1. Watershed
I moved to New York many years ago in a blaze of escape. I applied to grad school, flew to New York to audition when I made the first cut, got in, and then had to pack up shop in a matter of 2 months and leave. There were many reasons why I made this choice but in looking back it still feels like a getaway, as opposed to embracing a new opportunity. I had had this insane love affair that lasted (roughly) two years, but it had all kinds of unrequited elements to it … or, it was more like, we hovered on the edge of the abyss wondering, agonizing, whether to take the leap. We didn’t discuss any of it. Because the joy/accord/passion was so strong neither of us ever wanted to come out of it. (“Duh, then you know what you should do,” I say to us in retrospect.) We weren’t so much adults as babies who reach out to one another in a sea of adults, knowing: “Oh. You. You’re like me.” All along as that affair was going on, I kept one foot in the OTHER relationship I had going on, one that would far outlast this “babies in shopping carts” thing. The other relationship I’ve written about a lot, the crazy guy who crawled through my window in the middle of the night to “surprise” me, and our adventures are legion. He saved me in a lot of ways. We were both wild. Our other partners in the past had found us both (frankly) unmanageable. Everyone wanted to put a leash around us, and we had bucked against that. We never did that to one another. He is the first man who ever accepted me, every aspect of me, even the most difficult. Because I am DIFFICULT. But he was always nice to me. (Many men weren’t and aren’t.) He and I were intermittent. I found that if I spent more than 3 days in his presence, I had to take a break from him. We started to find each other annoying at that 3-day mark, so we’d retreat to our corners, regroup, and then come back. This went on (still unbelievable to me) for 11 years, even when we were in different cities (and we were in different cities for most of the time.) And it didn’t end in a bad way. It ended in the best way possible, a conclusion drawn, our connection acknowledged, a long long night of reminiscence that closed the circle. (That’s what he said he wanted: “Let’s close this circle.” He was a maniac macho guy, but way way more sensitive than I was, in a lot of respects. A couple of years ago, I found out he has a deteriorating illness, and it plunged me into grief. I tried to express how I felt in the aftermath of getting the news in this post. Life goes on, though, and apparently he is managing it, and he’s out there still doing well. So I’m happy. I always wish him the best.) During our time in Chicago, he knew about the other guy, the guy I was standing on the abyss with. He would joke about it sometimes: “He wishes he were me right now. He may have this great career, and the love of thousands, but at night, every night, he is wishing he were me.” He even made up a limerick about it, chanting it into the darkness of my room, as I cried with laughter. All of this seems rather unbelievable to me now, looking back on it, but this is how it all went down. When the standing-on-edge-of-abyss guy made his choice (he chose someone else), I thought my life had ended. That sensation would continue for 5, 6 years. I literally could not get over it. I was so sure that eventually we would un-twist ourselves, and choose to be together. And, to this day, I’ve never met a man who felt that way about me. That recognition factor. The first thing he said to me was “Are you waiting for someone?” I was standing on a street corner. And I was waiting for someone. But there was something about him … something about how he had clearly seen me from afar, and took the leap to come over and talk to me … his interest clear, his tone almost joking, his eyes lit up with friendly interest … that struck me, and I swear, I remember that an answer to his question floated through my brain: “Yeah. You.” Instead I said, “Yeah, my friend is supposed to meet me here, etc.” But that sensation of “Yeah. You.” never abated. And honestly, it hasn’t since. I’ve seen him a couple of times in the last 10 years, when he came to do a show in New York. The same thing still existed between us. So I can’t really ever see him again. I understand that now. He sent me a letter last year, a snail-mail, to congratulate me on the whole Criterion Love Streams thing, which he had heard about through osmosis. I wrote about that. It had been so long since I had seen him, or even thought about him really, that the sight of his handwriting literally made me go weak in the knees in my building’s lobby. I had to put my hand on the wall.
So when this thing between us crashed and burned, and he didn’t seem to realize what had happened (I got the, “Please. We still have to be friends. I can’t stand it” speech a couple of times, with increasing desperation) … and life became unbearable (except for that OTHER guy, crawling through my window … I am amazed at my younger self’s resilience. I couldn’t withstand any of this now.) … I started making plans to move from Chicago. That was my impetus. I couldn’t be there anymore because he was in the vicinity. I felt I could never move on. That time had stopped for me in Chicago. I didn’t realize (somehow?) how final that decision would be. I’m okay now. I’ve lived here longer than I lived in Chicago. I have a good life here. But still …
Leaving Chicago was almost hallucinatory. At one point, it WAS hallucinatory, because I came down with a summer flu that intensified into something dangerous, with a 104 temp, and hallucinations of icebergs. I had no health insurance. I was disconnected from my body. On impulse, I got a tattoo of a phoenix on my back during the disconnection period when I was still sick. Getting a tattoo was extremely pleasant because it made me feel my body again. This was before tattoos were in vogue for everyone. Tattoo places were filled with leather-clad Hell’s Angels types. The phoenix was (and is) a symbol, as well as a command. You will rise again.
I drove to New York. My cat was yowling in a carrier in the back seat. I snuck him into a hotel.
Randomly, and this kind of shit was always happening in terms of my relationship to that Abyss guy: During my drive to New York, I pulled over into a rest area to get gas and go to the bathroom. There were two little stalls in the Mini-Mart, and I went into one of them. I had been crying on my exit out of town, sobbing as I drove south on Lake Shore Drive, sobbing practically all the way to Gary, Indiana. I was exhausted. I flopped into the bathroom stall, and there, in red pen on the wall were two initials inside a heart. My initials and Abyss Guy’s initials.
I am not sure that that even happened. But I know it did. I sat in that stall for 20 minutes staring at those red initials, mine and his, written by another couple in another time. I felt like we had made a grave mistake, one we would be made to pay for again and again. That was a self-fulfilling prophecy, but honestly, it felt like reality to me.
One of the albums I had listened to constantly during that break-up time (the break-up lasted about three months because neither of us could let it go) was Nomads, Indians, Saints by the Indigo Girls. The album seemed to speak to that whole experience, two songs in particular: “Watershed” and “The Girl with the Weight of the World in Her Hands.” Mostly “Watershed,” with its image of “standing at the fork in the road.” “The Girl with the Weight of the World in Her Hands” was more chilling. I felt that that was what the love affair had made me become. I felt that that song was a glimpse of my future.
But “Watershed” provided more of a catharsis, because it spoke to where I was at. It also provided a small hope that I wouldn’t always feel that way, as unbelievable as it seemed at the time.
During my first year of grad school, I was so busy and engaged that I was actually working the “fake it till you make it” strategy. I was where I needed to be. That still feels true to me. But there were ambushes in New York. I thought I saw Abyss Man on the street once and ran after him, calling his name. We wrote letters to each other (unbelievable!), long chatty letters about our lives … with maybe one or two sentimental sentences at the end. It kept things alive for me, sadly, and I should have put a stop to it. But I was very lonely. It took me that first year to make friends (and I made friends who are still in my life today. I went out with Jen last night to see Creed.) I found a make-out buddy, a nice crazy Texan who wore a Stetson hat to nightclubs and was a brilliant actor. He was one of my best friends in school. But I could not let that Abyss guy go, and he could not let go of me. Our letters were innocent: nothing in them could be construed as cheating (he was involved with someone else, remember.) They were just two old buddies cracking jokes and telling funny stories about our lives. But they were not good for me. I couldn’t stop though. Oh whatever, everyone acts stupid.
Somewhere along the way during that first year of college, that Indigo Girls song receded into the rear view mirror. I wasn’t listening to it anymore. I was taken up with my new life. But I remember once listening to a mix tape on my Walkman (I’m old) as I walked back to school from dance class. I was on 13th Street headed East. And suddenly “Watershed” came on, and the sensation was so visceral and physical that I thought I would faint and had to quickly sit down on a nearby fire hydrant. It was, quite literally, unbearable, so I skipped over it.
That song has remained like Kryptonite to me to this day. (I have a couple of those. I am sure we all do.) I still skip over it. Memory Lane is unwelcome now. Also, so much has happened, so much ELSE that was painful, the hard dark road of my 30s where things got worse … and worse … and worse … that who needs that shit? In my mind now, I look back on that late-20s woman staggering over to a fire hydrant, and feel proud of the fact that she is ABLE to feel emotions like that. That’s over for me now. We are marked by life. I’m not saying my heart is black and cold. But things have constricted. And there has been no compensation for what I lost back then. (There has been in my new career. And I am grateful for that and proud of it. THAT has been the REAL phoenix. The tattoo WAS prophetic, just not in the way I thought it would be.)
I feel like I have written about “Watershed” before. I’d have to check. It’s been in my life now for 20 years. My relationship to it has barely changed. It’s molten lava. I can’t touch it, don’t want to. There are clearly better songs in the universe but that one got into my DNA. I actually listened to it the other day. And I felt time telescope out. The old loss came back to life, accompanied by a sensation of awe that I made it through all that. Not unmarked. Time does not heal ALL wounds, and nobody says that shit to me twice. Not only because my own little life has proven that to be untrue, but because of, oh you know, Syrian refugees and Anne Frank and genocide. Time heals ALL wounds? You SURE about that, you lightweight, who have never felt anything that deeply in your life?
Another element to all of this is the fact that I was white-knuckling a mental illness, did not know I was, thought maybe I had a little problem with depression on occasion, but those occasions were usually attached to a specific event. I got used to enduring them. It would be 20 years – TWENTY YEARS – before things got bad enough that I would get diagnosed. I had one hand tied behind my back. Look up “mixed state.” That’s what I had for twenty years and I would not wish that on my worst enemy. It has destroyed my resiliency, perhaps for good. (On a physical level, I mean. It could be seen in an MRI.) ANYWAY. Thinking back on all of this, and re-visiting “Watershed”, makes everything back then look totally different. I wish I had been diagnosed when I was 12, of course I do. I lost years to this damn thing. Now, my love affair was not a product of my illness. It was a real thing – for me, and for him – and it haunts the both of us to this day. Maybe other people integrate those “other paths,” those “forks in the road,” those “alternate lives” that didn’t happen. Maybe they find some acceptance. I have, to some degree, but that other life, the one that didn’t happen, (or lives) still has the capacity to ambush me. So it’s not entirely integrated. The best way to deal with this is to not think about it too much, and so I don’t. I hate the phrase “It is what it is” (OH HOW I HATE IT), but I have finally caved and found the use in it. It’s slightly Chekhovian and defeatist, but it has helped a little bit. (To reiterate: I do not walk around like Masha in The Seagull saying “I am in mourning for my life” and I do not walk around still heart-broken about Abyss Man. The ambushes are there, but I believe that that is because nobody else came along to “compensate” for that loss. I’ve had to get over it solely by willpower. And I’ve done that – not without a price. Seeing his handwriting on that letter last year was a ghost. A ghost that has been absent for YEARS.)
I listened to “Watershed” last week beginning to end. I listened to the lyrics. I didn’t feel pain or anything like that. Just awe, at how true they still are, but true in a different way. I’m older now. I’ve been through so much that is worse. And I’m still not able to “look back on my life” “every five years or so” and “have a good laugh.” None of it seems very funny at all.
Lee Strasberg, acting teacher, used to say, “Sometimes a man picks up his shoes and sees in them his whole life.” That’s what the song is. When you’ve had a lot of pain, and when you’ve endured pain for 20 years, it’s not entirely a good thing to see your whole life in its entire. But what strikes me is how much has been required of me in order to endure: I have shut doors on enormous sections of my life. Nope. Can’t think about that. Not because of the event itself, but because of the aftermath, and the “lessons” I learned (usually the wrong lessons.) Everything casts a gigantic shadow. For a while there, I couldn’t think about ANYTHING in my life, because it all felt like a wash. That has passed. I have found work that truly engages me. Sometimes I am paid quite well for that work. I have a family who loves me and excellent friends. I have a merry band of nieces and nephews who bring me joy every single day. I am lucky.
But I remember that “watershed.” I remembered it last week. I think my main sensation was awe that I am still here, considering what that song expresses.
2. File Folders
Yesterday I suddenly decided I needed to create more room in my fabulous bookshelves. They were overflowing. I pulled out books to donate. I re-arranged, moving my Film Directors shelf to another one, making room for other stuff. In the two bottom shelves of my kitchen bookshelf, there is a pile of file folders. I have not looked in them in years. I know what’s in there: my writing. But it’s old writing, stuff from many years ago, all the drafts and edits. I want to have that stuff around, even though my writing has taken a different turn. I have a big empty plastic bin, that used to hold all my winter stuff until I figured out a way to re-arrange my closet. I decided to move those file folders (some as thick as a book) into the bin, to make more room for books on those shelves. I thought it would be a simple process: just move that shit, pop the lid on the bin, and then focus on the re-arrangement of books. But as each file folder came out, I found myself drawn to peek. And I lost two hours of time. There is some stuff in there that I don’t remember writing. There are others which have gone on to be published, and there is my first hand-written draft, when I had no idea where the piece would go. Some of those essays are here on my site (many of them I linked to above), so I know them well, and they didn’t contain any land-mines.
But some of the other things!
I still finished up my cleaning, but I kept three file folders out so I could look through them more closely. I wrote a novel in 2001, 2002. Much of what was in that novel was eventually transformed into my play, July and Half of August. But I don’t remember doing that consciously. It’s been a long time since I wrote fiction.
In the three file folders were
1. My novel. Called “The Enchantment of Things.” Not a very good title, on the face of it, but it had a deeper meaning because ‘things’ actually ended up meaning “objects” in the context of the story. Coincidentally, the guy I kept mentioning above – the crawl through the window man – who I just mentioned in my review of The Big Short (no wonder memories and ghosts are ambushing me: it’s because of that review) – anyway, the window guy was obsessed with objects, although he never would have put it that way. Objects were sometimes all he talked about. His amazing deodorant. His coffee maker. His car. I loved it when he talked about “objects.” He never “got used” to them. They were filled with magic for him, a very bizarre thing for a big tough Chicago guy who rolled a pack of cigarettes up in his T-shirt sleeve unironically. And I had forgotten also that I had put some of this stuff on my site. The rocking chair. There’s probably more, but I can’t remember them, it was all so long ago, when he was more real to me than he is now. So it’s a novel where I was, frankly, trying to put that relationship into words, although I wasn’t strictly aware that that was what I was doing. I found much of it unreadable. Not because it was bad, a lot of it was hilarious (it’s a romantic comedy), but because I can see so clearly now what I was working on, and then I couldn’t. I felt almost tender towards my younger self, who was trying to deal with her memories in a fictional way.
2. Another novel, that (I swear to God) I have no memory of writing. Or, at least, I have no memory of writing that MUCH. It was called “The Plain Girl.” I re-read it, amazed at how much I didn’t remember. Has that much time gone by? How can one forget writing 200 pages? I was frankly trying to turn some of the events in my life into fiction. I used my own life, the weird summer after I graduated college, when I went to work in an assembly line in a factory for 4 bucks an hour. Why, Sheila? You have a college degree. The novel was about a girl who was pudgy and plain, spoke her mind, and lived a double life. It was about a girl who tormented her boyfriend by withholding her soul and commitment from him. Which was also from my own life. The parts I don’t remember writing were the long sections written from the boyfriend’s point of view. I wrote this long long after college, but I remembered (of course) that the second we broke up (after four years! Why, Sheila, why? He made you feel so bad about yourself!) I knew I was better off. It was like the shackles were taken off. I met “crawling through window” guy three months after I broke up with that boyfriend, and the chaotic no-rules thing Window-Guy and I had was much more my style and pace. I could BREATHE. But once I started writing “The Plain Girl,” trying to describe that weird summer post-graduation, clearly I became interested in what was going on with my boyfriend at that time (who could not understand why we weren’t getting married, and why I was working in a factory, and why I wanted to hang out with my friends more than I wanted to hang out with him. There was a big age difference between us, which pretty much explains everything, although it was not at all apparent at the time.) Although there was much in “The Plain Girl” that I didn’t like, there were sections I got sucked into the story. Wait, what happens now? I thought. Sheila, it’s your own life. (There was a lot of stuff I made up too, though. It was a mix.) It wasn’t entirely pleasant reading it because I think my memory is like a steel trap. Clearly it’s not. But again, I could feel that I, Sheila, was working OUT something in that novel, without even knowing I was doing it. (Thank goodness none of these were published. One agent at William Morris was interested in “The Enchantment of Things,” and it was so exciting, but to put that out there into the world would have been a disaster, I think.)
And finally, the real revelation:
3. A novella called “Alice’s Lie.” This came out of a game a friend and I made up (again: I had forgotten it entirely but it all came back to me as I read the novella). We decided that we would each tell one another a story from our lives, in great detail. And then she would write up mine, and I would write up hers. A pretty cool writing exercise! She told me about randomly and impulsively telling someone she had a boyfriend when she didn’t. She didn’t mean to lie, it just came flying out of her mouth. We were roaring with laughter as she told the story. I think she was doing it to make some crush she had jealous, but not sure now. So I set out to write this story, and it very quickly took up a life of its own. Alice’s “lie”, of course, was that she had a boyfriend, a fictional man she made up in order to make another man jealous, perhaps. But it very quickly had nothing to do with my friend’s story. Again: I have NO memory of writing this, and it’s 120 pages long. Of each of those file folders, this is the only story where I felt, “Holy shit, there’s something here.” Maybe because I wasn’t writing from my own life. It was this whole weird world I created (I can feel the influence of Joan Didion’s “Goodbye to All That” in it: a deadly influence: if you’ve read that essay, and you’re a writer, you have probably experienced that feeling of dread: that it will influence you as a writer, and you need to struggle out from under its shadow.) But there were details invented out of whole cloth: A thundercloud painted on the ceiling over her bed. An interaction with an HTML programmer at MoMA that led to Bloody Marys in a dusty bar. Random late-night limerick contests. (Echoes of “crawling through window” guy’s limerick, maybe?) And then Alice’s descent into madness (I wrote “Alice’s Lie” almost 10 years before I got a real diagnosis – on some level, I must have known). Alice goes crazy: The fake boyfriend she invented to make HTML-programmer jealous actually became corporeal, he came to life, he hung out in her apartment with her, and she talked with “him” for hours. Alice became more interested in hanging out with the fake boyfriend than with her new HTML-programmer boyfriend. It’s a very very weird story, and I am actually pleased with it. I would edit the shit out of it now (and I may very well do that), but the bare bones of something kind of interesting (to me, anyway) is still there.
Once again, I can feel my younger self (I wrote this in 2004, maybe? I have no idea) working on something. The story is like a haunted-house story. A ghost story. Like Seal says, “It’s the loneliness that’s the killer.” It’s about loneliness so extreme that a fictional character comes to life. The story is uneven, and I clearly got so swept away by inventing the relationship with the HTML-programmer (those whole sections still felt very funny to me.) that it takes over the narrative, making the whole thing out of balance.
I had a very weird hour or so reading those two novels and the novella, the majority of which I have no memory writing. The fact that I have no memory is disturbing, but that’s maybe just part of growing old. The last five years have been engrossing, and the most productive of my life since my mid-20s when I moved mountains to make shit happen for myself. But in the last five years, I started writing film criticism and was hired to cover film festivals. I got my first paid gig. And then other gigs came, and Roger Ebert reached out, and on and on until today. I am very wrapped up in it, and I enjoy it very much. I also wrote my script, under highly stressful horrible circumstances, but that script has brought me nothing but luck since I wrote it.
There seems to be a break with my past. I don’t know if that has to do with getting diagnosed, finally, in early 2013. And so a lot of these white-hot events in my past now look very very different in retrospect. There has been no integration. It is a separation, an abyss. And so I read those novels I wrote, or I listen to “Watershed,” and while I am connected to these things … I feel more baffled about it than anything else.
Was that me back then?
Did I do that?
Sometimes I think: How did I survive? Sometimes I think: You are Iron Man for white-knuckling everything as you struggled with an illness you didn’t even know you had. Sometimes I think: Who was that resilient girl? Skip over that one, pebbles skittering across a pond. Sometimes I think: My God, so much time wasted over these men, and so little to show for it. Another thought like a pebble skipping over a pond. And sometimes I think: There are connections here, there are links, between Me Then and Me Now. The abyss is an illusion. The trick is to frame those connections in a way that helps rather than harms.
It is all the same person. The me as a child, the me as a teenager, the me on the assembly-line in the factory, the me having two deep relationships simultaneously in my mid-20s, the me that saw those red initials at the rest area somewhere in Pennsylvania, the me of my 30s, when I wrote those three novels, trying to work out something, trying to turn those experiences into art, trying to make them of use somehow. I don’t feel like those experiences are of use anymore. But perhaps they still are, only in ways not so explicit. All of the things I was trying to work out in those novels are there in my script. Not recognizable anymore as autobiography, the script is completely fictionalized. But the themes are quite similar. They’re my themes. (Of course other writers have handled these things, but you have to take ownership of what is yours, and you have to have confidence that you have something to SAY on a certain topic, and in the case of Love and Loneliness and Intense Relationships, I do have something to say. Maybe it’s my only real topic.)
So maybe all of these things still are of use. Still are at work in what I am doing, but I’ve moved past the point where I am trapped by them. Maybe the present is all that matters. I don’t think so, but I don’t know.
Sheila, I could read your personal writing all day.
Thank you Nicola!!
I have always loved these stories, if loved is the right word–I don’t mean it in a purely happy way, obviously, because some of them are wrenching–and I’m grateful you kept “working them out” where your readers could see them.
I have a couple songs I can seldom listen to like that. (Never mind what they are. They’re dumb, honestly. At least you picked ones that were lyrically appropriate to the situation.) When I first got an iPod I had to make an “ok to shuffle” playlist so they wouldn’t come up. I didn’t need the auditory ambush.
I wonder if the 30s are a sort of mixmaster decade for women in general? You go in one consistency and pop out another. They felt like that for me, at least.
Well, it’s a very RICH topic, and one lots of people relate to, so that wouldn’t be the worst thing. But it can’t be your only one, else how do you factor in all the index cards on Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, etc.?
// When I first got an iPod I had to make an “ok to shuffle” playlist so they wouldn’t come up. I didn’t need the auditory ambush. //
That is a very smart strategy!! (and now, of course, I want to know what your songs are, but that’s okay, you don’t have to tell me. Weirdly, another one of mine is Mariah Carey’s “All I Want for Christmas Is You” … but that’s not a painful ambush. It’s a good and happy ambush. I saw Mariah Carey in concert a week ago – her Christmas show – and she is such a statuesque diva that the whole thing was fabulous and ridiculous – and also somehow warm and inviting – as though she had invited you into her home. And of course she sang that song as her encore! So hilarious and fun. There was a man in a snowman suit doing a hip-hop dance and my sister and I were crying with laughter watching him.)
// I wonder if the 30s are a sort of mixmaster decade for women in general? //
Ha. So true.
I personally hated my 30s. At least I can say that I FULLY enjoyed my 20s, even though I still feel like, “Who was that girl juggling all those crazy men?” But it was fun and they were all nice. Yes, it crashed and burned but I enjoyed it while it lasted.
// But it can’t be your only one, else how do you factor in all the index cards on Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, etc.? //
hahahahahahaha
Your memory, ilyka!!! Yes, an obsession with the ‘stans can only take you so far unless you work for the State Department or something.
I am sorry for “running out” on this convo–the way my apartment is, my desk chair winds up half wedged into the Christmas tree and I haven’t spent much time at my desk as a result. But I thought I’d go halfway and at least tell you the very dumbest song, because it is bitterly hilarious to me:
Two Suns in the Sunset, by Pink Floyd.
1. Apparently my heartbreak can’t be any old ordinary heartbreak, it has to be “the world has just ended in a nuclear fireball”-level heartbreak. Good job, me, A+ for melodrama and narcissism and you are definitely on the road to healthy relationships now.
2. I actually loathe Pink Floyd. I do. I bought The Wall when I was 15, had that whole “this is speaking directly to my very soul” experience that teenagers, especially melodramatic ones like myself, do have–and then my brother got into them. And I mean, he REALLY got into Pink Floyd to the point that it was open warfare between us: Him putting Dark Side of the Moon on my parents’ stereo, me taking it off; him learning David Gilmour guitar solos, me threatening to call the police or trying to sneak behind him and unplug the amplifier–it was actually his copy of The Final Cut that I’d heard Two Suns in the Sunset on, naturally, and thus for a time it was also his copy of The Final Cut that I kept dementedly sneaking into my room. He’d bang on my door–“are you crying again?” “No.” “Could you at least play a different song now?” “No.” “Can I have my album back?” “No.” I am still bitter about this and still not entirely sure what it was about that song that just caved me in, and still does. Maybe it’s the saxophone at the end.
3. All these references doubtless make it sound like a puppy-love thing, but I was 19 at the time and I don’t think so. At 20 I would do that reactionary, let’s-try-the-opposite-sort-of-guy thing that is NEVER a good idea, and I would move in with a recovering meth head who would go and get himself shot in the living room of our apartment, survive it, turn his rage and frustration on me, and smack me around for the next four years. I would also learn to get and keep a job, get and keep an apartment, get and pay bills, get and prepare food, and I can repair a kicked-in doorframe with wood putty well enough that you still get the security deposit back, so there’s that, I guess, but it made for an out-of-sync young adulthood.
4. I have always had weird musical reactions to grief that keep reminding me that really I have no idea how my own brain works, although I don’t think most of us do, when you get right down to it. When my best-loved grandfather died it was Pieces of Night by the Gin Blossoms; my grandfather was a strict Mormon who never took a drink in his life and certainly never spent the night searching for “Aphrodite on a barstool by your side,” but that was what I played over and over again. That is what fit.
I didn’t like my 30s too well, either! I mostly spent them trying to clean up the messes I’d made in my 20s, although I did have a great time making some of them. From 24-29 was a ball.
Oh my gosh, the Pink Floyd war in your household!!
I can definitely see the appeal in Two Suns in the Sunset – I too go for the “apocalyptic fireball” version of break-ups – which really (as you know) is not as romantic as it first seems!
Your 20s sound similar to mine. I got pretty competent in going after what I wanted and then … hm. something happened. But it’s never too late – I’m getting it back now. I just took a break.
I love the comment about your Mormon grandfather. You just never know what song will hit – and sometimes it’s the strangest thing. Maybe something you’ll never want to listen to again – or something you never would have been into before, outside of it having a good beat or whatever .
My most embarrassing song of this nature is Mariah Carey’s “All I Want for Christmas Is You” – which still, to this day, has the most “listens” on my iPod because it took over my life. I know what was going on in my life at that time – there had been this huge break-through – I was 35, 36 – and I felt all this possibility opening up. And I had re-connected with my ex, Michael, not in a romantic way but in a grownup “Okay. We are friends for life” now kind of thing – which made me feel so good since so many of the other guys were burnt up in all of those apocalyptic fireballs we have discussed. He came and stayed with me for a week. I lived in a one-room apartment. We would take beers up to the roof. He slept on a blow-up mattress right next to my bed. It was like we were teenagers. We had dated briefly a decade before – I don’t know, I still don’t know quite what it was about that week that made me so happy. I felt like I had re-claimed something. Our romance had been so SANE, and our friendship was sane too. No weirdness. (And we are still good friends. When I got the Gena Rowlands gig, he was the first one I told – because Cassavetes/Rowlands was a huge bond between us.) Anyway, all of this is to say – after he left, for whatever reason, freakin’ Mariah Carey’s Christmas song became the way I could keep that feeling going: of sanity and possibility and happiness. It wasn’t even the Christmas season. It was summer. I knew it was insane to be listening to that song so much, and it took about a month to die down … but I still get a shot of adrenaline/happiness when I hear that song, remembering what that week with Michael felt like.
I can’t really explain it. It seems like a madness now, looking back on it – but music is just so powerful that way.
Unlike a lot of other art forms, it HELPS. In a directly-into-the-veins kind of way.
I love “All I Want for Christmas Is You.” It’s so full of happy for a song that expresses yearning and maybe that’s what makes it great. When you’re a kid the yearning you have for it to be Christmas morning, to find just what you wanted under the tree, is exciting and not at all unpleasant. Yes, I can see that setting off Christmas in July under the circumstances!
It’s the best state-changer I know of. God bless the iPod, really.
My sister and I went and saw Mariah Carey’s Christmas show in New York a couple of weeks ago. It was insanely entertaining – at one point there was even a guy in a snowman suit doing some sort of hip-hop dance – as Mariah stalked around in her tiny dress singing “All I Want for Christmas.” It was so great. Cheesy, yes, but great!
tremendous first line & tremendous on the whole. You’re an amazing writer, Sheila. I loved these reads. Thanks so much for sharing.
Thank you so much, Jessie! I appreciate it!!
To lighten the mood I watched “Clap Your Hands if you Believe” last night and guffawed from beginning to end. Never fails.
/We are marked by life./
Yes, and.
I think you should be proud of what you’ve done with the markings. Beautifully written.
Thank you, mutecypher! Thanks for reading!
So much of this resonates for me in my own life — different circumstances, as you know, but I’ve often found myself wondering if I really only have one topic to write about. One thing I really know.
Why is the thing we really know always the one thing we wish we didn’t know?
// Why is the thing we really know always the one thing we wish we didn’t know? //
That is the question.
But there is something you are an expert on. Something you only can provide – and (ironically) somehow other people see themselves in it – or (at the very least) it makes them see things in a different way, and THINK about things that may have never occurred to them. You jolt people out of complacency.
But I know what you mean. Of course you wish you were not an expert in that particular topic. And nobody’s going to give me a Nobel Prize for being an expert in Loneliness – but we (hopefully) work with what we’re given.
xoxoxo
I just love you.
I love you back.
There’s no prohibition on being too sentimental about being in love.
Feelings are unassailably true, not immature, not inappropriate, but are.
You were up on the Watershed, standing at the fork in the road, facing the path at your pace.
I had to get to the Heart of the Matter.
It’s true, the more I knew, the less I understood.
I’ve learned to live without her.
The heart of the matter was forgiveness.
Did you forgive the man on the precipice?
There was nothing to forgive, then or now. He never did me wrong. That’s not the story being told here. You mis-read the whole thing.
I almost can’t bear to listen to Sade’s *Is it a crime?*
As I’ve said many times, I really adore your personal pieces. And I relate, although as I mentioned just the other day, I think I look back and feel that I didn’t live that fully at certain points. (Like my own sojourn in Chicago.) At times, I’ve pulled into myself and skimmed the surface of things, and just lived in my head a lot. This is one of the reasons that Patsy Rodenburg first & second circle stuff was so interesting to me, because I feel that my natural mode is first circle. I felt things very deeply when I was younger, but I had trouble *connecting* – at least with men. I had deep unrequited feelings on one hand, and then very shallow, er, aesthetic appreciation for certain people on the other. But deep connection where I really felt that I knew the person and he knew me, that really happened very little.
So I wonder if I have a different or even opposite kind of regret, that I should have put myself out there more. Taken more risks, or responded more to people who were a little more available or interested, rather than pursuing people who were slightly out of reach. Because you get hurt just as much, without at least that feeling of temporarily having found a place in the world. It seems like by not acting, or holding back, I should have spared myself pain, but it doesn’t really feel like that’s how it worked. It feels instead like I have some kryptonite songs that are just that much sadder because I know the person on the other end rarely thinks about me.
I don’t know if that’s useful at all, for comparison purposes, but that’s what I think about when I read about your youth or the arc of your life as you see it.
I love your thoughts on that Patsy Rodenberg clip, Anne – you have really made me see it in a new way, and taken it out of the realm of Acting, and into the realm of life. (And acting IS life, anyway, but I somehow had not considered it in terms of that lecture.)
// I have some kryptonite songs that are just that much sadder because I know the person on the other end rarely thinks about me. //
Ouch!! I think many of us can relate to that too. Unrequited love is terrible because you are alone in it. It doesn’t feel that way at the time – but when the smoke clears, sometimes it’s like: “Why … WHY on earth did I just put myself through that.” I totally get that and I did it constantly in high school. There were some of those in my 30s too.
My 20s (in retrospect) was the only time I really engaged with other people (i.e. men) in that particular way. And all of those guys – Abyss Guy – Window Guy – and the last one, the only one who gets a name – Michael – all of them still periodically reach out to see how I’m doing. It may be an ambush, but it’s a welcome ambush – because it reassures me that it all was very real, that we did find something special with each other, and that I am remembered. That may sound self-pitying but I don’t mean it that way and I have a feeling you know what I mean.
They were a MIRROR. Not in a narcissistic way, but in a way that made me feel like I was real in the world. I could see myself in the way they looked at me.
So even though none of them worked out (and Abyss Guy was the only relationship that detonated the way it did when it ended – the other two guys we were like, “It has been so lovely, this has been so great, now go off and be lovely in the world, and fare thee well …”) I am grateful it all happened. I really am. Evidence that connection is possible.
Thanks for reading, thanks for the support, and thanks for your insightful thoughts, as always.
Gah!
Sheila: What a heart and what a writer. What insight.
Isn’t it amazing all we don’t know about people we know? SIGH.
I ADMIRE YOU.
So much of this reminds me about the best things that Nick Hornby has written about music and relationships.
Quote 1:
“People worry about kids playing with guns, and teenagers watching violent videos; we are scared that some sort of culture of violence will take them over. Nobody worries about kids listening to thousands – literally thousands – of songs about broken hearts and rejection and pain and misery and loss.”
Quote 2:
“I used to think–and given the way we ended up, maybe I still do–that all relationships need the kind of violent shove that a crush brings, just to get you started and to push you over the humps. And then, when the energy from that shove has gone and you come to something approaching a halt, you have to look around and see what you’ve got. It could be something completely different, it could be something roughly the same, but gentler and calmer, or it could be nothing at all.”
More: https://www.goodreads.com/work/quotes/2961887-high-fidelity
Mike – xoxoxoxo
I love those Hornby quotes so much – I hadn’t heard either of them, and I think they are both so true!
Merry Christmas, cuz, and congratulations on all of your success. Whoo- hoo – TOTALLY deserved.
Oh, Sheila.
:)
This is so beautiful, Sheila. I read it this morning and have been thinking about it all day.
You inspired me to pull down “The Once and Future King” and look for a passage that I once felt described what you are talking about perfectly. It had to do with the author trying to understand young Guenever from his POV in middle age. He talked about balance, and about a “seventh sense” he called “knowledge of life”, opposed to a younger person’s passionate need to feel strongly, to quest for truth or understanding. When I was in my early 30’s, this passage felt like the summation of my own experience, but reading it again today, I discovered that I no longer completely agree with it. Yes, I have more balance now. Yes, there’s a part of me that would like to speak to the lonely, rigid, painfully shy and questing person I was in my 20’s and try to get her to see the value of that balance. But she IS me, and all my “knowledge” has not completely created that sense of objectivity and acceptance that White is talking up.
That’s ok, I guess. I think it’s a good thing that music is such a touchstone, that a song can still smack us in the face (painful as that is). And that we continue, marks and all.
I agree, the cliched phrases you mentioned can only take you so far, and sometimes lead you astray. I keep going back, though, to the one my aunt always said. “This, too, shall pass.”
Barb:
// reading it again today, I discovered that I no longer completely agree with it. //
Wow!! I so know what you are talking about! Isn’t it so incredible when you go back and re-visit things and they seem so entirely different??
// But she IS me, and all my “knowledge” has not completely created that sense of objectivity and acceptance that White is talking up. //
That really is the hard thing – that integration thing – life is a continuum, and we as individuals have a continuum with our own lives. I have always felt I didn’t – and that writing was a way to bridge that gap. I guess it still is, even if it’s on an unconscious level – I’m trying to connect those pieces.
“This, too, shall pass” has been enormously helpful.
Phrases I never want to hear again, however:
“Time heals all wounds.” NOT TRUE.
“Everything happens for a reason.” NOT TRUE. Tell it to the people in refugee camps in The Sudan or the refugees fleeing Syria.
“If you love something set it free…” needs to set on fire and I will laugh over the burning embers.
But “This, too, shall pass” is helpful – and it is TRUE, even though often it’s hard to feel that.
//“If you love something set it free…” needs to set on fire and I will laugh over the burning embers. //
I’ll join you! No bonfire is too high for that particular piece of nonsense.
I’m going to echo the tone of everyone else in saying that your writing amazes and moves me. You are the Iron Man and Wonder Woman rolled up into one. Everyone has something but not everyone (unfortunately) can find help when the “something” gets to the total shit face out of control stage. By some miracle you did, thank God or whoever.
When I hit the big 4-0, I was facing surgery or blindness, I had just started a job where I had to read for a living and I was alone. A trifecta. Someone came along at the right time and helped me. A minor miracle but a miracle never the less. So, I choose to believe that if you at least try to do the right thing most of the time, you get your miracle when you really need it.
Carolyn –
Thank you!!
// A minor miracle but a miracle never the less. //
Amazing how angels do show up, and I am glad one showed up for you. You have to be on the lookout for them! (Perhaps they don’t arrive spouting Enochian or wielding silver angel swords, but they are there!)
Sheila!
I’ve been reading this for two days now and trying to figure out what to say to you and it’s pretty much, Thank You! And echoing the comments here.
When I see you put up your personal writing I think “Oh goody!” And settle in.
Everything resonates with me while your life experiences are quite different from mine in a lot of ways. But that’s what good writers do. They hook into the eternal, the universal. So while my experiences in my 20’s and 30’s on the outside look different, I know what you are talking about.
The loneliness theme. It’s killer. I know with the internet young people might not feel it in the same way, but I bet it’s still killer. And I think it’s a weird subject that no one wants to admit to. About 10 years ago I had the luck of playing Savage in Savage in Limbo by John Patrick Shanley. I thought, oh this is going to be so much fun! The first two weeks in rehearsal just reading the play my stomach was in a knot and I would go home and just weep and weep. I didn’t know why, and then I realized oh fuck! I have to go back there! To the terrible loneliness of childhood, teenage and early 20’s. No! The funny thing about acting is once you do that, and go deep, the fun starts! And I got to be a much braver person then I wished I was at that age. I don’t explain the acting process well, but I love reading about you talking about writing and what a writer does.
I also love reading about your shelves!
The first piece I read from you about The Two Character Play, written so long ago now but still holds up well! Yes, you have grown, but the youthful enthusiasm, the humor, and the honestly is still the same, and why we all keep reading your stuff.
Example: Our other partners in the past had found us both (frankly) unmanageable.
I find in the midst of everything this is so hilarious! and Because I am DIFFICULT.
The honesty is the best part, and a lot of artists don’t have it and (frankly!) what art needs the most, not cleverness, or cuteness, or some shiny thing.
It’s the dead honesty that somehow helps us all to live.
Merry Christmas Sheila, and thanks for all the words!
Regina –
I absolutely love your Savage in Limbo story! Ha! “Yeah, this role will be so fun! … Oh NO, what’s all THIS??”
And I love your thoughts on how playing a role like that can release something – or help you deal with something – that you may not even be aware of in your own life! Or something you actively avoid. Truly amazing when you think about it.
And “difficult.” Ha. Once I just figured out I was difficult, life got a little easier.
Thank you so much for reading all these years – and I love it so much that it was Two Character Play that brought us together!
Merry Christmas to you both!! xoxo
Hi Sheila
You write superbly. The good things, the bad things, the happy and the sad things, I find they’re beautifully written. So thank you.
I’m 60 years old and I try to remember the 40 years old me. Who was that woman? Why did she thought she could never change? That different ways of life would never reach her? That love was forgotten and better get used to monastic routine? How silly and how funny. There’s an expression “the playback of my life” as if music stops around age 40. Or “if my life was a film who would play me?” as if time doesn’t bend in a curve and wouldn’t include plenty of actresses, young and old at different times. I saw once a Mongolian film where there was a teethless old woman in a yurt, and the adult son brings something electronic, maybe a washing machine, and she is childishly happy breaking the bubbles of the wrapping plastic. I would LOVE to be interpreted by that woman!
But I disgress. I just wanted to tell you I appreciate very much your writing, and to confirm you that “this will pass, too” as everything good and bad, because it’s their nature to be transient.
Hugs
Cla – your comment is very deep, very welcome – I thank you for sharing it.
// There’s an expression “the playback of my life” as if music stops around age 40. //
Wow. Needed to hear that perspective, so thank you!!
And thank you so much for reading, for commenting, for participating – the conversations here with all of you are so special!
Sheila – This is an amazing piece. Your writing is so fluid, and it pulls me into all these amazing details then pops me up further downstream into another story. Best kind of personal essay. Thanks for sharing.
I am laughing about one detail. Three days and you would go crazy with the window guy. My dad had a saying – “family and fish go bad after three days.” Maybe we should add old boyfriends to that list?
Your dad, ha!! I know Benjamin Franklin used to say that too – but maybe he was quoting someone else. Let’s pass it on – it’s always true!!
Yeah, at the 3 day mark I’d be like, “Oh my God, I am so so sick of you right now.” And he’d get super-bored and then we’d bicker and both of us would be like, “Later, alligator.” hahahaha Or we’d suddenly get violently out of sync. He’d get clingy and I’d get annoyed. Or I’d get clingy and he’d be like, “It’s a heat wave. Get OFF ME.” How we worked all this out with ZERO hurt feelings is one of the weird miracles of that whole thing. In a way, it was the ideal relationship. (Oh, and I’ve mentioned my own personal “Tough Guy” in some of the SPN posts. My Tough Guy reminds me a lot of Dean – and that’s this guy. I think my guy was just slightly more insane than Dean – if that’s even possible – and definitely more cranky. Maybe that’s why cranky Dean is my favorite. I loved it when my guy got cranky: he was at his funniest. My guy was equally macho – he cried once in my presence in 11 years, and I referenced it a couple of weeks after it happened – “Yeah, that was that conversation when you cried –” Sheila: this will not go over well! And, predictably, he said, “I didn’t cry. Gimme a break.” “Dude, you cried.” “No, I did NOT.” “I can’t believe this. I SAW you cry.” and on and on. Anyway, he was macho with an awful backstory which I was never allowed to ask him about. Sometimes, I can’t help it, he becomes my “filter” for Dean. )
Thank you so much for reading and commenting, Paula! I appreciate it!
Like I said to Jessie above, watched “Clap Your Hands if You Believe” last night and guffawed start to finish – as though I hadn’t seen it 25 times already. Lightened the mood, for sure!!
“It wasn’t ….. a hate crime ….”
Yes! Ben Edlund must have been on a lucid acid trip writing that and J&J just threw themselves into his hands. One of my favorite Dean moments was in that ep, when Patchouli leaves the room and Dean goes to sit down on Sam’s bed, he starts to sit then looks at the messy sheets, makes a disgusted germphobe face and then moves to the clean bed. Edlund said that wasn’t in the script but was all Jensen. God, he is so good at those moments.
Long-time lurker here. I also love your personal writing. You’re an intense person, and you capture that intensity so well.
I’m quite a lot younger than you, and so I haven’t had as much time to experience things. But I completely agree about the way certain songs can blindside you. I think for me the most recent experience of this was listening to ‘Awakening’ by Yellowcard, and ‘Adam’s Song’ by Blink-182. I set them as my alarm on a whim, but when I woke up in the morning, they threw me right back to being 17 again, on a dark, rainy winter afternoon, the day we had chips for lunch on a not-so-double date, my friend’s dog died, and we drew a 100-person family tree.
Those moments of intensity stay with you, and you write about yours so well – thanks for sharing. For me, they come maybe 3-5 times a year. Yesterday was one of them.
Miriam – I love it when people de-lurk with beautiful responses that make me think! Thank you!!
I don’t know “your” songs, but I am going to check them out.
// they threw me right back to being 17 again, on a dark, rainy winter afternoon, the day we had chips for lunch on a not-so-double date, my friend’s dog died, and we drew a 100-person family tree. //
So specific, I love it!! Music is so powerful that way – I wonder what synapses in our brain that actually make this possible. I can re-read a novel without being transported back in time to when I first read it – but not so with songs. Or, it’s more intellectual with re-reading something. “Oh yes, I read this in the summer after my junior year when I was waitressing …” etc.
But a song can literally be a time-travel machine. With all of the sensorial sensations intact. (There’s a reason so many actors use music to “get into” certain emotional scenes. I used to do that myself when I was acting: stand backstage, listening to a song on my Walkman … and Voila: perfect mood for whatever scene. It’s amazing.)
I think the only thing AS powerful that way as music is smells. Smells are transportive in the same way. Proust and Joyce knew that (I guess everyone knows that) – and they use smells all the time in their stream-of-consciousness novels.
It’s all quite amazing.
Thank you so much for reading and commenting!
Thank you for your writing, Sheila. It’s all a marvel. I hope 2016 brings good things for you.
Thank you so much, Kris!
You too, with the New Year!!
Blisteringly honest as usual, Sheila. Your personal writing is always incredibly brave. I’m reminded of a story your friend wrote – I’m sorry but I’ve forgotten her name – about who Sylvia Plath would have become if she had lived. There’s a line in there about how she would look back at her younger self and barely be able to recognize that ‘ragged girl’…
There’s always an oddness about realizing something big about yourself at a later time than you are ‘supposed’ to. I’ve done that. And I think, how could I have not known? But also: how COULD I have known? Who has time for intense personal re-evaluation when they’re white-knuckling it, as you say?
I think I’ve had the opposite trajectory than you so far in that my thirties are looking good (to be fair they just started so maybe I shouldn’t make any declarations) but my twenties were largely a miserable, stunted time. For reasons both internal and external. My teens were even worse; I essentially lived inside an afterschool special. I said to my sister the other day, “You do understand that we grew up in a borderline crackhouse, right?” And she said, “What was borderline about it?” There’s so much in our culture about being young and wild and free, but I didn’t feel like I was any of those things. I felt sad and scared and old. I’m younger now than I was then. I also wonder how I could have gotten through it, but the fact is I did. I hope I could again if I needed to but who knows.
I’ve missed out on a lot of what ‘normal’ people take for granted, and at times it makes me feel like an alien. But I think there are more of us aliens out there than we realize.
Desirae –
Thank you for all this!
// There’s always an oddness about realizing something big about yourself at a later time than you are ‘supposed’ to. I’ve done that. And I think, how could I have not known? But also: how COULD I have known? Who has time for intense personal re-evaluation when they’re white-knuckling it, as you say? //
I know. I know just what you mean.
This is probably what they call The Human Condition. And I hate it!!
Like Emily in Our Town, coming back from the dead, and crying at how fast everything goes among the Living – that nobody stops to look at each other, or really BE with each other, but now she’s dead and it’s too late to change it.
// I essentially lived inside an afterschool special. //
Oh boy.
In re: the 20s:
There is so much pressure, as you say, to be a certain way. Even if you don’t subscribe to those things – even if you know you’re being advertised to – it still seeps in. Especially for women – because of that biological clock thing that literally everybody reminds you of. (Or at least that was true for me.)
// There’s so much in our culture about being young and wild and free, but I didn’t feel like I was any of those things. //
That is so painful. Because a culture that says “life looks this way” cannot deal with things that don’t line up with reality. Like the assumption that childhood is happy and innocent. It isn’t for so so so many people – and so what does it say to a child living in a nightmare when there is this shared cultural assumption that childhood is the best time ever? It makes those children not experiencing it that way feel even WORSE. Like it must be their fault.
It’s WAY too much pressure.
and for women in their 20s? Forget it. That might be the most pressure-packed decade in our lives. I know a lot of people who feel happy to have made it out of that decade with any sanity intact. :)
I very much hope that your 30s are wonderful! You certainly deserve it.
Thank you , Sheila. That means a lot. I wasn’t good at being young anyway. Some people aren’t.
It’s like this line from Dorothy Allison: “Having survived, am I supposed to say something, do something, be something?” So you – we, all of us – have survived… whatever. What now? What next? There’s no guide for that. Especially if all those should’ve beens never applied to your life anyway; if it seems like they’ve been set up for other people (the normal people). As you say even if you know you’re being advertised to it can still sink in. Even if you don’t want it! I sometimes get jealous of my sister because she does have that kind of life and she came through so much of the same stuff as I did but is much more normal. But normalcy was important to her. She worked very hard on it. I didn’t, because frankly I was pretty weird from the get-go and I already wasn’t interested.
So we get to make up those next steps – we have to invent them. And that’s scary. But not bad, per say.