lie no. 39 | 05.05.20

By my second week back from Amsterdam last year I’d already settled into a delightful unroutine routine—one I could stomach. I continued to walk everywhere and picked up the habit of taking myself on what Julia Cameron calls “an artist’s date.” In her book The Artist’s Way she suggests taking yourself somewhere creative and inspiring each week, be it on a nature walk, to a museum or even a craft store, but the catch is you must do it alone. Like, you actually have to date yourself. She even spells out that no dogs are allowed, which may seem like a no brainer, but the comfort of a dog makes for a terribly convenient excuse, it makes those mid-day walks around the city seem all the more socially acceptable and justifiable.

One of those first few weeks back I walked myself down to the National Portrait Gallery. I put on “work clothes,” heaven forbid someone see me, gasp, walking on the sidewalk midday without a dog leash in hand or an important business meeting in sight (I’d already knocked out the three lucrative ones I’d booked post-trip, and yet, I still cared about this for some reason) ((check me out... STILL defending myself to no one)).

I made it less than a block before I turned back and threw on a pair of black skinny jeans, a comfortable sweater, hot-pink coat and over-the-knee flat boots actually made for walking and went back out there, ready to not be so ridiculous. 

Less than an hour into my date I spotted a good friends’ mother, who also happens to be good friends with my mother in law. My pulse quickened and I caught myself feeling so thankful for rushing through that single gallery I’d allowed myself (helluva a date, I was) and for planting myself and my laptop down in the courtyard. I was so pleased with myself for looking busy I even waved at her. I was too afraid she was going to politely avoid me and mention the run-in that wasn’t to my gal pal or my mother in law—lest they see me for the fraud I was or wonder if I’d lost it completely (A museum! On a workday! The HORROR!), so I made the first move. I never once stopped to consider that this other grown, professional woman was also at a museum in the middle of a workday, literally peeling her socks and shoes off as fast as she could and splashing around in the fountain with her precious granddaughter like no one was watching. Meanwhile, I was trying to look busy, as if everyone was watching.

I got really honest with just about everyone those first few weeks back—except myself, it seems in hindsight. I confessed every crime against my skin to my dermatologist. I became a person who gets regular physicals. My primary care physician told me she’d actually assumed I worked for the CIA, had been overseas for the past several years and... I guess my honesty in that appointment proved her otherwise. I’ll spare you the dental and gynecological appointments, you get the point. It’s weird to be honest with doctors—when you actually let them get to know you, you also get to know them.

I realized I no longer had life insurance (hello, self employment! But also, how had I ever left my LIFE INSURANCE in the hands of an employer?! I digress...) and had to go through an annoyingly tedious interview and form process. I told them everything and I watched my insurance agent’s jaw drop more than once (yes, I did these in person because they invited me, I had the time, and, quite frankly, was curious about the process). In his defense, he always recovered quickly and said, “well, yeah, it’s just that people don’t actually admit to these things so just know your insurance might go up.” (I’m thrilled to report it didn’t.) He emailed me not that long ago asking for a recommendation for a good shoe repair place in the neighborhood. I guess with truth, comes trust.

I continued walking the mile to therapy each week, too. One week after a particularly embarrassing session where I confessed to not knowing the difference between thoughts and feelings, apparently something typically learned in childhood, I almost punished myself by not rewarding myself with that trip to the bookstore. I wondered if honesty was starting to wear out its welcome.

Refusing to give in that easily, I took my new feelings worksheets with me and headed toward that independent bookstore around the corner for a coffee and a book (or twelve), followed by a sit and read in the nearby park.

That day I picked up Paulo Coelho’s Hippie at the recommendation of a girlfriend while I’d been in Amsterdam. I was already jonesing to be back, so whatever could help get me there I was game. I devoured more than a hundred pages that day in Dupont Circle, a hundred and twenty to be exact, losing all track of time.

A quarter of the way down page 120 I read a sentence that simultaneously set my soul on fire and scared the ever-loving shit out of me. 

“If there was no change, there would be no Universe.”

I slammed the book shut and leapt off the bench. I ran-walked home, desperate to dig up and reread that folded up piece of paper from the waiter in Amsterdam I swore said the same message. 

I made it three blocks before a bird shat all over my Moncler coat. I texted Matt a picture of it before I cleaned it off by rubbing it against a cement planter outside of the Australian embassy (not likely the cleaning method endorsed by the brand.) 

“Boarded!” he texted back from a tarmac at Reagan. “Don’t worry, that’s supposedly good luck. Love you! 🛫”

I made it another five more blocks before it happened again. Another bird dropped another load on me. What the actual shit. I took another picture. I knew the American Airlines wifi couldn’t handle it and I’d be annoyed by the lack of response so as soon as I got home I texted a couple of my woo woo girlfriends again like they were Miss Cleo. 

“What does it mean?!”

“Just acknowledge it,” one replied, as if I had the faintest idea how to do that other than by cleaning it off.

“It’s the answer to a question you’ve been asking,” another said, as if she’d forgotten I ask an average of one million questions a day.

I let my coat dry while I dug through my files looking for that waiter’s note. When I finally found it I didn’t know whether to be comforted or confused or both.

“If there was no change, there would be no magic,” is what the folded up piece of paper said. 

I wondered briefly if magic and the universe were somehow interchangeable in Dutch. Miraculously, to this day, I still have not looked that up. Because it doesn’t matter. Because it does.

A few days later Matt got back from his work trip and I breathed a sigh of relief—not when he got home but when be got back from walking Sammy that day, so excited to tell me he, too, had been taken to the tree box full of shit. It was comforting to know I wasn’t completely losing my mind. I wanted to know who had pissed off someone so badly they filled their tree box full of shit. I knew there was a helluva story there.

Everything was a potential story to me—it’s tempting to add “back then,” but the truth is it’s the same today and I love it. It’s all my eyes see: stories hidden in plain sight. Suffice to say this has never been Matt’s favorite, ahem, chapter.

“What do you think the story is there?” I’d posit around every corner of every block on every walk.

That laundry basket abandoned on the sidewalk with those rumpled clothes and that single shoe—what was the story there? 

What about that pair of men’s dress shoes left out in that patch of grass, still shining? How? Whyyyy?

What’s the story with that concert ticket lying there on the sidewalk, stub still tact but date long since passed?

Matt lost interest in taking walks with me back then as quickly as I lost interest in hearing him try to tell me that not everything had a story. Sometimes it was simply a tree box full of shit, no meaning, no story. Just a tree box full of shit. But I knew better, and still do. Every tree box full of shit has a story.

One day I walked toward Dupont Circle to meet an old friend and college roommate for a last-minute lunch while she was in town briefly for work. She’d just gotten engaged and I was so excited to hear all about it.

On my way there I walked past one of those stunning old row houses on R Street and I crumbled. My legs stopped working and my knees folded down at the sight of the dozen or so newspapers, still in their bags, collecting at the top of the home’s stoop, alongside several bouquets of flowers.

OH GOD. WHAT WAS THE STORY? I knew there was one and I knew it wasn’t good.

I heard Matt’s voice in the back of my head, the one reminding me not everything had a story, and lifted myself back up from the curb in which I’d melted into only moments earlier, overcome with a grief suddenly paralyzing me. I was almost late for lunch at this point and I still had questions but perhaps they weren’t mine to ask.

She and I caught up quickly over lunch, covering a lot of ground in a short period of time. It had been years but is fortunately one of those friendships that requires no effort, the kind that picks right back up wherever it left off. Apparently we’d both quit our cushy corporate jobs around the same time. I had no idea.

“Do you think you quit because you were fed up or because your soul was ready and just needed to get your attention?” she asked.

“Great question,” I said as I tried not to laugh at the notion of divinity playing any role in a decision I’d spent a year-plus defending by that point, mostly to myself. “It was so unlike me, so out of character,” was a common refrain in that story.

The question hung in the back of my mind long after lunch ended. She seemed to hear me and see me at that time unlike few others had been able. 

When you fall asleep at the wheel of life and the universe wakes you up by pumping wonder into your tank until it overflows, without any way—or desire really—to turn it off, it’s easy to think you’re losing your mind. So finding people you feel safe enough around to open up about your experiences, the ones who won’t question your sanity or look at you like you’re crazy, is like bumping into a good friend in a foreign country. The hard part, the part that takes courage, is trusting yourself to cross the street to say hello.

At the time I felt so different from everything and everyone around me. It seemed the closer I looked at something, the more I studied it, questioned it, the more out of place or wrong it all looked to me. It was as frightening as it was freeing.

For example, I’d started looking at that invisible glass ceiling someone else put above my head and told me to aim for and... well, I suddenly didn’t want to go anywhere near it. The idea of a ceiling always felt so limiting to me, but I could never articulate why. The mention of it made me claustrophobic. Ceilings close in on people, or at least mine always had. I realized I no longer wanted to break whatever glass ceiling existed up there, and maybe never had. No, I wanted to shatter the ever-loving shit out of the glass floor beneath me. I wanted to go deeper, not climb higher. 

The very notion of there being this ladder we’re taught to climb to this invisible place, hellbent on breaking it when we get there, this idea that we’re in control each step of the way, as if the only way there is up some linear path, each step evenly spaced out a comfortable and safe distance from the next, suddenly repulsed me.

At the end of our lunch my girlfriend promised to send me various links to resources and book recommendations from the train as she headed to New York for a mindfulness retreat—Amtrak’s wireless signal weaving in and out of its own consciousness. I waited for the whole list to load before reading through it and deciding what resonated—an extension of the game I’d played with myself in Amsterdam about finding my place. I knew by this point there was no step-by-step guidebook for this, so I was better off going with my gut rather than doing everything she suggested at once. 

The first link I clicked took me to a former monastery-turned-mindfulness center in upstate New York, the very one she was headed to that afternoon

“Workshop: Writing for Resiliency,” was the first thing I saw on the website’s rotating carousel of live programming. Technically, all I really saw was writing and workshop, I’m sure my eyes glazed over the rest. It was three weeks away. I signed up and paid in full on the spot. I’d been a writer, according to my Instagram bio, for a few weeks so it was only natural to take the next step and attend a writing workshop! Bonus: It was not only in the U.S., it was within driving distance. Hot. Damn.

The night before I drove north—plot twist!—last April I called my mother. We spoke for hours. I finally asked her many of the questions I had about being a twin. 

What had it been like for her (my twin), for her (my mom) and for them (my parents)? How did it affect their [now non-existent] relationship? I felt ashamed for never having had the courage to ask these basic questions before but was so glad I finally did. I learned and re-learned so much that night.

I asked one last question before we hung up that night.

“Mom?” I started, already hedging. “Was I ever... abandoned, or left somewhere, as a kid?” I regretted the words as soon as they came out of my mouth. I knew it was a ridiculous question. And I certainly wasn’t accusing nor wanting to imply accusation of anything. I’d had a fairytale childhood. I just couldn’t shake the stark sense of abandonment I’d felt since my session with the midwestern shaman in Mexico. Her answer didn’t surprise me since I already knew it, but what it brought back up to the surface with it did.