Yesterday, I had a beautiful vision that began when Lasiurus came up on my Self Care Sunday shuffle. It began as I stood firm on the ground absorbing the first few moments of the music and allowing my body to move along with it, into it, transporting back nearly 20 years to my summer in New York City.
At that time in 2005, I was messily emerging from a dormant state, adventuring into my own personal Gotham, working my way through a particular chapter of ongoing hell. I didn’t realize at the time, but that experience completely changed the trajectory of my life, for the better, and not how I had anticipated it would (by moving to New York, which I did not do and thank god for it).
In these first moments of the music, overwhelmed in sense memory, recalling the power I felt with this soundtrack in my ears eyeing the skyline on the subway, I began recalling. Recalling the weight of the anger and displacement my soul was going through. Recalling the long lost friends who had supported me through that trip. Recalling the foundation they never knew they’d helped lay down with me.
I was overcome with emotion quickly and started crying. Not just surface crying, but a deep, profound, soft wailing that took over my perceptions completely. I stopped moving to instinctively clutch myself.
As my hands curled around to embrace me, I realized I was hugging this former self of mine, the brave one who left her husband to travel across the country into the unknown, to carve out a place for herself in a society that didn’t fit right, who returned technically failed but changed and steering in a completely different direction.
I thanked her, genuinely, for probably the first time. I thanked her for everything she did, for how brave she was, for her mistakes, for her flaws and failures. I thanked her for choosing to divorce, for choosing to change careers, for choosing the spotlight, for choosing to let go and move into the van, for choosing cringe. I thanked her for her hustling, for her creativity, for reaching out and asking for help, for creating an unprescribed life against the current trying to drag her down the road most traveled.
I hugged her and stroked her and took her jaw in my hand and told her between long guttural wails that she did a good job. She did such a good job. Breaking the cycles. Risking.
Flashes from 20 years of memories started flooding in, and as the music shifted and changed, rose and fell, slowly, an audience appeared in my minds eye around us. My audience. Every audience.
In my room, suspended in this wormhole of time with 2005 me, I was on stage, the biggest stage I’ve ever performed, soaking in a last wave of audience approval so massive, if it had been real I would have been blown through the back wall of the building as if I weighed absolutely nothing.
Every person who applauded me at any point in my performance career was there, in the dark behind the blinding light, clapping.
While this audience slammed their hands together, stood and hooted and whistled, I felt every ounce of validation I’d ever dismissed from my performance work in real time. Every compliment I refuted, every mistake that sent a paralyzing jolt through my body, every show I agonized over once it was finished.
After a lifetime of struggle, self doubt, insecurity, stage fright, shaking legs, and flat out pain, I allowed it all in. She allowed it all in. We allowed it all in.
This was such a cosmic experience for me, this internal shift to acceptance after decades of fighting myself, to turn to previous me on that stage in front of everyone and say — you did it. You did it. You got through it. Thank you for doing it. Thank you for everything you gave. Thank you. Goodbye.
At the end of Hey Hey, on Cold Front, I say among other things that I’m going to be the change I seek. Little did I know how radically I would transform in the years since I released that record. That change would mean retreating into an obscurity I was previously terrified would kill me, that I would go from one of the loudest people I know to moving in perpetual silence.
It was a beautiful ceremony within the flow of life that, once again, is only just beginning for me, as not just a chapter closes, but the second book in my ongoing series comes to its end.
Where there is historically intense sadness and a wistful longing for sameness at the end of a chapter, there was no melancholy here, in this final bow with tears streaming down my face as I finally, finally claimed all that you’ve tried to gift to me over these years.
In perfectly orchestrated irony, now that I finally have my voice and my body is feeling like one that actually belongs to me, the phase of my existence where I sing songs and tell tales of triumph with my miraculous aching meatvessel has passed.
The phase where I toil over what titles to put on my business cards, how to encapsulate my personhood into a tagline, where I rely on friends to be patrons to be clients to be customers to maneuver this weird fucking world is over. My vision concluded by my silencing the crowd with a hand gesture, and accepting my formal award in silence. Beautiful, hovering, lingering, suspended silence.
The spotlight that was once my lifeline belongs to a new generation now. New stories, new lessons, new teachings. I get to be an audience member, to interact fundamentally differently with life, to allow the impermanence and fleeting nature of living for your applause to fade into the depths of time where that compulsion belongs.
Nothing of me is original. I am the combined effort of everyone I’ve ever known.
Chuck Palahniuk
Thank you. Thank you, all of you, whoever might see this, for witnessing me, for contributing to this long twisting journey. I was never as gracious and thankful for your efforts, your consumption, your support of my performance works, as I wanted to be able to be. It wasn’t your fault. You always deserved more than I was ever capable of giving back.
Take care of you,
-nee