all before And I can’t take it anymore
At such moments, I find it best to let Madonna speak for me, in the same way I’d play certain songs in the car when my parents would drive me somewhere ~ a vain attempt to get them to hear my silent cries for help. And sometimes, even when the cries were made directly to them beneath tear-stained desperation, they looked at me, pretended to hear, and moved on, unmoved.
I’ve heard it all before, I’ve heard it all before I’ve heard it all before, I’ve heard it all before
This song has already been featured in a Madonna Timeline here, but it’s such a banger that it works on a multitude of levels, going beyond some jilted romantic endeavor into something far more powerful and universal. A bit more sinister too, when one thinks of all the wrongs that a family can inflict over the years, over and over and over…
I’ve heard it all before, I’ve heard it all before I’ve heard it all before, I’ve heard it all before
