lie no. 42 | 08.09.20

This story has an ending. I’ve been sitting on it since last fall. I think a part of me hasn’t been ready to let it go. To let it end.

Endings, of course, are also beginnings. 

I’ve let the writing be my guide in this story since day one, long before it even was a story. No goals. No deadlines. No plans. No daily writing practice. Certainly no semblance of a linear storyline in sight. No pressure. 

Only trust. Well, that, and a whole lot of faith. Both relatively new kids on my block.

I met with a book agent a couple months after the writing workshop. I mean, I’d added writer to my Instagram bio, attended said workshop and launched a website for my essays to live. Getting a book deal seemed like the obvious next step. 

[Narrator: It was not the next step.]

The meeting went really well. He was sick. I was half drenched in sweat having insisted on walking the mile and a half to his office in heels. It was one of those early June days in DC where the air feels fantastic, perfect even, until the humidity makes a not-unexpected yet always surprising appearance about a block or two in and there’s no going back.

By most standards it truly was a fantastic meeting. He liked what he saw. I brought up all of my fears, all of the reasons I wasn’t qualified to write a book, only disguised as self awareness. 

“I’m a nobody.”

“I’m not a household name like a Chelsea Handler, even if we’re both writing about therapy and spirituality I totally get that I am not her.”

“I don’t have a big audience.”

“I barely have a platform.”

And the most asinine of them all, “I’ve never written a book before.”

He didn’t dispute any of my points. Instead we brainstormed a few concepts together, ways to blend my journalism and research backgrounds. You know, ways to make the aforementioned concerns a bit more palatable to a publisher.

I left with a deadline of one week to get him a proposal to take to market. I left happy, excited even, because that’s how you’re supposed to feel after a successful meeting. But on the walk home, with each passing block I couldn’t quite shake a feeling that something wasn’t right.

He asked two questions that day that swirled around in my mind long after.

First, he asked if my Hong Kong-Mexico-Amsterdam tale was at all contrived.

“I mean, insofar as I’m a privileged white woman with an abundance of freedom, flexibility and the ability to just up and go as I please?” I said. “Sure... I did book the trips after all. But if you mean, like, did I set out to blow my own mind and write about it? God no.”

I didn’t plan the trips at the same time. I certainly hadn’t booked them with the intent of writing about them (I was writing about a hurricane at the time, brewing both inside me and in a place I call home). My goal was to get a Modern Love column in The New York Times. The reality was I’d simply run out of coping mechanisms—neither fight nor flight was cutting it anymore, and freeze has never been my thing, so I was doing the next best thing: booking flights.

At the time of this meeting I hadn’t even gotten to that part of the story. I’d only written up to Lie No. 21, wherein I came clean to my therapist and booked a trip to Mexico City in his parking lot. I myself was still piecing the story together so I couldn’t possibly expect someone else to see the whole picture, which is to say I was less concerned about it being contrived as I was with his next question.

“Does this story have an ending, Rebecca?”

Ugh. What is it about the insertion of one’s name into a question that instantly ups the ante?

“Oh yeah, of course it does.” (Lies I’ve Told My Book Agent: A Sequel?)

Maybe at the time I thought it did have an ending. I read a LOT of books, I am fully aware every last one of them has had an ending, I get it’s a pretty critical part of the whole formula—but the truth is I didn’t have one. I was writing about my life, shouldn’t I *not* want there to be an ending?

I couldn’t get the question out of my head, which is to say it moved in and took up residence there for the next six months.

Now, for a puzzle-loving, problem-solving sleuth like myself, this question felt a little dangerous, to be honest. Could I trust myself to let it be? To be patient and have faith the ending would come without trying to force it, to script it? I wasn’t sure, but knew I had to try.

I’m so grateful he asked both of those questions that day. If he’d asked one and not the other I’m not sure where I’d be today—and I have wondered. I’d probably be stuck inside a never-ending story (although, I can think of at least one of those that’s had enormous commercial success), or worse, an ending that comes off as contrived.

To this day I’m still in awe of myself for neither giving up—by putting the proverbial pen down, nor giving in—by writing something that didn’t resonate with me, even if it would make for something more marketable, more commercial.

I’m also crazy grateful for the *thousands* (!!!!) of you from 30-plus countries (!!!!) who have followed along on this coddiwomple (reminder: I still detest the word journey, and far prefer its British-slang cousin which means to travel purposefully toward a vague destination—isn’t that what we’re all doing in this thing called life anyway?).

It should also go without saying but is certainly worth saying—I’m enormously grateful for the friends and family members who’ve not only continued speaking to me while I tell my stories on the internet, many of which they are very much a part of, but encouraged me the whole way.

A couple months into isolation I saw an Instagram post about destination addiction, or the idea that wherever we are, literally or figuratively, is never enough. This idea that happiness is elusive, always just up ahead of us, in some other place, with some other person, some other job, some other situation, rather than available to us exactly where we are right now. 

Hi, I’m Rebecca and I’m a destination addict.

Last year, without realizing it at the time, I started to recover from this lifelong addiction I didn’t even know I suffered from.

If I can just get that essay published in The New York Times. If I can just get that book deal. If I can just fix myself and my marriage. If I can just get myself from here to there. If I can just escape where I am. 

But then what? 

Every time I focused on the future state, I was rejecting the current state. Every time I rejected where I was physically or figuratively in life I was also rejecting who I was in that moment. I was telling myself I wasn’t enough. I was telling myself something was missing. I was telling myself I wasn’t complete, that I wasn’t whole.

Now, if anyone had asked me in the spring of 2019 if I believed any of the above, I’d have looked at them like they were crazy. My brain doesn’t work in such broad, sweeping generalities. In other words, I never went to my therapist and said, “I feel incomplete, doc,” or “I feel unworthy and unlovable.”

Enter past-life healing.

As we kicked off that first session the healer asked what led me to her. Well, a friend of mine, for starters. But I knew that wasn’t what she meant. 

I first heard about past-life healing when I started Lies on Instagram. I posed a question there about therapy and a good friend replied that she didn’t have a therapist but did see a past-life healer.

I had questions (coincidentally, my therapist did too). My friend answered them over dinner ahead of my mileage run to Hong Kong. She explained how she met her healer and how past-life healing is all about limiting beliefs at its core. It didn’t resonate with me, and wouldn’t for many months so I put it to the side.

But then after the weekend at the monastery I thought about it again and reached out. I still had questions—lots of them.

Looking back, the shaman had been a gateway drug for my curiosity as I delved into the spiritual realm, with Amsterdam providing the really addictive stuff and the monastery proving more of a quick hit. I needed more. I craved it. “Can one become addicted to travel?” I wrote at the time. “What about self discovery? Spirituality?”

My first session with the healer lasted several hours and gave me the most clarity I’d had in months, if not years. Maybe even a lifetime. I walked away not with more questions or even really answers, looking back now, but with more understanding.

At the time my takeaways from that first session were quite literal: a role my father played in a past life—which perfectly explained (to me) the whys and hows that’ve eluded me about events in this lifetime; a role my twin played in a past life—one which perfectly explained (to me) why she didn’t make it in this lifetime.

It all made sense (to me). Finally. And that’s all that mattered. It would take longer to understand that the roles and past lives were never what mattered; the beliefs I held, or more accurately, the beliefs that held onto me, for whatever reason, are what mattered.

As I wrote in Lie No. 25, religion to me “always seemed like a socially acceptable solution for desperate people seeking solace.”

And yet, here I was. Desperate for some semblance of solace. Like any good junkie, I kept going.

I met with the healer weekly. A couple months later I was learning how to heal myself. How novel! 

I also signed up to go to Sedona that September with a medium and another shaman (with the same name as the OG one!). My first night there the medium did a reading for a number of us. 

“There’s a woman, she’s furiously washing her hands, like, obsessively scrubbing them. I also see test tubes,” she said, before going on to talk about 2020.

My grandmother, my dad’s mother, worked at the CDC before passing away years ago. She, along with five other members of my family and Matt’s came up that night with a lot to say. It was as weird as it was comforting. 

On the second day the medium pulled me aside and gave me a beautiful necklace of beads and stones to wear the remainder of the trip. 

“Write down everything that comes to you while it’s on,” she said. She went on to explain it was gifted to her from the Blackfeet tribe after she successfully found the remains of a missing elder years earlier. “They want you to wear it.”

Oddly enough, Matt and I had been driving around Montana the month before and during one of my turns behind the wheel drove past—in what felt like slow motion—a tribal ritual taking place on the side of a highway. Shortly thereafter we hit a town called Browning. I told Matt we had to make a pit stop. He was happy to oblige and relieve himself when I pulled over at the first gas station I saw. I was elated by the opportunity to be around the people there. I still can’t explain the draw I had to that place and those people.

As I am wont to do, I became mildly obsessed with needing to know everything about this small, poverty-stricken town. I was still talking about it at dinner that night in a very different town when a man overheard me and offered suggested readings on the Blackfeet tribe, headquartered there. Things were getting strange.

I woke up in the middle of my third night in Sedona in tears over the death of a man I never met, never even knew.

Matt got an email a few weeks before I quit my job in 2017 from a man named Doug Haller, of no relation, but with a son with the same name. I came to find out this man had been mis-addressing emails to my Matt for years. The emails were fascinating! They painted a picture of a family and history that sent my imagination into overdrive. Several days after quitting my job, fresh out of fucks to give and with newfound time on my hands, I took it upon myself to email Doug to let him know he had the wrong Matt. And also to overshare all that my internet sleuthing-turned-Instagram-stories had dug up on him and his family. Surprisingly he replied—not to let me know he’d reported me to the police, but to thank me. That was the first and last I ever heard from Doug, and at the time it was weird and confusing and easy to chock up as me being me, but the truth is I felt a connection to this human and his family I still can’t explain at a time when I felt completely unanchored from everything and everyone I knew.

I cried that night in Sedona as if I’d lost my own father as I googled and quickly confirmed that he had in fact passed away more than a year earlier, less than six months after we’d emailed, after a bout with a fast-moving illness. (The next month, on a plane to Asia I replied all to one of those original misaddressed emails to let his family know how very sorry I was and struck up several new correspondences.)

So, anyway! Safe to say the experience in Sedona paid for itself in dividends.

When I got back to DC, in the few weeks before I jetted off to Asia for most of October, Matt and I bought a house, conveniently located above where we already lived.

People thought Matt and I were crazy in 2009 to buy a place together after dating less than two years—at the height of a recession and mortgage crisis.

For the better part of a decade, pretty much anyone who walked through our doors had to hear about my dream of buying the building’s other unit and expanding. Matt thought I’d lost my mind and wrote it off as a phase, a very long phase. “What would we do with two kitchens?!” he’d always ask, as if my refusal to cook thereby forcing/inspiring him to become the chef he is today wasn’t all part of my master plan. Child, please.

Over the years the couple we called neighbors (the same ones who designed and converted the building then sold us our unit) continued to grow their family. With each new baby I’d think, this is it. They’re going to need more space. By the time baby number three came along, I’d all but given up hope—I had great neighbors! I shouldn’t be so greedy! It wasn’t meant to be!

Then, the week after Thanksgiving 2017 I ran into them on my way out and learned they were moving that spring. I don’t remember what I said, only what I did next. I got in my car, drove around the corner so they couldn’t see me and started sobbing. Not tears of joy because my dream might actually stand a chance of becoming a reality, but tears of absolute devastation—the timing couldn’t have been worse. 

I’d quit my job unexpectedly the week before and had no plan for what was next. After all those years of dreaming and playing whac-a-mole with any and every reason it wouldn’t or couldn’t or shouldn’t work, I was the one thing standing in the way of it happening. I was heartbroken, humiliated and ashamed it was all my fault. It was not a great time to be buying real estate.

Spring came and went, and we still had neighbors. Their moving truck didn’t pull up till the end of summer 2018. Matt and I were away celebrating our 7th anniversary at the time—actually, celebrating is a stretch. We were in a bad place, because I was in a bad place. I was working for myself and starting to question everything I believed in—about my life, my identity and my marriage. A hurricane was about to hit, in more ways than one. In other words, it was not a great time to be buying real estate.

Months went by and their place sat empty, frighteningly similar to how I felt at the time. Then in the spring of 2019 we got the heads up they’d be doing some work on the place but didn’t yet know whether they’d rent or sell. I felt this flicker of hope—as much toward the possibility as toward the unknown.

Construction ended upstairs and more months went by without any news. Then one month before our 8th anniversary we got the email: The place was ours if we wanted it.

It was a no brainer—this was our place. Not because it was easy to make happen—the best things rarely are. Not because the unknowns ever go away—you just learn to live with them (or you give them their own floor). Not because it made perfect sense, or really any at all—ultimately none of that mattered.

A few days after I got back from Asia last October, just in time to watch the Nationals win Game 7 of the World Series with Matt, I went up to our new roof deck by myself. We didn’t have any furniture in the place yet. The sun was setting, sinking below the horizon. The sky was a million shades of pinks and yellows and oranges. With tears rolling down my cheeks I started to laugh. 

I’d spent the past year, maybe more, chasing the ever-loving shit out of the sun. I was convinced people only watched the sun rise and set in other places. Turns out, all I had to do was look around and realize it was here, and there, wherever I was, all along. 

Last year was a rebuilding year. As I continued to peel back the onion, shedding layer upon layer, I was also rebuilding myself, a stronger version of myself, not better, just stronger. What I was really doing was discovering and then validating so much of what I already knew, what I’ve always known but had long ago buried. It was my great excavation.

After deconstruction comes reconstruction. After breaking down comes breaking open. After the end comes the beginning.

Joke’s on me, it turns out. I traveled around the world looking for something I already had all along. Something hidden deep inside me. And I’d do it all again in a heartbeat.

I’ve got a few ideas about what comes next. But fortunately I know better now.

The beginning.