The Sheila Variations

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.