I was trying to sit down and tell you the story of me leaving my church. Then I thought — “no, I don’t want to tell you that. You should just buy my novel when it’s done.”

This is fair. But — maybe there are other reasons I don’t want to tell you this story about leaving my church, the one I attended from infancy to twenty-six. Maybe I don’t want to tell you because it’s four years later, and I’m thirty now, and I feel happy and good in my body and life, and telling you about my church-leaving would mean I have to revisit a moment when I absolutely did not.

2017, the year of my church-leaving, feels like mostly a garbage fire of chaos in my immediate recollection. However, it was also a moment where words were one of the few things keeping me sane, so there is, in fact, a record of exactly how I felt — on September 28, 2017, three months after leaving my childhood church.

I titled the piece “Negotiations in the Liberation Pendulum”, and think I largely wrote it so that I would have an excuse to use all the photos of Elaine Robinson and Ben Braddock leaving the church at the end of The Graduate. I still find this to be a good reason.

Beyond that — the piece stirs up a lot in me to re-read. She was in so much pain, that 2017 Me. She was so brave — but also, so behind. I cringe to read the use of “secular” at all, I had to edit out an appropriative misuse of “tribe”, and my slavish devotion to “He” pronouns for God makes my forehead pinch now.

I know. I need to be kinder to her. She is so much a part of me. She did all the things before she had any guarantees or glimpses of what feels so good now. She left the bad thing without knowing what would come next. She got on the bus, let the laughter settle, and stared uncertainly ahead as “The Sound of Silence” played over credits rolling.

I love her. I thank her. And, without any further prefacing — here is the woman I can thank for leaving my church four years ago, telling her messy truth as it is.

September 28, 2017: Negotiations in the Liberation Pendulum

This all started with a title idea. Me trying to put a word fence around the chaos of this past year, to ease my soul, still aching from the whiplash of to and fro.

The Pendulum.

The Shifting Place.

The Shakeup Year. Year? Years. Let’s be real.

This idea of shaking off the structure you were born with, understanding the human tendency to categorize and prioritize and strategize all the oxygen out of process. Of understanding that there’s a lot of insidious lies that I’ve been told about myself in one way or another. And now having those exposed, seeing where I’ve absorbed them, stepping out of them…and determining what freedom looks like.

Right now, in layman’s terms (if said layman loves Mike Nichols as much as I do), I’m Elaine Robinson at the end of The Graduate. I’m looking up at someone banging on the glass, screaming, and I’m screaming back. I’m running out of a church full of conflict and dysfunction. Hell, I’m the banging-on-glass Ben Braddock, too, running until my legs give out, giving the content of my lungs to get people I love out of there. I’m both of them, locking the door with a cross and fleeing the chaos to hop on the bus ride out of there, delirious, mad…

And then, when I catch my breath…staring ahead in the back of that bus, smiles fading, the question of the ages: now what?

Freedom in its poetic pictures is a wide-open space, is laughing and running in an open field. But freedom in its cyclic form necessitates the occasional stage of revolt, following a time where I have been repressed by myself or others — and in reality it’s always a combination of the two.

I know that I’m standing in this very particular place because at the age of twenty-six, I’m still very much in the identity formation phase of life. I’m leaving the village in some ways. So many ways. I’m figuring out some of the person I’m going to be for the rest of my life.

And my faith is a big part of my life.

In fact, during this season, it’s been one of the only things that’s carried me through absolutely. But that faith is and has been in process, and I don’t believe a lot of things that I used to believe. And some new beliefs have come to take their place.

So I’ve discarded many things, and I’ve picked up some new ones, and I’ve been hearing a lot of things about fluidity and about gray areas and the Thomas Merton idea of the fallacy of either-or, and the third choice we never really see that comes from holding both in our hand.

I am acutely aware at this moment of not throwing out the baby with the bathwater. But what if this baby was never even my baby? What if it’s not a baby at all? I don’t know. I think I may have lost that metaphor.

What is it to be liberated? And can I trust myself as my own liberator? Because there I am, and there I am, and there I am, standing right in my own way.

I’m always in a cycle of “I’ve been repressed, I’ve felt shame, I need to be free, I need to find truth, not just go along with what everyone said I’m supposed to do.” But at the same moment, I don’t want to be someone who’s ruled by my desires, someone who just follows my own pleasure, I don’t want to be someone who makes an idol of comfort.

And there is a reality that in pursuing my own freedom, I have to grapple with the question of what does freedom really mean? Freedom is not sating every thirst. Freedom is knowing where the real stream runs, the one with the good water.

It’s always inspired me in Psalm 23 that Psalm 23 is such a prayer of rest, reflection, and restoring who you really are. I love “he makes me lie down in green pastures, he leads me beside still waters.” But what’s always spoken to me most, especially in this season of life where I’m trying to articulate my soul, trying to live where is best to take of my soul, and to live in such a way that I’m able to care better for the souls around me — is that “He restores my soul.”

He restores the core of me. That’s what I want. The core.

I think to be in this place is to accept humanity. To accept that every one of us is influenced and hampered and selfish but also capable of great love, great joy — and has a story to tell.

And I want to hear the stories around me, understand their influences and factor that in, but I also want to be a textured enough person to hear everything and understand that there might be some truth I need to take amidst a lot of things that offend me, but I also need to be wary of those things that offend me, and why. And what, on the flip side, do I trust?

I tend to write a lot of these pieces from a semi-secular place because I don’t want to divide people in my life into camps. But I guess this whole piece is about camps and bubbles, like I’ve written before.

But now…I’m in it. Because some of the camps I’m about to leave, or have left. And now I’m really coming to the place of foundation, of bare essentials: my faith is real, my relationship with God is the thing I’m fighting to put first, because He’s the one who I can trust above all others to guide me to his truth.

And yes, I need community to help understand Him better. But I also need to have at least a quadrant of a [chosen family] who understands gray, who understands texture, who supports other people like myself seeking to find that kind of understanding.

It’s strange to have this experience of being torn at the seams when in this current political climate. I know this is something that happens normally for people who are my age, but it’s very strange to have the feeling of it being amplified on a national or global level really, where it seems everyone is coming to the end of themselves, everyone is having that moment of “No, I won’t stand for this.” And as much as I’m experiencing this internally, my prayer for this nation is that we could all figure out this balance together.

It’s hard for me to even say without laughing at my own idealism because there’s so much hopelessness in this nation at this moment that sometimes I can’t even talk about it. But I have to keep talking about it. And I have to acknowledge that there is something to the end of the rope moment on this level that I think will help us.

And the challenge is, this road is unseen. This is the leap of faith. Standing out on what feels like a precipice and jumping off. One moment you feel free, you feel the wind on your face. The next — you really, really wonder if you’re going to fly, or if death awaits you. If a more crushing pain than you ever thought you could withstand is right ahead.

This is the adventure I asked for. I’m standing in it right now. So there I am, wanting to run back, back, and back into an older version of me. And I have to forgive myself if I yield here. I have to forgive myself, because then that will be part of the story. All things are redeemable.

But do I believe that I could be strong enough, that I could be brave enough to be in the worst place a little bit longer?

Could I believe in myself enough to get to the person I am on the other side of this? The person I’ve been asking to become for so long — myself?

I don’t know. But I know this — I can articulate a clear turning point in November 2016, in the days after the election, where I said to myself, “That’s it. You’re done worrying about what people think. From this moment on, you start telling the truth. You start standing up for the marginalized. There is not a single moment that can afford to be wasted.”

I’ve made so many promises like this to myself over a lifetime, and most are unkept — but this one’s been different. No, I haven’t done it all right. And there has been much lost along the way. But I think most, if not all of it, was supposed to go.

And I’m different now. I’m not the little girl who was terrified she’d never have friends, that she’d be alone, so she tried to mold to what they wanted. I am myself in process.

Yes, much of this process has been lonely. But for what is to breathe free, pursuing love and truth — I don’t regret getting on this bus for a minute.

Speak the name of the demon, and it loses its power.

This is what I learn, and relearn, to be true. And for years now, I have known the name of my demon to be this: I’m Nobody’s Girlfriend.

And I never have been. Or well — that’s not strictly accurate. There was a brief six-month period in high school where I was Somebody’s Girlfriend. And Somebody was exceptionally wonderful, exceptionally handsome, and I loved him with my whole hormonal heart.

He was also, as it happens, exceptionally gay.

While that’s a longer story for perhaps another time, I’ll leave it at this for now — we’ve both been much happier since being Somebody’s Best Friend.

But even with this happier change, my demon has always found ways to be heard. On bad days, in heartbreak, and the end of my frayed self, while consuming a lot of art with limited perspective, my demon creeps in — What’s wrong with you? No one you ever want will pick you. You’re good enough to fuck, but not to meet anyone’s family. You’re just a warm port getting them through this particular storm. They’ll have the baby, the marriage, the life that can be photographed — with the next girl. If you were prettier, if you were skinnier, if you had more of your shit together, if you weren’t quite so loud…

You get the gist. And I dealt with it the way one deals with demons — something in the vein of “Shut the fuck up and get behind me, Satan”. Naming the demon is one thing. Giving airtime to the lies is another, and I spent too much of my life listening.

So it just became a thing. The Nobody’s Girlfriend pain. Don’t even say the words, because that’s only the match to the garbage fire of self-spite italicized above.

Then — a couple months back, I found myself starting to say it anyway. I’m Nobody’s Girlfriend. Not to torture myself, but because it was starting to sound different.

I’m Nobody’s Girlfriend.

Something about it was starting to sound a little less lonely…and a little more like…fuck you. I belong to no one.

Strike that — I belong to myself.

I’m Nobody’s Girlfriend.

I’m writing about this because it likely won’t always be true. I don’t say that in a coy, guess wha-at kind of way — only in the way that all my states of being, especially those I cling to — are temporary. Someday I will likely have to negotiate how to be a whole person in a committed relationship. Maybe soon. Maybe not for a long while. All these things depend on life and death and everything in between, and who’s around the corner, and who I’ll be around that particular corner, at that particular time…

So I need to claim this moniker while I can. I need to feel everything of what this time in my life means and affords.

I’m Nobody’s Girlfriend.

I’ve recently come to revalue the role of friendship in my life. It wasn’t until at a recent gathering on the topic of friendship that I realized I’m more the rarity in a group of women — not always but often, the presence of significant others diminishes the importance of female friendship. Or it’s not given the same weight or effect as anything involving sex.

But I can say with some pride that my friends, my chosen family, are the village that feeds my soul. And as a result, I thus far have been able to let my lovers be less than everything to me.

Is it only that I have yet to encounter an everything-worthy person? Maybe. But at present, I’m happier with where the priority lines have been drawn.

I’m Nobody’s Girlfriend.

One year ago today, I was devastated by this label. One year ago today, I was so convinced of my unworthiness for legitimate coupling that I instigated what was by all accounts an affair, and one that took far too long to end.

One year ago I could only wail at the heavens why was I not enough? Why was it never in the cards to be cared for by somebody I loved? And I could only wail this over email to a man I was unrequitedly in love with, pretending these were perfectly objective questions that had nothing to do with how badly I wanted him to want me. And God bless that man, whatever his shortcomings — he spoke truth, and he spoke it kindly, and he led me back to myself.

I’ve come to accept over time that sometimes — maybe even often — I end up finding myself along the way to pleasing a man. While it may not be the perfect route, it still gets me where I need to go, and I’m learning to have grace for this.

I’m Nobody’s Girlfriend.

Today, on the day I am writing this, I awoke alone, sick as a dog, but still aroused, and started my day with sex with myself. Read: very good sex.

Today I spent the day accountable to no one but myself.

Today I have also spent reading a manifesto of sexual pleasure and revolution that is Pleasure Activism by the inimitable Adrienne Maree Brown. And as I read everything that liberated sex should be, my heart soars with unshakeable gratitude that while no, I have not had the traditional Girlfriend Experience, my formative sexual experiences were with a man who continually prioritized my liberation, pleasure, and safety. And as I continue to have the privilege of continued sex with this man, even without the approving structures of a relationship label, even with the uncertainty of how long this “situationship” (credit — Adrienne Maree Brown) will continue, I feel wildly grateful that sex has only improved as I have known my desires deeper and learned to communicate them, that as I grow stronger into myself, this partner has responded and grown with me.

Girlfriend or not, I am no longer going to take that gift for granted. I’m tired of calling that anything but holy and miraculous. And I’ve known too many women in and out of relationship who have shared much more difficult stories with me.

Today I have filled my life with the pleasures of my home — reading empowered literature, listening to records I love, feeding myself, connecting with my roommates, meditating, bearing the heat more than I thought I could, delighting in my sweaty summer body.

And all this I have done while being fairly certain I am in the process of being ghosted by a new romantic prospect. Unfortunate, yes. But does this shatter me? Oddly, no. With every hour that passes of his silence, confirming this reality, I feel more deeply rooted in the woman I have recognized in the last few days — sexy, fierce, tender, resilient as fuck.

I’m Nobody’s Girlfriend.

This does not make me garbage. This means I have eyes wide open for the world outside approved structures. This means my standard for relationship is really fucking high these days. And rightfully so.

I’m Nobody’s Girlfriend.

And my life is too good to settle for half-measures, for a label too small for any whole human to squeeze into, committed relationship or not.

I’m Nobody’s Girlfriend.

And I say to you now — there’s so much good, my girlfriends, my loves of all genders. So much good between your legs and at your fingertips, on your tongue, before your eyes, in your lungs, pinpricking your skin. No matter who loves you, who you go home to, what the one in your bed calls you…you belong first and foremost to yourself. Eat it all. Don’t miss a thing.

I know. I have been odd — about the baker within me, about my relationship to homemade dessert in general. It’s been a strange and unexpected journey for me, one that still unfolds as we speak, but I’m going to attempt to chronicle it as best as I can for you now.

Falling in love with Maggie Gyllenhaal

There are a lot of things I wish I could have done differently in my life, but one thing I can say I did well with absolute confidence was completely by accident — I picked the best possible first Maggie Gyllenhaal movie to see: Stranger Than Fiction.

Not only did I forever fall in love with her as an actress, but her character of Ana Pascal the baker made more of an impression on me than I realized at the time. Before her, baking had seemed quaint and 1950s-esque — nonetheless intriguing to me because of the out-of-time soul I’ve always been — but Ana Pascal was angry, flawed, tattooed, charming, generous. She seemed to bake as an extension of her self.

Moreover, her monologue about dropping out of Harvard Law — because she realized if she wanted to make the world a better place, she would do it with cookies — sort of seduced me. For one thing, I think the idea of having an excuse to give up on the thing you’re supposed to do to go bake instead immediately flooded me with tempting relief.

What if it was that easy? What if the easy thing, the baking, is actually what you’re supposed to do? As I will make abundantly clear soon, I have come to terms with the fact that this is not the case for me.

But beyond that — I think I still envy this kind of story for the way one discovers a vocation. The way I fell into screenwriting was so quiet and simple and without fanfare that occasionally, I come to doubt its legitimacy. And yet from what I’m learning about hiddenness, maybe it’s just the opposite. The quiet voice is the one that speaks the greatest truth.

Beyond Maggie Gyllenhaal, I really think Stranger than Fiction affected me because I want to be everyone in it — the writer, the friend, the expert, the baker, the protagonist falling in love and having a personal awakening. Of course, reading that now, I see that the beauty of life as opposed to fiction is that I can be all these things at once in varying degrees instead of having to choose an archetype and call it a day. I can be complex as hell, and that is a damn beautiful thing.

But anyway. This isn’t about my personal growth, it’s about baking. Actually, that’s not true, it’s about both. But I’ll make it clearer how they relate, I promise.

The Thing about Hiddenness

See, there is a spectrum of skills in the world, and some of them are more visible than others. And granted, the more visible set have different challenges — perhaps a struggle to find true authenticity or privacy in the constant spotlight. But I think the hidden skills are hard to preserve and refine in a world that constantly fights for your attention.

So it is with writing — ninety percent of the time you’re alone, and there’s a drudgery to it. But it’s also just a discipline that requires more of you. Writing requires quietude. You likely won’t get much validation or attention for it — or at least not for the discipline itself — any response will be mixed at best.

But that’s why you do it. You do this to create something good for the world. It’s not to please them, or whatever “they” think they want today. This is for you and you only. You don’t have to place your worth in their perception of you. But it’s a deeper process; it’s not a road of instant gratification. It’s a longer path of personal transformation, and all the baptisms by fire that happen along the way…not to overstate it.

This is not so with baking. At least with me. I fully acknowledge that if baking is your calling, then it challenges you in every way it’s meant to. But for me, when there is no challenge involved, it can be like crack.

All this validation for a work that is highly visible and aesthetically appealing, that people will always praise me for…but that will never challenge me. It’s hard to explain how highly dangerous this can become.

And yet…this is key to understanding the building obsession and psychosis that is the Pie Chapter of my life.

My Long, Strange Relationship with Pie

I think it started with Pushing Daisies…which comes as little surprise, since many if not most of my epiphanies have been tied to film and television. 500 Days of Summer made me realize that I was currently holding on to a relationship with a fundamental inequality of affection. I was Joseph Gordon-Levitt and I didn’t want to be for a second longer. But it wasn’t until I watched The Graduate for the first time a few months later that I finally got over that person — I realized I wanted someone who would run after me the way Ben ran after Elaine at the end of the movie. I didn’t care if they ended up together or not in the future. I deserved, at bare minimum, that level of passion.

Pushing Daisies — well, it more or less just reminded me that I liked to eat pie, and that I wished I could do this wearing Anna Friel’s array of beautiful vintage dresses. But I think I also probably knew deep down all along — in the pie vs. cake debate, I’m pie all the way. Why? I have frosting-to-cake ratio issues, which is why cake donuts are ideal and cupcakes are a living hell. And I’ll take flaky pastry and fruit/cream/custard filling over all the rest, any day of the week.

It wasn’t until Waitress that everything really changed. Watching Keri Russell’s heartbreaking portrayal of Jenna throw pies together in her head to cope with the mess of her own life awakened something in me (I also probably, like any sane person, wanted Keri Russell’s hair).

I wanted that relationship with pie — to have a tough moment, then create something in my head that would speak to the struggle, and in that way become stronger than my own suffering.

Now, you may be thinking, “That sounds a lot like what writing’s supposed to do…isn’t it?” Right.

But the thing about pie, or any semi-challenging baked good is — you can seek the same end from it, but you have an external result. You made something with your hands — it feels real. And you know if that real something is good, because either it tastes delicious, or it doesn’t. Writing is rarely so black-and-white.

And here’s the other thing — pie is filled with delicious, sugary ingredients. It’s addictive. People are going to want it.

And they’re going to like you a lot for bringing it.

But I wasn’t so hep to all this when I started.

All I knew is that I wanted to make pies like Jenna, and I wanted to eat them. And then I tried my first blueberry pie with a Trader Joe’s boxed pie crust (I shudder as I write the words even now), and I realized upon tasting my work (as mediocre as you’d expect) that this was going to take more finagling than I thought.

So I made a deal with myself. I decided that the summer after college was going to be the Summer of Pies — I would make as many pies as I could, until I was great at it.

I tried every recipe I could get my hands on, perfecting, refining. I could never seem to make up my own like Jenna, but who knows, maybe that would come later. And in the meantime, I had quite the Instagram following as I went on this little baking adventure — people were always tuning in to see what I would bake next, eating as much of my pie as they could.

And by the end of the summer, I had baked 25 pies…and I didn’t quite know how to stop.

Because baking pie was just something I did now. And I didn’t feel like I had quite found those foolproof recipes that would teach me how to make up my own. So I kept going — baking through the holidays ad nauseum, my Christmas baskets growing more ambitious and less realistic by the minute.

And then I found it. The Four and Twenty Blackbirds Cookbook.

Created by the Elsen sisters in Brooklyn, this book came from their pie shop where they chose to make simple, delicious traditional pies like their grandmother made, using only seasonal ingredients. Their salted caramel apple pie hooked me first — to this day my favorite apple pie of all time — and soon after, I had bought the recipe book and made myself a crazy promise in January 2014.

Yes, I decided — I would bake through every single recipe in this book, for every seasonal pie of the year.

And for a while — it was fun. The creative, delicious-sounding recipes genuinely excited me, and I loved digging around for the perfect ingredients, savoring their all-butter crust and its surprisingly forgiving texture. And I baked a lot.

To the point that my Instagram feed was more pie than human faces.

To the point that there was always dough under my fingernails, butter smudges on my phone and laptop screen, and bags under my half-present, crazy-wide eyes.

Now that I look back I try to remember how I did this with a full-time job, especially when I consider that through most of this year my family was going through a lot, and my best friend and I were barely in touch. Maybe I was more drawn to this “baking disorder” because it was something I could control.

But then, I don’t really want to blame this on anyone but myself. The point is, in the middle of all this, the spiraling out of control happened pretty fast.

Eventually, I was staying up until 3:30 AM on one summer night, baking thirteen pies for a summer church picnic that no one had even asked me to. Whenever anyone asks me what a “baking black hole” is, I point grimly to this moment.

Why, you ask?

Maybe some part of me just wondered if I could do it. But mostly I liked having something people remembered me by. It made me feel more visible in a church community I was trying to establish myself in. And to a certain extent, I can defend this part of baking — it has genuinely helped me network/make an impression in an office. People appreciate you doing something personal for them, and it makes you stand out among other employees.

But without boundaries, it becomes a black hole. And because I was deep in this black hole, doing something that didn’t challenge me, I started to be this strange, insecure person who would snap like a crazy woman at any one of the poor souls who, with the very best of intentions, would suggest I open a pie shop. “Actually, no, it’s a bad idea, because you have to bake constantly to come up with any kind of profit, and I don’t even come up with my own recipes, so it would be a pretty big fraud anyway…” all to the exhaustive tune of “You don’t really know what you’re talking about.”

And it finally became a suggestion I was irritated to even have to respond to. I became fed up, finally throwing my hands in the air and bemoaning, “Why do these people keep only thinking of me as a pie lady? Don’t they know I’m a writer?”

So I would tell them this over and over again, in perhaps a less-than-gracious way, probably half-telling myself at this point. “No, I don’t want to open a pie shop actually, I want to write, and no, you can’t do both.”

But they never seemed to hear me.

And it wasn’t until I’d gone through all of autumn (aka pie season), that I finally woke up.

December was upon me, and as it was the first Christmas I’d had working a full-time job, I was overwhelmed by everything on my plate at the end of the year — Christmas shopping and events, writing goals unfulfilled, and a desperate longing for time to reflect and make resolutions for 2015.

And with all this on my plate, somehow I also had it high on my priorities list to finish baking the Four and Twenty Blackbirds Pie Book. I had five recipes left unbaked on December 15th, and I vividly remember sitting at my desk at Harbinger, nineteen windows of responsibility open, and there I was stressing out about finding a grocery store that would carry both plums and figs so I could make plum fig pie, and I couldn’t find a single store that had both in December, and my patience was wearing thin, and I found myself stopping to ask —

Jaz. What are you doing? How has this become so important to you?

And I stopped everything, really trying to honestly answer this. Well, I had committed to finishing this project. I said I would bake through the book, and I like to keep my promises to myself, right?

Is that it? Or do you just want to say you finished this so you can try to forget how much writing you didn’t do?

Ouch. This hit closer to home than I wanted to admit. But I’d started pulling at that thread, and now there were questions behind the questions — like how many hours, how much money had I spent on pursuing what was ostensibly a hobby?

And the natural next question ran through my body with a chill…what else could I have been doing with that time? Writing, spending time with people I care about, reading, developing spiritually…the list was too terrifying. I couldn’t look back anymore or I’d drown in what-ifs. All I could do was be grateful that I caught myself in time.

So I stopped five recipes short. And I looked at what had happened to me — I had embraced something that didn’t challenge me, that made people like me, and I was hiding behind it so I didn’t have to do the harder inner-life work of being a writer. And no one would ever know this except me, so I had to be the one to stop it.

And for all the moments I had despised people for telling me to open a pie shop, the ones I wanted to think of me as a writer…I turned to my inner self, finally awake, and said, Well here’s a thought, Jaz. If you want them to think of you as more of a writer and less of a baker…why don’t you write…more and bake…less?

I know. It’s embarrassingly obvious on paper. But so are the answers to most of our bad habits, our self-soothing routines that take us away from what might be harder now, but more refining and rewarding later.

So I decided I needed new rules, new boundaries — a new deal with myself. Where hobbies were concerned, I would only spend excessive time on things that challenged me and pushed me into a better version of me — like music, dance, exercise.

I would only bake for birthdays, holidays, and if I actually wanted to eat the pie I was baking.

I would tell other people in my life my story, so that they could keep me accountable. These same people dubbed me “Piesenberg” to jokingly signify the dark alterego my addiction occasionally transformed me into. Now it’s a personalized apron they had made for me a few years back, and every time I wear it I take it as a reminder that this is better for me within my new limits.

Boundaries are good, even in the baked goods arena.

And today I am doing better. Yes, I still get a little twitch of crazy when people tell me to open my own pie shop. And yes, there’s still a part of me that feels like a fraud when I walk into a gathering without carrying baked goods to offer.

But I try to remind myself at these times that I have a folder full of new and old writing projects that have flourished all the better since I have let baking be the hobby it should have always been. And at the same gathering where I feel guilty for not baking, I am so much more present to love the people around me better, to not be stretched to a frightening, frantic fragment of myself.

But if I should ever backslide, and you see me making plans months in advance to bake a season’s worth of pie, if you see me gearing up to make more than five pies and it’s not a holiday, if you see me rolling and pinching crust at 2:35 AM, eyes glazed over — I am in a baking black hole. Please do whatever is necessary to pull me out.

Where is the girl so assured of dramatic endings?

Where is the girl not convinced we’ll make it through the night?

Where is the girl so enamored of tragedy?

What to make of a world where he who leaves seems now to stay?

What to make of the ways I have been leaving myself?

How do I stay?

“I don’t want to be heartbroken, I want to be a revolutionary,” she said then. But what is the revolution but letting your heart break for the world, a thousand times over? Maybe what she meant was that she couldn’t imagine a heart strong enough to survive what one year brought.

But she was wrong.

The night after the first Women’s March, an hour before I wrote my first Women’s March piece in the Broadway Bar next door, I sat in the Orpheum Theatre, listening to Buddy Wakefield perform what is now one of my favorite poems of all time, We Were Emergencies:

We can stick anything into the fog and make it look like a ghost.
But tonight let us not become tragedies.
We are not funeral homes
with propane tanks in our windows
lookin’ like cemeteries.
Cemeteries are just the Earth’s way of not letting go.
Let go.
Tonight, poets, turn your ridiculous wrists so far backwards
the razor blades in your pencil tips
can’t get a good angle on all that beauty inside.
Step into this
with your airplane parts
move forward
and repeat after me with your heart:
I no longer need you to fuck me as hard as I hated myself.
Make love to me
like you know I am better than the worst thing I ever did.
Go slow.
I’m new to this,
but I have seen nearly every city from a rooftop
without jumping.
I have realized that the moon
did not have to be full for us to love it,
that we are not tragedies
stranded here beneath it,
that if my heart
really broke
every time I fell from love
I’d be able to offer you confetti by now.
But hearts don’t break, y’all,
they bruise and get better.
We were never tragedies.
We were emergencies.
You call 9–1–1.
Tell them I’m havin’ a fantastic time.

I remember hope flooding my body in the fuck-yeah variety. I remember emailing Buddy Wakefield himself to ask for this poem later. I remember recalling it time and again, every time I needed to remember that my heart was never confetti. But it took two years of bruising and falling to finally believe what I know now, in the year I marched alone — hearts don’t just get better, they get stronger.

My once-friend of that original piece is still in past tense. There appears to be no end in sight for our radio silence — perhaps emphatically not, as I’ve now written a number of pieces on the matter.

My once-lover, of all things, now retains some permanence, a welcome presence in my life that grows warmer — and though I don’t yet know the shape of this presence, or how that will shift, I welcome it all the same.

I think of all the subsequent radio silences that have taken their place. Some losses that chasmed me, some at which I now barely flinch. How do some losses at once gut you and make you lighter?

I’m finding, as I write this, the temptation to sound like I’ve got some semblance of a thing all together. Let me be emphatically clear that I do not. I have no illusions about evading the possibility of heartbreak ahead. I know the crisis points will find me again. But I’m finding it less believable that they will shatter me. I can’t imagine myself in shards anymore. It’s hard to shake the hard-won feeling of being a whole person at last.

Sometimes I’m a lonely whole person, yes. Sometimes the world feels massively disappointing, yes. Sometimes I have to set aside a day to cry until all the water’s left me.

How am I different? Am I? I don’t know. Maybe I’m not. Maybe I’ve just stopped questioning my worthiness to be here, stopped asking what’s wrong with me every time love goes wrong. Not stopped hurting amid the wrong, no…but I’ve started asking new questions. What is all this for, after the theatrics die down? What is the deeper and quieter narrative at play? Where is my role to play in all this? And is it even so static that it can be defined in a day alone?

Two years ago, I walked the March fresh off mourning Carrie Fisher. A role model of mine forever, and fitting for the headspace I found myself then — writing beauty and wit amid the tragedy and darkness of my own head. My best friend has since given me an embroidery hoop that hangs from my rearview mirror and reads, “Make Carrie Fisher Proud”, lest I forget wherever the many roads of my life take me.

And then Mary Tyler Moore, just a few days short of that first march. Mary, who gave me Mary Richards for every season of life when I was nowhere near turning the world on with my smile — she held me in normalcy and vulnerability and career uncertainty and finding love and comfort less in the arms of lovers and more in the chosen family of friends, until I believed I might just make it after all.

Then, last summer, we lost the Queen of Soul. Aretha, whose anthems we sang two weeks ago in solidarity at the end of the rally. Aretha who, and I don’t know if this story if true, but apparently held fast to a deal her entire career that she didn’t walk onstage until she was paid in full, in cash. Aretha whose likeness now hangs on my rearview mirror too, in case I forget that she meant respect enough to walk away knowing what she was worth. I am learning how to do the same.

And this year — two days before the march, Mary Oliver. Mary of the wild and precious life, Mary of the soft animals of our bodies, loving what they love. Mary who lived well long after sixty, lived well even in the grief after the love of her life left this earth. And I hang Wild Geese in my entryway to think of how long and short life can be.

I think of these women — the saints I light proverbial candles to — the messy trenches they walked, the different paths they took. And I think of Carrie, then Mary, then Aretha, then Mary again, and how I don’t want to be a woman scrambling for fear of wrinkled skin, scrambling for the altar, scrambling for anything at all. I want to wander idly in fields and speak truth and stand firm on self-love and sing from the soul and think in my mouth and not shy away from the dark stuff and laugh as much as possible and live in community and write my own story and get started belonging to the world immediately.

I’m struck by how scattered this piece feels. I still ache to find a more definite container. But then I think that so much of this has been about losing the container entirely — so many miles from how black and white and fractal I began all this. Tragedy is easier, tragedy is certain — we all know how it ends.

But in a nation of extremes and division, everything worth following has pulled me into gray. Even my own gray — how was I to know that I could only love myself now by loving my darkest places? And yet amid uncertainty, so much simplicity emerges, so much letting the soft animal of my body love what it loves — listening to the soft animal of my body to begin with, giving it back the power and voice stolen by so many, allowed by me. And with this listening, I feel a bandwidth — a bandwidth made available by loving myself…

…A bandwidth almost immediately taken up by a world made harder to navigate daily. No longer the easy lines of Jesus only, of keeping your legs and mind closed. More the Padraig O’Tuama and Richard Rohr understandings of “Jesus-and”, of a spiritual plane that feels vast enough to spend the rest of whatever time I have alive wandering, never quite arriving, so much as deepening.

And I need that depth, because I’m fighting differently than I used to — more self-care, more hard conversations, more listening, more reading, more getting it wrong and getting back up again. More realizing how long a haul this whole business of world-changing is going to be. More trying to “be a good ancestor, stand for something bigger than [myself], add value to the Earth during [my] sojourn”, as Marian Wright Edelman so wisely advised.

Maybe it’s less plot points, more leaning in to the infinite texture of the ordinary. Maybe all of this has just been one long way of saying that I’m not living like tragedy, like an emergency anymore…I’m living like someone who knows they might be here a while. Someone who can finally say in earnest:

You call 9–1–1. Tell them I’m havin’ a fantastic time.

Last night I had the teeth-falling-out dream.

I wasn’t sure if they were falling out at first, if they were teeth at all. Just a vague pain, and then shards floating on my tongue, until I reached in and pulled the pieces out, a perverse wonder at the feeling of everything that enabled me feeding myself dis-attaching, untethering, until I stared at the bloody remnants in my hand, translucent and frail as the ice in my drink the night before, never able to free itself from the tray in one piece.

The teeth-falling-out-or-breaking dream is infamous, understood within dream interpretation folklore to signify a feeling of powerlessness, instability — something in your life you feel powerless to control or avoid, anxiety over decisions you’ve made.

I could pretend to be mystified by this truth, to be just realizing it now, because I think I gravitate more toward traditional narratives of a character’s naïveté and distance from what they know to be true. This would be convenient — give me less accountability — but also less agency. I’m trying not to do that anymore. I’m trying to practice self-implication — so no, this dream is hardly a surprise. I find my response to the dream is more one of relief, of confirmation — that my body has validated the chaos of my heart and mind within, and while no answer has presented itself, I feel peace in simply knowing that my body is saying — okay, so we’re finally going to figure this out together.

Anxiety’s been no stranger to my dreams lately — though it’s been a curious variety of type. Unpaid parking tickets that suddenly are the sum total of my rent. An unmanageably large bag of cat litter I refuse to dispose of. An awkwardly long stretch of eye contact across a room that I worry has ruined everything, eggshells-wise.

And, on the stranger side — I find that I’m suddenly invisible to everyone except my ex-lover, who has decided to sneak me into his house to have an invisible fling. But first I have to watch from the corner while his entire family, including his girlfriend, eats dinner. I’m invisible, but I still have to make sure I’m absolutely silent, so that I remain a secret, so that we can after dinner he can whisk me away to have bizarre and brief invisible sex in a bunk bed upstairs.

That last one might seem like the clear deviant in the game of “which of these is not like the others”, but it’s not. I feel the thread running through them all so clearly now — I am stuck in monotony and mundane and melancholic old flames. I am being moved toward an untangling of the gold chains that I have worn as jewelry. I am being reminded again that maybe they are, in fact, just chains. And they don’t belong around my neck. And I am perfectly able to remove them whenever I choose.

I’m in a season where every romantic door of my life, casual or otherwise, is closing to an almost comically obvious degree. Which seems to say, as my best friend recently paraphrased, “If you can’t let go, the universe will let go for you.”

And it’s true. I haven’t been doing much letting go. There’s been letting go of sexual shame, yes — and there’s been some necessary experience and exploration to follow. But I’m reaching a point where I need to admit that I can’t hide under that sexual liberation banner any longer. That’s not what’s going on anymore. What’s going on is that I’ve been ricocheting from one painful and unsatisfying relationship into the next, taking on more grief and trouble rather than do the deeper, healing work.

Why? Because I’m fucking terrified.

Why? Everything about which I am fucking terrified: okay, go.

Terrified of talking about singleness — because by doing that, I’m afraid I sound small and sad and lonely, even if in actuality, that’s how I feel sometimes.

Terrified that there’s no one in the world who will actually love all of me, darkest corners and all, free from the scent of doing me any favors. Or at least — that this will be a person I love back in equal measure.

Terrified of sitting still and drowning in my own thoughts.

Terrified that all the self-sufficient singles out there are staring at me from their zen places saying, “So? What are you waiting for? Why is this so hard for you?”

Terrified that all the marrieds and coupleds are out there staring at me from their cozy companionship with a sympathetic head tilt at poor, lonely me.

Terrified that my life will be boring, and that I will internalize this as my fault.

Terrified that I’ll finally find peace in being alone, that I’ll let go of any romantic ideals — and that at the bottom of that peace a demon will rise, saying, “Well — was it really a choice to be single? Looks like no one worth your time wanted you anyway.”

Terrified that if I do end up finding a worthy companionship one day, another demon will pester me forever, saying: “You never would have been able to hack it alone. You’re weak, and you can’t stand without this.”

If you can’t tell by the vitriol of my demons, this is why I have to be very careful about journaling.

I’m also terrified that by reading this, you now all think I’m insane. But this fear is one I need to overcome first. Because right now, I need to write knowing that someone will read this, which will force me to be that much kinder to myself. Left to my own diary devices, I can be unforgiving, and put all the lies in my head to paper, giving them more power than they deserve.

I was reminded of this last week, as I was in the process of moving all my things out of my room in my parents’ house. This soon became an excavation of my adolescence — the most disturbing artifacts found being the entirety of my middle school and high school journals. Including two journals that were expressly devoted to “Letters to my Future Husband”. The material was not terribly edifying or empowering to myself or women in general, to say the least.

I cannot adequately express to you the strangeness of how I felt about my thirteen-year-old self. I equal parts wanted to strangle her for being so annoying, and wrap her up in my arms and mother the hell out of her saying, “It’s okay, sweet pea. You’re loved and seen and enough.”

But I don’t just need to do that to my thirteen-year-old self. I need to do that to my twenty-seven-year-old self. Because that thirteen year old’s fear has been popping up everywhere in my life in the last three weeks. At the theater seeing the cringingly accurate Eighth Grade, in petty competitive jealousies I thought long gone, in the suddenly resurgent belief that maybe I just haven’t found love because I’m not pretty enough.

How long? How long will these stories be my deeper narrative that I return to and subconsciously perpetuate? How long will I believe the societal lie so deeply ingrained in my growing up that my heroine’s journey only ever ends in a wedding?

No. I need to write a different story about myself, and believe it enough to present it to the world as truth. I need to believe that there are more interesting stories for women out there than the misadventures of romantic love and sex and heartbreak. I need to remember what that little girl inside me loves when she’s not worried about being loved. When she knows she is loved beyond knowing.

This need vibrates somewhere in the walkabout/vision quest frequency. I’m only traveling up the coast for a few weeks, not disappearing into the outback. But I may need to take every walkabout element where I can get it. I need to venture out and shake off this old and dying skin of mine. I need to allow for the sting that accompanies new, softer skin underneath, exposed to the elements for the first time.

May I be brave enough to feel every shade of this texture, painful but also poignant.

May I find the wild heart of mine underneath and amidst all my terror.

May I find delight in the particular beauty and textures of the world that resonate to my particular frequency.

May I relearn what it means to play, to love, to hold space for every soul in my periphery.

May I learn the fearsome and lovely practice of listening to my body — for it is there I feel I may find a reunion with my heart.

May I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world, and find in my gaping maw teeth enough to eat the world in all its nourishing, power enough to rise to the task the road has laid before me.

Onward.

Is wild hope the food of fools?

Is it madness to march in the streets one year later, when it feels at times like so little has changed…and arguably worsened?

It’s been a year since I marched in the first Women’s March on Washington. I don’t think any of us knew what was coming that day in LA, with just shy of a million women barely inching forward, with Exhilaration and Exhaustion interlocking their proverbial fingers just like we were. Together as one.

I wore the same clothes in tribute, in reverence in some way — and because somewhere in the series of last year’s protests I decided that my Good Girls Revolt T-shirt and bell-bottoms were my chosen uniform of the resistance. And yet, I’m nowhere near the same woman walking.

They say the personal is political, but I know that they don’t mean what that’s come to mean for me — that the way I fall in love has an eerie synchronicity with my political understanding and engagement.

First, dumb and shiny-eyed in the Obama administration, riding on high on good news and progress and everything being generally good and happy and “fine”, so I didn’t have to look at the hard work to be done underneath, gravitating toward a long series on very safe non-relationships that never got off the ground.

Then the world exploded with 45 — and Year One became a year of operatic extremes of the opposite. Picking up my picket signs and becoming a revolutionary, a firebrand, feeling more wildly alive than ever before — but also sometimes feeling like I had to live as a symbol more than a soul. Even my faith involved a righteous war where safety, family, familiarity, comfort, certainty, would absolutely be casualties.

There was no corner where I wasn’t fighting my cause, so I found one in the exhausted embrace of paramours that more resembled weary soldiers, to keep me warm while the world crumbled outside. None of them would make it in the long term, but with fire and fury all around, who among us could say with confidence that we were long for this world?

But the human soul cannot live in a constant state of grim battle.

I needed rest, rebuilding — some kind of life with a day-to-day foundation under it. So when my soldiering companions ran out the clock, at they were destined to do, I tried to swim through the grief alone, with little sense of light around me, and a lot of water left in my lungs.

Then, at the close of the year, when there was just enough light and hope to let wounds heal, I found the good, grounded, what-might-well-become-love I was looking for: brother in arms in this grander fight of ours too, but this soldier didn’t look like the others. Less wrapping of disaffected pain and distance, more extending an offer of company, and no sign of a secret plan to ask me to surrender my will, spirit, soul.

No more archetypal lovers. No more opera. Just enough romance to sweep me off my feet, and make me hope that something healthier and capable of growth was possible.

Then — abruptly, at the start of Year Two, this too was ripped away from me. A twist of fate no one could have foreseen, no one’s fault, just…gone.

The details are not so important, except to say that I foolishly thought that throughout the past year of personal and political battling that somehow I had learned life’s rubric, steeled myself for the worst. But maybe it’s exactly living that way that will bring sure disappointment.

Shoes will drop. Plans are uneasy aircrafts. Nothing gold can stay.

So how does one keep going? How do I hold on to hope when there’s no guarantee that any of this will go the way that we plan?

As much as I know that everything is process, everything takes time, I still find myself instinctively approaching most everything in my life by pendulum prescription. Perhaps because I’ve spent too long getting high on the aphrodisiac of apocalypse. I sway between wild, hopeful fantasy and “let’s make love while the world burns down”, and inevitably fight the hangover of despair as a result.

I’ve never been the kind of girl who’s been much good at walking through life with no expectation at all. Passion is too deeply buried in the fiber of my bones, and trust me — I’m no good for this world, or your company, burning at a more palatable wattage.

So if there are no guarantees, and I can’t stomach adjusting my expectations to grayscale…how do I go on? How do any of us?

I think my answer lies in a question. What is the purpose of a protest, anyway?

Is it really to oust a despicable administration? Not really. An impeachment trial is unfortunately not guaranteed by the outcry of the masses in the streets of the world, though I often wish otherwise. So why, then, do we march?

We march to know we’re not alone.

We march to remember that as much as this monster has tried to convince us through racism, sexism, xenophobia, demonizing the other — we are a part of the human race.

We are hands with calluses and without, skin of all shades, bodies carrying a lifetime of victory and defeat and rising again.

And when I walk so tight-close to those bodies that they literally hold me up, so that I forget how tired my feet are, I remember with a deafening clarity: we belong to each other.

And as my heart soars with this, I remember in the cold sunshine that made Los Angeles shine in both marches, that it isn’t all darkness.

I remember watching with my brother as people of every race, religion, orientation, and age bracket stood up for our Muslim brothers and sisters at the LAX protest — moved to involuntary tears within moments.

I remember that a year ago, the predators of #MeToo were still living in power and secrecy. And now we listen to a stage of survivors and activists proclaiming truth, because this exposé hasn’t died down with the next news cycle but spawned a movement in response, taking action: #TimesUp indeed.

I remember that although I’ve left a lifetime of things and people behind, I’ve also found a new church, in a whole new city of people I love. I’ve found a voice I’m not afraid to use, a little bravery amid the heartbreak, and a lot of openness in having my world detonated and rebuilt from the ground up.

And I know in moments like these that no grief can break me, national or personal.

Because I reach out and on one side there is my sister, bold and brilliant and changing the world and finding her voice on the other side of the country. And on the other side, my dear friend who puts her art out there everyday, who’s seen me through multiple heartbreaks and let me walk with her in her own. And behind them, all around, so many I may never meet — but whose specific strengths and stories inspire me, even unknown, even from afar.

We’re all walking a little heavier this year, perhaps, it’s true. We’re not so much fueled by the endorphins of outrage as we are trying to comfort each other in our grieving, in our weariness. The realization that change is necessary is often swift — but change itself is long, strange, mysterious.

So how do we live? How do we hope, especially when it feels most foolish?

We keep walking, keep moving forward together, because we are never alone.

We march.

“It’s not nice being inside my head. It’s a nice place to visit but I don’t want to live in here. It’s too crowded; too many traps and pitfalls.”
– Carrie Fisher

So I’m supposed to write something about self-reflection, and how it’s important, and where it may be dangerous. Dangerous, I thought. Interesting. But where would I start? And then I had a week of working eight hours a day in a quiet office where there was no work for me to do. Two weeks after a breakup.

Amazingly, I am now full of material on the subject.

I’ll be the first one to tell you that I think everyone should be in therapy, that everyone should know themselves deeply and well. “Sure, you don’t have to be in therapy,” I’ve said countless times, “But the way I see it, it’s like living without glasses when you need them. Sure, you could squint and see just enough to get by. But wouldn’t you rather see the world clearly and see what life is like without a chronic headache?”

This well-worn pitch aside, if you get to know me at all, there’s not a lot that I don’t analyze from every angle, take seriously, feel deeply. I am one of these people that there are now copious Thought Catalog articles on: the Highly Sensitive types.

For a long time I thought it was weakness, this emotional vulnerability. Always feeling like a sponge that absorbs near-everything with no appropriate avenue to wring out. Sure, everyone says that “it’s a gift, it’s healthy, this is what the Evolved People do”. But it always seemed suspiciously convenient that the people who told me this were on the avoidant side — just sort of opting out of experiencing all the pain.

And a lot of them were men. So it was hard not to hear, “Well, you’re a woman. Women are supposed to feel all the things for us, and we protect them and feed them…and hopefully keep them from dissolving into a pile of tears. You’re welcome, by the way.”

I used to say that I felt like Superman, in that part in Superman Returns where he flies Lois Lane up to the atmosphere and they sit there in silence, looking down at the world and he says, “What do you hear?”

“Nothing,” she says.

He looks down into the cloudy blue, then away into space with this deep sense of melancholy, and he says, “I hear everything.”

That is how I would describe my own emotional processing: I hear everything. I feel everything. The soul equivalent of the headache you get from wearing 3-D glasses outside the theater. And the nausea can make you think…maybe we’re not supposed to do this all the time.

And I have gotten better at not seeing this as a burden. I have come to believe, even when I don’t feel it, that vulnerability is strength. And I’ve taken a long enough stroll on the walls-up side of the fence to realize I don’t want that either. I don’t want it to take a month for me to figure out how I actually feel about something because I’ve been protecting myself on autopilot. I don’t want to be dumbfounded when someone asks me what I want. I don’t want to deaden myself to the world.

Moreover, I do believe it’s my responsibility as an artist to step into texture. I’m not supposed to choose naïveté any more than I choose worldliness with the armor of detachment. Both strip my art of truth and efficacy. I supposed to choose to examine why this or that hurts, and who else in humanity has hurt in that same place, and how connected are we are by our overlapping wounds.

The trouble is, my wounds can become so interesting to me I never leave them, so damned interesting they’ll kill me.

So alluring that I’m watching the car accident of my own life, debris flaming, and I’m just standing there asking for an instant replay, without lifting a finger to help or change. And I could barely tell you why, except that I fear the unknown ahead. I can’t let go of the old thing, so I get caught in my own loops, until I crash into the median and it all finally stops.

But as I’m painting this destruction for you — now is probably an opportune moment for me to pause and make my confession of just how hastily I am wont to mine my life experience for creative product.

Yes, “everything is copy”. Yes, we should write what we know. Yes, art should be truth. But sometimes I’m delaying my own healing by dragging things out to make them more dramatic. I’m wallowing because it makes better poetry — but how good can it be if the cost is that I have no strength to survive the day?

I make pilgrimages to old haunts and catalogue my feelings in months that follow, watching how they shift and change, and maybe it makes good copy. Sometimes, I suspect, it might even be great. But I must be ever-wary not to idolize suffering so much that I forget that even better art comes from transformation and healing and perspective from the other side. Freedom must be the goal.

I know I’m sort of circling more the process of grief than reflection — but they aren’t entirely discrete. If reflection is the awareness of all internal processes, maybe my grief is now magnifying for me the danger of over-reflecting…because it’s in love and in grief that everything is the most magnified.

So it is relevant — because now is the moment to be most cautious of the time spent in my head. I can no more be obsessed with my reflection in the water, standing on the shore, than I can drown in my own sorrow. This is what’s helping me see this.

And as much as I know reflecting will heal me eventually, if I can tread the right balance of seeing enough and not too much at once — it’s difficult not to walk into my psyche and find this endless catalogue of error to keep me company. An ocean of what-ifs to keep you cycling back and back and back…and then suddenly I’m more pinball machine than person:

Insert change here
And all my lights go off
A cacophony of electric and chaos and bouncing off
But never any forward
Never any oxygen
Just clattering against all obstacles backward until I collapse to the bottom And shut back off
For all the bells and whistles
Till some wizard proves me wrong
There’s never a pinball machine at peace

Navel-gazing has been my champion sport at times, but it doesn’t take long before your neck starts to hurt, and at a certain point you become the enemy of your own grace.

And in considering grace and how heavy a thing it is sometimes to be so aware, I’m reminded that reflection without spirituality would surely kill me. Maybe that’s the switch flip to all of this.

Just as living in the moment can become frivolous, “knowing thyself” can become an excuse to never step outside our own proverbial rooms and touch something larger. And if reflection is with the aim of knowing myself, it doesn’t stop there — it means knowing where I came from.

Who created me? Who birthed me? Who raised me? Who loves me? Who hurts me? Who hurts me by loving me…just as I have done to all around me, as we humans do? Why was I born? How can I improve the world around me?

Could one small piece of that plan be simply to consider to the stories of those around me with the same weight and significance with which I view my own soul?

Could this process remind us all of what is shared, that we are not now, and have never been alone?

That kind of reflection, I’m thinking, is the good thing.

And even if most of my life is spent fighting the pinball machine phases of reflection — I choose grace and humility and belief in my ability to keep fighting my way up and out of the glass case, into the larger ocean. Outside myself.

And then maybe, just maybe…my head’s an okay place to live after all.

I’m drinking champagne alone in the Broadway Bar on the night of the Women’s March on Washington. I just left the Orpheum, where the Literary Death Match poets and readers declared hopes for daughters and tribute to mothers — and you could feel as much in the audience as on the streets of Downtown LA tonight that we’re all still flying high, giddy with celebration even though we know there’s a long four years ahead. But we’re not ready to let hope fade yet — people are still carrying their signs, and they’re wearing their homemade pussy hats, and I still haven’t changed my clothes.

I missed the boat tonight, where the real party’s at, but this unscheduled quiet isn’t unwelcome, because there’s something else hanging in the air. Something that I haven’t been able to shake the last few days. Something that’s making the Saturday nightlife fade into a dull roar around me…I’m carrying a separate loss, a separate sadness with me, apart from the pain of our nation, our world.

Because while the country loses so much and worries they will lose more, I have lost you.

You plural.

As in two.

A friend. A lover. In cruelly quick succession.

You two, who on so many occasions commiserated with me about this end of the world, these near-dystopian times. I thought we would always be able to turn to each other, eyes wide, heads shaking, as the harrowing events scroll on, but now the radio has gone silent on both channels. And maybe it’s dead altogether. And now that I can’t get a message through the airwaves, all I want to ask is, even if it’s only here —

How’s your apocalypse going?

How do you cope with the orange toad who swallowed up our favorite family of Firsts? Do you watch the highlight reels, the goodbyes, the life of Joe Biden that I appreciated far too late? Do you cry like I do, like someone opened a faucet we’ll never been able to shut it off?

Did you watch the inauguration shrouded in darkness and storm, and find it all a bit on the nose? Or did you sleep in like I did, hoping as always that the world would have changed upon waking. But still I wake, and the world is so much that I lie there every morning, paralyzed by the prospect of overcoming, for almost an hour.

How’s your apocalypse going?

How did you begin to bear it when Carrie Fisher died? She was so much like us and not at all. I miss her gravelly voice in my car radio, from so many books, so much life, that was already helping me get over you and past you when I heard about the heart attack and gripped the wheel. And then we lost Debbie too. And still I wanted to grieve with you, you my plural lost ones.

What do you fear you’ll lose on the road ahead? Health, family, freedom of speech, the concept of truth, respect for yourself? Our very well-being? But how well are we being, to begin with? And are you…well? Without me?

How’s your apocalypse going?

Did it mean anything to you when Good Girls Revolt ended? Did it strike you as dark and cruel and strange? Did you feel my heart breaking from whatever far-off place you were standing?

Do you start to feel like nothing makes sense anymore? Does life feel like the same large fictional play to you that I’m starting to recognize, to loathe? Does it feel like a cruel joke to crush a spirit just starting to grow?

But my friend, you still make the old jokes that come from chains. And my lover, you’ve been tired a long time.

I always fall in love in major election years. For Obama’s 2008 victory, I was a shiny-eyed teen drunk on hope and change and “Yes We Can!” — so drunk I didn’t notice my boyfriend was gay. But we grew older and wiser and learned to see each other better.

Eight years later and I’m numbing myself. I’m resigning myself. And I constructed a crossroads before me:

A woman I hope I can trust, a history-making, bold choice to fly in the face of the establishment — unless she’s more the establishment than I ever realized.

An alcoholic, unhealthy escape route of a man who will never be qualified for the job.

This is love in the time of POTUS 45. The president I can only refer to with air quotes around his title now real.

How’s your apocalypse going?

To my friend — the mermaid once mine.

I know you must hate the state of things too, though your voice has faded from my life completely. All but for the echoes of your once-hope for us: “I wish I could take both of our loneliness and light it on fire.” How different the place I stand in the apocalypse today — loneliness everywhere, and so much of my fire gone out.

I thought we’d be burning down the barricades together, soot smudging a new shape to our smiles, wild hope in our browns and blues. But you were all talk and t-shirts — you just liked how the gas mask brought out your lowlights, how your legs looked in riot gear. I guess you swim in shallower water than you think.

Then one day, I looked away too long, and you fell asleep. I laid out all my plans and schemes, but you skipped town, made some deal with the Empire, the people who keep all our ocean of beautiful mess under the rug.

I thought that didn’t happen with sisters in the rebellion. Or at least — I thought that didn’t happen with you. Just like I never thought America would fit this far down the rabbit hole.

But I already lost Princess Leia, so I wasn’t going to blow up the Death Star alone.

How’s your apocalypse going?

To my lover — my smoky, mercenary scoundrel.

You cannot be reached. You cannot be called into your X-wing at a moment’s notice. But then I lose my backup, and you swoop in to my rescue with whiskey and wine. And I lose myself in a galaxy far, far away from traitors, loyalists — I lose myself in your disaffected rant with no end.

But how erotic your indignance, your dissatisfaction that devolves with alcohol. And then, with the magic of my silence, of my wryer smile, I am the wiser one. I am the all-knowing and mysterious one for the night.

And then we’re two rebels, above all this bullshit and betrayal. I teach you about gender pronouns I learned, and what it was to stand on a soapbox, and how it felt to have my feelings evaluated by committee before me. You tell me your war stories from the other side of the world’s glass, against which my nose is ever-pressed. You tell me about your kid, and the things in his stocking four sizes too big. You tell me about the kid you were for not long enough. I drink it all in like the cheap wine we split — dizzy now, sick later.

But hey — we’re standing at the end of the world, aren’t we? It’s the end of the world, so why be alone? It’s the end of the world, so we barricade in your shelter, distracting ourselves with smoke-filled kisses and coffee in stolen mugs and telling you all my old ghosts — still pretending you’re not becoming one even as we laugh at Ted Danson’s pitch-perfect delivery. I’m already fading for you, even as you hold me tight, refusing to let me leave — but we both know who chose that.

How’s your apocalypse going?

My lungs want to give out from how much I’m talking. I am talking and talking and saying everything and nothing, because everything is dire now, so it’s as good a time as any to dip my protest sign in blood and paint over where you both left wounds much more ordinary. I don’t want to be heartbroken. I want to be a revolutionary.

The stain of my cheap dark wash bell-bottoms seeps into suede tan boots caked with mud, and I’ve stopped feeling my feet hurt. Or maybe it’s just that these days, I like it when my feet hurt. I like it when my endorphins from running drown out that you were both running from me, maybe always. Maybe from the beginning.

How’s your apocalypse going?

I thought we would spend it all together as the world went down in flames. I lost a sister in arms. I lost a drowning buddy.

But even today, even in this bar alone, something is different.

Because today I walked until I couldn’t with 750,000 women, men, and children who comforted each other in love, who raised their voices — in protest, in strength, in hope of a better world.

I stood in the same place where I took your hand because I couldn’t stand up straight on the ice without you.

Today that ice had melted, and I walked strong with my brothers and sisters.

I walked through the same streets you guided me by the hand, because I didn’t know how to take the subway, I didn’t know where I was going without you.

I knew where I was going today. Forward.

Because when you see this much hope, you can’t help but believe that the world will never burn at all, except to take all our loneliness and light it on fire. This time for real. I want that for us.

This world isn’t going down without a fight. And neither am I. And tomorrow’s already hard, and I’m stepping back and needing to rest, and to grieve, but I’m still fighting. And I’m not alone. Never.

So I must go on differently now, because there is too much love to be won over hate, and I’ve seen it inside myself to do things I never thought possible. No more terror of my own feelings, of my own power, of the risk of bruising that accompanies real love.

How’s your apocalypse going?

I don’t know. But mine is for damned sure coming to an end. Cheers.