lie no. 36 | 03.06.20
Lying to your therapist is like faking an orgasm during sex. Lying to yourself? That’s like faking one while masturbating—a real waste of time.
So why did it seem as if I couldn’t turn around these days without catching myself in yet another one of these compromising positions? It had to stop.
What the hell was wrong with me? (Nothing.)
How had I so outlandishly misremembered that night with the shaman? (I hadn’t.)
My wild imagination had gotten me into my fair share of trouble over the years, but this—THIS!—I was not equipped to handle. (I was.)
When we misbehave as children, we’re put in timeout to think long and hard about whatever it is we’ve done wrong. Our punishment is to *literally* sit alone with our selves and our thoughts. (It’s no wonder our natural inclination as we get older is to avoid doing anything but!) So, that night in Amsterdam and for most of the next morning that’s what I did—unsure what the hell else to do when convinced without a shadow of a doubt that something was wrong, with either me or what I’d done yet again. I made myself sit with my thoughts (the horror!) until I had learned my lesson. Usually when things don’t make sense to me, I roll the proverbial tapes back in my head until I can force the pieces together. Clearly the tapes had just lost all credibility, so I wasn’t really sure what to do. Eventually, like a child in timeout for too long, I must’ve worn myself out and fallen asleep at some point.
Shortly after 8 a.m the hotel’s fire alarm woke me up. While my eyes adjusted and my mind remembered where I was, I got out of bed and dressed with a less-than-urgent pace, debating what, if anything, I should take with me. When I opened the door, panic starting to creep in at the sheer duration of the blaring, I was relieved to see my neighbor to the right had also been calling the alarm’s bluff. I could tell he was as thrilled as I was about being on the top floor in that moment. The alarm stopped before I could shut the door. A man’s voice came on the speaker.
“It is safe,” he said. “There is no need to evacuate. We apologize for the inconvenience.”
I laughed and went back into my room. He repeated the message in Dutch. I regretted not recording it in English. In the strangest of ways, it felt tailored to me. It felt like someone was reminding me I was safe. There was no need to evacuate—the building, my marriage or my search for meaning. I was safe. I was neither in danger, nor a danger. The man’s voice came back on and I hit record, downright giddy about snagging it for the records. At the time, I didn’t understand why I was so hellbent on collecting these artifacts along the way like shells on a beach.
I grabbed my notebook and pen and got to work at my hotel room’s desk. I kept hitting the same wall as the night before: if the shaman hadn’t said those things, but I remember hearing/seeing/feeling them so vividly and deeply, where’d they come from? A year earlier—hell, a few months earlier—I would’ve considered it a real possibility I was going crazy, losing my mind once and for all. But, not that I noticed its absence at the time, that never crossed my mind this time. (Growth, is that you?) Instead, I wondered if it was possible those words or feelings, whatever they were, had come from somewhere buried deep inside me.
I’d been writing down just about everything by this point—from what I saw and experienced out in the world to that of my inner world—even before my mind had pulled its most recent Jayson Blair on me. Mostly I’d wanted a record of all my recent adventures. Now I know somewhere in the shadow I also did it so I could later fact check myself and/or prove myself when someone didn’t believe me, as if the latter was a foregone conclusion.
The Kavanaugh hearing happened while I was cleaning up debris and starting to rebuild—both my life and eastern North Carolina—after Hurricane Florence. Watching Dr. Ford testify about a traumatic experience she’d had decades earlier, seeing doubt cast on her recollection—riddled with holes as it was, as it would be for any of us—and, as a result, covering her character in vitriol, shook me to my core.
It’s not surprising so many of us walk around with shattered belief systems. Who knows what or who the hell to believe in anymore—not least of which, at least in my case, includes ourselves? I’ve always given so much weight to what others believe about me, the scale never stood a chance of tipping in favor of what I believed.
While watching the hearing, I tweeted, “As a cusp millennial, I often joke w/friends about how lucky we are we didn’t have social media in hs/college. But, man, imagine how differently this hearing could go with even 1 or 2 of those digital receipts & breadcrumbs.”
As time and space have allowed me to zoom out again, I see why all the sudden my notes and artifacts collected along the way started to look like one of those mile-long CVS receipts. I’d gone inside needing one thing and now look at all these other things I didn’t know I needed too!
That morning in Amsterdam I let my pen do the driving, letting it decide where to go next on the blank page in front of me. I started writing.
“The room went silent, like all the noise had been sucked out—not violently, it went peacefully. I’m surrounded by people I recognize, but nothing looks familiar.”
For the love of all things holy, please don’t let this be going back to the day I was born. I ignored the voice and kept going.
“It’s one of those moments you feel something you know isn’t real.”
OK... here we go. This could be useful! Maybe this memory had the power to shake loose a how-to guide of sorts for this moment.
“There’s a drain in the floor. I watch as the water I’d just been floating in swirls down it, disappearing into nothing.”
Huh? I resisted the urge to turn this into a high-stakes game of Charades with myself.
“I look around at the others and wonder why they’re not holding their breath, too. How are all their mouths still moving, their arms still flailing in the air? How are they still going through the motions? How do they have the energy?! The strength?! Some of their faces start to turn red and I know I should try to save them, but I can’t. I’m suddenly overcome with the singular need to save myself. After all, I seem to be the only one gripping the arms of my Herman Miller like a life raft, like my life depends on it.”
Oh.
“I open the executive conference room door without making eye contact with anyone. I know if I so much as glance in another’s direction there’s a strong chance the levees will breach. There’s still water on the other side of the door. I let the current carry me back to my desk and I pack up my things. No one notices. To be fair, there are a lot of things I didn’t notice that day either. I didn’t notice I was the only one drowning. Most notably, I didn’t notice I’d left my shell behind that day as my skeleton walked out the door.”
“I texted Matt on my way home to give him a heads up. He’d talked me out of quitting a couple months earlier, encouraging me instead, like any rational person would, to look for another job first. If you’ve ever been in a job you felt robbed you of your sight, crushed your soul or questioned your value to the point that you’re sure you’d burst into tears before any prospective employer could even get their first question out—you know looking for another job in that moment is not an option. If you’ve ever been there and made it to the other side, you also know a job doesn’t have the power to do any of those things.”
OK, wow. Did not see that coming. So, if a job can’t do those things, at least not without me giving it the power to do so, my thoughts couldn’t either, right? I mean, aren’t I kind of their boss? I waited for the balloons and confetti to fall from the ceiling, for the celebratory music to start playing, for someone to tell me I’d gotten the answer right. Much to the relief of my unsuspecting hotel neighbors, none of that happened. I was going to have to do it myself.
I had felt like I was drowning back then. It didn’t matter that I wasn’t, not really. What mattered was knowing I wasn’t in the right place and trusting myself on the way out.
I had felt seen and heard the summer before by someone who wasn’t my husband. It didn’t matter that I never had been, not really. What mattered was realizing how unseen and unheard I felt at the time, and learning how interconnected those feelings are with how I experience love.
I had heard those things while with the shaman. It didn’t matter if he never said them, not really. What mattered was hearing them at all.
Holy shit. Now I knew it was growth knocking on my door—I knew it beyond a shadow of a doubt—and I was so ready to let it the fuck in. I swung the door open, suddenly starring in my own musical, let housekeeping in and ventured back out into the city I knew still had so much left to teach me.
I was safe. There was no need to evacuate.
The words played in the back of my head that day, my last in Amsterdam. There was one thing left I wanted to do. I set off toward the Van Gogh Museum, stopping for a late breakfast and popping into several bookstores along the way. I wasn’t sure I had enough room in my suitcase to take back all the books I’d bought (spoiler: I didn’t. I ended up leaving a bunch of clothes behind, which, if you know me you know is a bfd).
I spent hours in the Van Gogh Museum, mostly on the second floor, mostly with tears streaming down my face. They weren’t happy tears, exactly, but they weren’t sad ones either. They were heartfelt, maybe that’s the right word. I went in basically knowing three things about the man: he painted a lot of self portraits, some famous sunflowers and he chopped his ear off in a breakdown of some sorts. I had no idea he what a prolific letter writer he had been! I read the translation of every single one on display that day. I hogged the phones on the gallery’s wall where museum-goers can lift the receiver and hear several letters read aloud. A small line formed behind me. I didn’t care. Most people were only listening to excerpts then moving along anyway! I couldn’t leave until I heard every last word. I bought a book in the museum gift shop containing all of his letters. I left the museum and sat outside reading them until I started to lose the light to do so.
I’ve struggled to explain what exactly it was that struck a chord with me about his letters. I overheard two teenage girls snickering when they spotted the streams running down my cheeks in the museum. “I bet she thinks she was Van Gogh in a past life,” one said and they both laughed. While the letters did resonate with me in a way unlike anything else I’d ever experienced, I obviously didn’t think that (bitches). (But you better believe I started working with a past-life healer a couple months later.)
It was how he described his relationship to painting, to creating, that got me. “It’s only in front of the easel while painting that I feel a little of life,” he wrote in one. In another: “Drawing is the root of everything, and the time spent on that is actually profit.”
It was exactly how I felt about writing, I just hadn’t been able to articulate it (the irony!).
“More than ever I have a pent-up fury for work, and I think that this will contribute to curing me.” Same Vince, same.
I no longer—as of about six hours earlier and counting—thought something was wrong with me. I wasn’t broken. I never had been. I needed to break open, and, whether intentionally or not, I’d done just that. Looking back, I’d been ignoring the signs for a long time. Writing may have only been the vessel, but it carried me through both my cracking open and my piecing it all back together.
I felt seen and heard that day—in that gallery, in those letters—in ways I hadn’t in decades. Never mind the source of my unexpected serenity had been dead 128 years. It didn’t really have anything to do with Van Gogh, just as it had nothing to do with my husband or my parents or their divorce or my father’s affair or anyone else for that matter. It had everything to do with me, who I am, everything I believe in and what I’d been resisting for a very long time. The relief of that took my breath away.
That night I literally chased the sun till it disappeared, picking up my pace as it picked up its in lighting the sky on fire. This is what life was supposed to be about, for me at least: chasing the ever-loving shit out of what set my soul on fire.
I slid my phone back out of airplane mode when I sat down for dinner along a canal, yet again the only one sitting outside under the heaters. As if testing me, the sky began to slowly spit rain down from above. I’d traveled by myself enough at this point to know nobody would worry if they couldn’t immediately get a hold of me. If anything, I’d overcorrected on the independence front—and we can’t have it both ways. Even still, I probably held my breath as my service kicked back in and I texted Matt.
Me: Things are going to be different when I get back, you need to know that, because when I get home, I’m going to be different. I know it sounds dramatic but some really big things clicked for me here and I can’t wait to tell you all about it if you want to hear.
Him: That sounds intriguing to me
Me: You’ll either be on board or you won’t—and either way will be OK. I have a good feeling though—otherwise I’d be knee deep in my usual night before leaving list-making of reasons to stay.
Me: This will be equally cryptic, I just don’t want to talk about it via text or phone, but...
Me: Thought about it like this today... ya know how in sag harbor I was obsessed with finishing the puzzle’s border before we left? This past year has felt, for me, like I’ve just been missing pieces of the border. It’s been terribly frustrating not knowing if they’re lost for good or why it doesn’t just fit together. So, without totally realizing it, I started looking for the missing pieces. Figuratively, and then literally around the world. Today I realized I’ve been trying to solve the wrong puzzle all along—and just like that, the border fell in place.
…
On my walk back to my hotel, I did a double take at a sign inside a cafe. No. Fucking. Way. I thought, as I read and reread the words I’d randomly scribbled on a post-it note a few weeks earlier. “Write something worth reading, or do something worth writing.”
I scratched the record on my own plan to go back to the hotel and instead turned toward one of the coffeeshops selling Amsterdam’s finest. La da da da da da.
The next day I flew I home, finally ready. I wrote the whole flight back—not what I set out to write (which later became Lie No. 22), not what I ever intended to write, but what I needed to write: An essay about my grandfather. It described a very different kind of love and relationship and way of looking at the world. And for once, it wasn’t an excavation of my heart and soul warranting recovery on the backend. Instead, it had been an absolute joy to write.
...
I went back to Amsterdam last week, one year later. Technically, I went back because a marketing email offered me a free pass to the same conference and I found a roundtrip ticket on American for 30k miles (putting last year’s 40k-mile ticket to shame).
In reality, I wasn’t really sure why I went back. I never had any intention of actually attending the conference this time—I’d stopped faking it till I make it a while ago, having realized what an unsatisfying waste of time that is.
I told myself I had no expectations going into this trip, which is to say I wound up packing some pretty hefty ones. I spent my first 8 hours on the ground doing work for a client (touché, universe). It was freezing and it rained most of the time and I didn’t once sit outside in that. I didn’t need to. I never planned to retrace my steps or expected I could recreate the magic I’d found on my first trip to Amsterdam—I knew I couldn’t. And yet, in the process, I stumbled on some I never could’ve expected and never would’ve understood if I hadn’t gone back.