I’m one of many, I’m sure, wandering between bed and computer in a dystopian stupor. Unable to sleep but no longer able to watch. Stomach in throat, fear on lips. The road ahead feels dark and vast, unlit and unsure. I feel extinguished. I’m sure you do too. The fire of promise, the warmth of newness and velocity of change, suddenly damp and ashen.

We burned so bright and tried so hard- what’s to become of our flame?

Until now we’ve been a campfire; burning wild and free, fed by the branches and pulp of social media, memes, polls and predictions, our smoke at the liberty of political winds. I encourage you now to reimagine your fire. To preserve and protect it from extinction.

Consider the way a gas lantern continues to burn, its flame customizable yet never quelled. These flames are visible yet safely kept in an enclosure of glass and metal. These chambers cannot snuff you and your fire can do no harm.

I venture that that these protective enclosures are not only your physical self, but your family of choice and blood, your safe haven spaces, your tribe, the fellow flames that joined yours to shine all the brighter.

For now, in the days and weeks ahead, protecting your fire must take precedent over wild abandon. Keep it safe. Keep your glass housing clean and throw no stones. Open your valve when you can to increase your light, dim it as you need to protect your reserves.

Reinforce the lamps that line your street. Take care of you and yours, doing the next right thing in each moment. Nothing more for now. Find comfort in your community. Forgive those within it of pure heart and good intention, no matter where you stood yesterday.

Marvel at how very little the minutia matters when your focus turns to fiercely protect and serve the ones you love. Accept their love as fuel. Give and receive grace. Find resource in the unbiased beauty of nature, of animals, of art. Store this fuel and give it freely when you can.

Folks who are smarter than I will no doubt have more wisdom and less metaphor in the coming days. I look forward to it. But for now, tend the flame inside your lantern and those around you.

After all, even a street lined with half lit gas lamps can provide a safe and comforting space to travel, to move on, to find the way home. When we’re ready to step into it, only our collective glow can illuminate the dark path ahead.

As we journey through the year-mark of the COVID-19 pandemic in America it feels like proverbial plexiglass walls are popping up around every turn, all of us smacking into them in our weary blindness, like a bird to a window. That’s the level of COVID fatigue I’ve been sensing and experiencing in these post-spike, mid-vaccine, still-hunkered months of early 2021.

I thought I was alone in the sentiments I’m about to share until I spoke about them during a chance encounter with a friend. She confessed feeling the same, then so did another friend, and another. As is almost always the case, the Venn diagram of our feelings overlaps with many folks from many walks of life, especially while we weather a massive societal event like COVID.

First up, let’s normalize that and find strength in numbers while we ponder our isolation. I’m sure if we could word search the transcripts of every therapist in the last 12 months the most commonly uttered phrase would be, “you’re not alone.” Followed by, “the whole bottle?” and “how many cats?”

So here we are. It’s March. Those of us who were lucky enough to make it through a holiday season ripe with superspreading are now tempted, cajoled by the occasional 50-degree day and a distant promise of herd immunity. But- doesn’t it make you mad?

When the clouds parted here in NYC last week for a brief respite and spectacular unveiling of thawed dog shit, I found myself reticent to go outside. Angry at the shafts of light decorating my couch.

You see, it’s easy to hunker when it’s miserable out. It’s scary to know that reentrance to society is on the horizon and that you ought to get ready for it- but reentrance to what, exactly? What’s next is so grey that it insults me when it’s bright.

If you’ve read my previous post about the death of New York City, you know I truly believe that our pre-Covid lifestyle was unsustainable, and that we desperately needed a cease-fire with our social media-obsessed culture that rewarded overwork and exhaustion. We really did need a plexiglass wall or two.

But it’s hard not to miss certain aspects of where we were a year ago- seeing friends, planning spring adventures, slogging through New York’s famous secret puddles en route to our busy days and lives.

There’s the source of the anger. I’m pissed that I’m not who I was and SO scared that who I am now isn’t ready and won’t be good enough for who I need to be.

I was watching old Instagram stories a few nights ago, digging up videos of my recently-departed kitty to save to my phone, and I would occasionally stop in my tracks and watch a snatch of an old memory. Everything looked so- easy. Effortless. Vibrant. I know that’s exactly what Past Me wanted folks to think, even if it wasn’t true, but Present Me was still a little jealous.

Present Me gets winded after walking over an hour, likes eating dinner at 6:30, and is so sure that all the skills she’s honed in years of training have certainly raptured away, leaving behind a little homebody with no talents except a strong recall of the entire TLC canon.

Present Me worries that the second Future Me has to kick a leg, learn a middle harmony, show up dressed well and prepared for an audition, it’ll be hard. It’ll hurt. It’ll feel weird.

Then Present me gets sad about that. And angry. Wistful for what’s been, anxious for what’s to come, wishing for clarity. Let’s call it ‘pissedful thinking.’

Round and round and up and down we go, a lumbering carousel of feelings. We’re high on the past, traveling through the now, low on the future. And we never cease to spin, to move, but not necessarily forward. It’s all endlessly circular, chasing the shellacked wooden tail of whoever’s in front of you.

But back to my informal survey of friends. One thinks she sounds like cottage cheese. (I’m intrigued by this. Is anyone else’s cottage cheese talking to them?) Another thinks she can’t act anymore. One got an audition last week and spent five days in a total panic before reluctantly filming material in a dress she didn’t want to wear, barely looking at the takes, and eating an entire bag of conversation hearts after it was sent off. Ok, that was me. I did that.

These are all people who really seem to “have it all together,” (that old chestnut) but feel privately less-than. And I know they’re all wrong. Of course it’s going to be bumpy and clunky as we get back to doing those things we always did in ways we’ve never done them.

This doesn’t just apply to artists, of course. It’s for the parents who are courageously adjusting every day to provide for their kids, to entertain them, to educate them. It’s for the business owner who has pivoted so many times they feel like a dancing vaudevillian. For the frontline workers and medical heroes who navigate daily policy changes and the fact that only about 65% of people actually want the very vaccine that will allow us to resume so many of the things we love.

Since I don’t pretend to have all the answers and am awash in pissedful thinking as much as you, I’ll just leave you with this small nugget. A wise friend reminded me- you chose your career. Don’t take it or yourself too seriously. All will be well. We are all changed. We’ve all developed resiliencies we don’t even recognize yet. But when we have to put them into practice, they’ll be there.

Though herd immunity may be imminent, none of us were immune to the spectacular changes COVID forced into our lives. We’ve all experienced trauma, and most of us are surely moving within a functional depression. It’s hard to take a leap off a moving object- which is why even the carousel has to slow down at some point to give the ponies a rest and the people a chance to move on.

And the COVID Carousel will slow, the highs and lows will equalize, and you’ll come to a complete stop. The music will stop playing. It’ll be so gentle, you might not even notice it’s happening. You’ll get off, with a bunch of other riders, a little dizzy. You’ll acknowledge each other. We did that. We took that ride. Then you’ll go your separate ways into life’s amusement park to see what ride you’d like to be your next adventure, ripe for metaphor.

So do me a favor and be gentle to yourself. Get out there into the sun when we’re lucky enough to have it. Just watch out for dog shit.

My cat is dying. That has nothing to do with con men or racial injustice, but everything to do with spending more time than usual on the couch while tending to a sick kitty and distracting myself from the inevitable.

In between at-home workouts and a part-time remote job, I’ve been spending most of my time in the doom scroll rabbit hole of streaming services while Henry the cat rests on my lap. Today, through pure happenstance, I found myself watching two movies about real-life con artists that left my head reeling by the time the credits were rolling.

My search began in the afternoon; I wanted something chipper and bright on in the background while I worked. Having already finished the season’s hot-ticket items (Bridgerton et al), Netflix was happy to unearth and recommend Catch Me If You Can, the wonderful 2002 movie based on Frank Abagnale Jr.’s life as a mod con man, flying over a million miles for free while posing as a Pan Am pilot, bank fraud and forged checks fluttering in his entrails.

Abagnale also posed as a doctor, lawyer, and prison agent before his arrest in 1969. He had served 5 of his 12-years in prison when the FBI hired him to finish his sentence as an employee in their check fraud department. He went on to advise and lecture for various agencies and companies, as well as running his own financial fraud consultancy company. Abagnale is still alive today, living quietly in the midwest with his family.

I finished the film, warmly lost in the captivating performances of everydad Tom Hanks and childhood idol Leo DiCaprio, not to mention a slew of amazing female cameos. I relished watching Ellen Pompeo, Jennifer Garner, Elizabeth Banks, Kaitlin Doubleday, and Amy Adams strut their stuff in their 60’s finest.

Afternoon waned into evening. With my workday done and the cat sleepy on pain meds, I began the scroll again, searching for something to blur the hours between 8pm and bedtime.

I’m a huge NYC Transit aficionado. A train geek. I’m endlessly intrigued by the secrets of the subway, abandoned stations, mole people, IND, IRT, BMT, transit history, you name it. My evening scroll brought me to Prime Video.

Naturally knowing all the intimate details of my interests, Prime recommended the 2016 documentary “Off The Rails,” about Darius McCollum, a gentleman who has, at print, gone to jail 30 times for hijacking and driving various modes of NYCT. In true Besosian fashion, it scratched an itch I didn’t even know I had. I clicked play.

I’ll spare you an in-depth recap, hoping instead you’ll take 90 minutes of your own doom-scroll to view the film yourself, but here’s a Reader’s Digest version:

Darius McCullom was born in Brooklyn in 1965. While Frank Abagnale Jr. was crisscrossing the globe on Pan Am, young Darius was becoming fascinated with his own, more local, form of transportation: The NYC Subway.

As a child with Asberger’s Syndrome, the rote predictability of the subway was Darius’s refuge in a big, bad town. The MTA employees were his friends. He learned the ins and outs of daily operations and had the transit map comprehensively memorized at age 8. He began taking on operator duties alongside active employees and driving trains as early as age 9.

His impulses and obsession with transit only increased when he was stabbed in the back, in the literal non-Shakespearian sense, by a classmate with a pair of scissors at the age of 12. Now that school was unsafe, his only escape remained the ever-stalwart subway.

Darius began gleefully taking over shifts for his transit worker friends, most notably with his first arrest at age 15. Darius was caught driving a downtown E local train while the operator begged off shift to visit a girlfriend at the 34th Street stop. Darius refused to rat out the employee, or any of the employees who took advantage of an autistic boy with a reverence and insatiable knowledge for the transit system.

Because of the E Train incident, Darius was denied employment with the MTA when he applied at ages 17 and 18, the only job he ever wanted.

His fervor never waned, and he spent the next 20-odd years commandeering trains, buses- whatever transit vehicles he could get his hands on. He would always drive the subway or bus along its plotted route, carefully picking up and dropping off passengers, known system-wide for his kind and gregarious PA announcements. The D train was his favorite.

Darius would commandeer transit vehicles until he was arrested, and resume as soon as he was released from prison. Not once in his 18-plus years in prison was therapy offered to Darius McCullom. He was denied employment at the MTA again and again, even removed from a beloved volunteer position at the MTA NYC Transit Museum.

Even after he procured a more aggressive legal team in 2018, his best choice was to enter an insanity plea and ship off to a government psych ward, where his plea keeps him from behind bars but without any control of his wellness or potential release. He’s still there to this day.

The film ended and I was agog. Here were two men, both impersonators, both obsessed with systems greater than their own, with such divergent paths following their arrests.

Frank Abagnale’s dream was never to work for the FBI. Or a fraud securities company. And yet, he was gift-wrapped a chance to bust out of jail and parlay his white privilege and vast expertise in check fraud and financial swindling into the very agency he had been defrauding. He remained free, besides once a week check-ins with the FBI, until his sentence was complete. His post-conviction career in securities advisement garnered him millions.

Imagine if McCollum, who had been shouting his desire to serve the MTA from the rooftops his entire life, had been given a fraction of that grace. Imagine the lives he could have touched, the systems he could have improved. I bet the L train reno would have been seamless.

Perhaps both men have indicators of a narcissistic personality disorder. Perhaps both were searching to be seen, to be lauded, to be in control. Undoubtedly both experienced trauma in their early years. But racial bias and a prison system hell-bent on the lucrative revolving door of black men failed Darius McCollum and served Frank Abagnale.

Darius’s blackness charted an entirely different course of action with no redemption. The unique strengths and abilities that his Asberger’s provided were not celebrated and utilized as Abagnale’s skills were, but instead used to label him a “loose cannon.”

One of these men was cumulatively sentenced to 13 years in prison and served 5.

The other is serving 22 years and counting.

One of these men was lauded for his government-assisted rehabilitation, with a tell-all autobiography spawning not only the very movie that delighted me for two hours on this chilly January day, but also a Tony Award-winning musical that has employed many of my friends.

The other sits in a Rochester psych ward, his only visibility through an aimless documentary scroll on Amazon Prime and Wikipedia.

So should your escape from reality involve commandeering a Boeing 707 or a Coney Island-bound D Train, whether your joyride becomes a Broadway musical or a life sentence still sadly depends on the color of your skin.

Aside from viewing “Off The Rails,” you can visit @freedariusnow on Twitter to read the latest on Darius’s case and sign a Change.org petition to release him from the federal asylum where he now sits. You can also write to him:

Darius McCollum
c/o Rochester Psychiatric Hospital
1111 Elmwood Ave.
Rochester, NY 14620

(Originally published by the Pittsburgh Post Gazette on December 28, 2003)

Like many college students who fly home for the holidays, I submit to endure the latest airport safeguards in the name of homeland security. A lot of us have stories to tell, but only mine is a fish tale, a contemporary melodrama of the absurd to prepare you for future travels.

My boyfriend Trey and I arrived by taxi at the US Airways terminal of La Guardia airport, heading home for the holidays. We had four bags apiece and one more precious piece of cargo — MJ, my pet fish. MJ is a gorgeous Betta fish, his palate a perfect pastel rainbow. He had become quite a solace to me in New York, a city that can make you feel so small and alone.

I missed my cats while away at college, and it really helped to have this tiny, exuberant creature to look after. Betta fish, research has shown, are the only aquatic animals that can recognize their owner. MJ was no exception. I’d walk into my cold dorm room after a long day and his body would light up, swimming excited circles around his little bowl.

Unfortunately, residence hall rules required that I take him home with me for winter break. This was just as well, since there would be no one there to care for him in my dorm.

Once at La Guardia we proceeded to security, the X-ray inspection point run by the Transportation Security Administration. I have learned by now that, post-9/11, a traveler is better off safe than sorry when proceeding through security. Surrender your phone, your laptop, your peanut butter, and hope for the best.

I wasn’t prepared, however, for a TSA agent to stop me right at the entrance, proclaiming that no small pets, including fish, were permitted through security. I had, however, just received the blessing of the ticket agents at US Airways and pre-assured MJ’s travels with Pittsburgh International Airport security weeks before our travel date.

I tried to explain this to the screener who stood between me and the gates, but she would have none of it. I asked why we couldn’t proceed, and she said the fish could potentially be swimming in nitroglycerin or some other explosive liquid. I queried how my fish could still be ALIVE if he was swimming in such a substance, which was clearly the wrong move.

I was led back to the US Airways ticket counter, stocking-footed and alone, where the agents reasserted that they didn’t see a problem for me to have a fish onboard the flight, properly packaged as he was in a vet-issued fish bag and secured with a rubber band. The TSA supervisor was called over, and he berated me profusely. He exclaimed that in no way, under no circumstances, was a small fish allowed to pass through security, regardless of what the ticket agents said.

Mr. Supervisor was causing a grand scene, marshaling the full authority of the TSA to refuse me. It struck me that with all the commotion my little security threat was causing, by now engaging the full attention of the TSA at LaGuardia, someone who posed a real threat to passenger safety might be conveniently slipping by.

By this time, I was in tears. I asked the supervisor what my options were should I not be allowed through security with my fish. He said I could leave it behind the counter with the US Airways employees to pick up upon my return (6 weeks later), or I could dispose of the fish. He wanted me to flush my fish.

He saw the horror in my eyes and told me I could go outside and give him to whomever I came to the airport with. When I explained that I was a college student, alone in New York City (save for boyfriend Trey), he brushed me off and said that was not his problem.

I cried some more. With no other option that we could see, Trey and I headed toward a restroom.

Inside the ladies’ room I looked at MJ, swimming happily in his bag, and then the looming porcelain toilet bowl in front of me. I broke down. There was absolutely no way I could do it.

I went back outside and told Trey I couldn’t flush MJ. It was then, in this hopeless predicament, that ever ingenuous Trey had an idea. He explained his plan and with a simple nod, we sprung into action.

Trey disappeared into the men’s room with the fish and my backpack. I’m a notoriously messy and haphazard packer, and my backpack only contained pants. Yes, pants. When he got into the stall, he let out a bit of the water in MJ’s bag and packed the fish into my backpack. Wedged between some corduroys and khakis, we prayed he wouldn’t suffocate or get squished, not to mention fried by the security X-rays that can be fatal to small creatures such as fish.

Trey exited the bathroom and we proceeded to a different security checkpoint on the other side of the terminal. Before we went through, Trey grabbed my hand. “Lara,” he said, “you know there are only a few outcomes here: one, they will see his bag or skeleton in the X-ray and catch us, we’ll get arrested for messing with security and we’ll have to flush the fish. Two, he may die instantly in a blaze of glory from the X-rays. Three, he’ll miraculously survive and we’ll smuggle him onto the plane and pray that he survives the exposure.” I shuddered and nodded.

We took a deep breath and proceeded. We loaded our things onto the belt before the X-ray machine. The second part of Trey’s plan was to cause a diversion. He purposely left his laptop in his backpack and just as my fishpants bag was going through the machine he yelled “Stop! Gosh! I’m sorry- I forgot my laptop. Can you grab my bag?”

Through huffs and sighs, Trey’s bag was removed and mine sailed through. Once we were past the scanner, Trey and I grabbed our things and ran for the gate, eager to find the first bathroom we could to see if MJ was intact. On the way, we passed by the original security checkpoint we had tried to go through earlier.

The agents were huddled together and naturally recognized us. “What did you do with the fish?” they asked, “What did you do with the fish!?”

Sensing a chance for comeuppance, Trey clenched his jaw and assumed a stone-cold gaze. He said, with great dramatics, “You know what … we flushed him. We flushed him because you made us. You killed my girlfriend’s fish. [grand pause]No, you made HER kill her fish … Happy holidays.”

I started sobbing again. Trey gave the TSA agents one last steely gaze. We turned and walked away. I smelled an Oscar.

Now in the restroom, I faced impending doom once again. I picked through my bag and found the familiar plastic. I pulled it out, and miraculously MJ was still alive!

Maybe it was God, maybe it was the corduroy, but someone wanted my fish to live. I ran and bought a doughnut from a coffee kiosk, placing MJ on the bottom of the paper bag I was given and the pastry on top. Trey and I walked to our gate and checked in. A few passengers had witnessed our role in the La Guardia Christmas Security Spectacular and asked us what happened to the fish. We stuck to our story and told them he was gone.

The flight was full. I sat between two men who seemed intrigued by the brown paper bag I gently cradled in my lap the whole flight.

An hour and a half later, we were in Pittsburgh. We departed the people-mover and ran to the bathroom one final time to see if MJ was OK. He was.

Two terminals, baggage claim, and a car ride later, we were home.

As I write this, I sit with a cat in my lap and my fish, whom I have aptly renamed X-ray, swimming contentedly in his glass-beaded bowl. And even though my actions may send Homeland Security reeling, I really don’t care.

Honestly, they have bigger fish to fry.

Postscript, November 2020:

I can’t believe it’s been almost 17 years since MJ the fish made his death-defying trip through security.

This article was published in 2003, when TSA and national security was a hotter button issue than it is now. My story received lots of attention, and I was contacted by many news outlets to comment further on my ordeal. A few days after publication I received a call from a higher-up at a certain security agency, asking me to stop talking to the press about my story.

He asked what it was going to take for me to cease commenting on my tale. After giving it a think, I called him back and simply asked for safe passage for me and my fish when it was time to return to NYC for my spring semester in 6 weeks. He agreed, and I held up my part of the bargain.

The weeks slipped by in a holiday haze, and soon it was time to plan our return to New York. Trey and I fly standby, so we tend to book our flights at the last minute, based on loads and weather. We did just that a day or so before our return. I figured TSA had forgotten all about us by then and fell asleep the night before our flight anxious about our return flight with MJ.

The next day we arrived at the airport, once again 4 bags each and a fish in hand, and proceeded to security. As we stepped into line, a man approached me.

“Ms. Hayhurst?” he said.

I nodded. He took MJ’s bag out of my arms and walked him through security while Trey and I were screened normally. He was waiting for me on the other side of the machine, bag in hand. He handed me the fish and walked away.

And there you have it. We flew back to New York uneventfully and MJ went on to live for another year or so before meeting his aquatic maker on his terms, peacefully in his bowl.

So let this update be a reminder to flap your fins and keep on swimming. But only in water.

Up until this point I’ve kept an outwardly sunny, positive outlook on surgical recovery. I think it’s key to healing well and fast. It’s not a façade, but it’s also not truthful to tell you that everything about recovery has been easy.

I had a meltdown today and I want to tell you about it. It started brewing yesterday at my first post-op doctor’s appointment.

This visit was with one of my surgeon’s PA’s, not the man himself. And let me tell you, if my surgeon is super liberal about recovery, this gentleman was as conservative as they come. This was Maddow v. Coulter stuff.

The PA said my scar was looking good, despite a reaction I’d been having to the surgical strips. I told him about some new and concerning nerve pain I’d been having in my legs. He said it was probably just an irritation as things settled and healed, but there was a possibility that a piece of hardware had jostled and was poking something it shouldn’t be.

This possibility was NOT something I wanted to hear.

Mr. Coulter also said that if he was in charge, I’d be in “time out” (my modified life) and in my brace 24/7 for 6 MONTHS. This sentence was a far cry from my surgeon’s claims of “you’ll be running in a week! Totally healed in two!”

As with all extremes, I’m sure the truth lies somewhere in the middle. I’m sure somewhere between 2 weeks and 6 months is the sweet spot where my spine will fuse and life will open up again for me. I’ll be freed from time out and mom will give me all my privileges back.

But until then, a bit of a grey area.

Here’s something I wish I would have known prior to my surgery that wasn’t fully explained. This may be of assistance to anyone in a similar boat as me.

I was under the impression that the fusion I was receiving happened ON the operating table. That the spacers and the screws and the stitches would be drilled in and we could set it and forget it like a spinal crock pot.

Not so. The fusion happens NOT on the operating table, but in the weeks and months following. It’s happening right now as I sit braceless (sorry Coulter) in this chair. It’s happening while I walk around NYC. It’s happening while I eat cookies and fumble through auditions and watch my friends soar in their summer shows.

The bones were broken, and they need to heal and grow AROUND my hardware and ON TOP of my hardware and BETWEEN my hardware and every other preposition you know.

The metal puts everything in place, and then the bones take over. In fact, after the fusion is complete the hardware is useless, and can even be removed! (More on that later)

This process can take a few months. It can take six. It can take twelve. I’m young and active so I’m probably on the shorter end, but you don’t want to mess this up. It’s a weird, silent healing. I feel pretty great, but I can’t plow forward and risk damaging the work.

This leaves me feeling kind of lost. You know me; I’m a control freak, I’m a planner, and I don’t like esoteric prognoses. (Remember the whole naming thing?) So I stepped back and made a list of the things I did know following my visit:

The good news: no more bandages, full freedom to shower as usual, high heels are ok unless they hurt. (Clearly Coulter has never worn heels. They always hurt.)

The bad news: at least four more weeks of “time out”, as much back brace as I could handle, an unlikely but tiny possibility of nerve damage from an out of place piece of hardware, and a round of steroids to manage the irritation with hopes it will go away.

Steroids. I hate them. I understand their use and *wow* are they powerful, but if you’ve joined me on this journey you know that the steroids prescribed for this kind of neurological pain are NASTY. Dexamethasone makes me a Hulked-out monster with no control of my ever-vacillating emotions.

***Note from the peeping editor in 10/2020: see Dexamethasone re: Trump and his COVID-19 medications. All of his hysterics made complete sense to me for that week. And that week only.***

I’ve been on them four times and every time it’s the same. I emerge from a cloud of ashy haze at the end of the taper week wondering what horror movie I was just a part of.

So, ready to hear about my breakdown?

With the PA’s words ringing in my ears and the steroids coursing through my veins, I began facing the fact that a longer recovery than I anticipated was in my future.

Here’s the vain thing I need to admit about recovery; it makes me feel awful not to be feminine and sprightly. I hate needing to ask for help. I hate not being strong. I like to be a sparkly girl who can also carry her heavy boxes and scoop the cat litter.

I feel ugly and bulky in my brace. While my cane is AMAZING and I’m overjoyed to have it, the fact that I’m unsteady, stumbly, and ungraceful wears on me.

My scar is small, but the surgical area is raised, like a small hump. It may go down, but part of that hump is my hardware. And because there’s not much stuff between my spine and my back, the hardware may POKE OUT when I sit or bend in the future.

It may poke out so much that it needs to be removed. Like reverse the drill and take it out. Spackle it up and hang a new picture.

I can’t work out, I feel not in charge of my body, and I’m emotionally eating. I’m not always eating because I’m hungry, but because I’m sad. Or angry. Or bored.

I woke up early this morning to get some work done before I went to an audition. An audition I really didn’t want to go on.

It wasn’t the project- it was for a theater I’d be overjoyed to work for and a role I love, but when you’re feeling emotionally unstable in your bathroom it’s super hard to imagine being vulnerable in front of strangers for an audition.

The last thing I wanted to do was put on a dress, do my hair, and present myself as a person I really don’t feel like right now. It felt inauthentic.

I was wheel-spinning through those emotions this morning in the bathroom while I reached for my steroids, which I have to take. As I reached, I tripped a little. Because I’m unsteady. And when I tripped my hand slipped. And instead of grabbing the bottle, I slapped the glass shelf in our medicine cabinet and it flipped forward, shooting all of its contents into the sink.

I surveyed the damage. The steroids were fine, my contact case was fine, Trey’s brush was fine, but my brand new bottle of Chloe perfume, one of the FEW things that brings me feminine joy right now, was shattered. $75 of brand new perfume was draining down the sink.

A tangent about the significance of the perfume: for my birthday last December I asked Trey to get me a new bottle of perfume, his choice. Instead, he chose six little sample vials of scents he thought we’d both enjoy and gave them to me in little envelopes listing the notes, name, and ingredients.

I was to use one vial a month for six months, then on my half birthday I’d tell him my favorite and he’d purchase the bottle. What a gem, and so fun to try a new perfume every month!

When the six months were over, I selected Roses de Chloe. It was a rose-heavy scent that stuck around but wasn’t obtrusive.

We both loved it and he gave me the bottle (a little late) on my opening night of Legally Blonde at Cortland Repertory Theater; June 18th, 2019.

It was late, mind you, because Amazon lost his package. He had ordered it to arrive on time for June 4th, but one of those freak delays happened and the box was nowhere to be found. He rushed to Sephora before we opened and bought a bottle to compensate for the Amazon drama, for which he was refunded.

So I’m watching this lovely gift from my husband, a symbol of my femininity, pour down the drain while the bottle sits cracked in two. The perfume got ALL over my medication, which seemed like a terrible joke. Now every time I took a pill that I didn’t want to be taking in the first place, I’d smell my Chloe and remember this moment.

Well this was finally too much for the Hulk (me) and I broke down. I cried over the sink. I cried feeding the cat. I cried getting dressed for an audition I didn’t want to go on. It was ugly.

On the way out, back brace on and cane in hand, I said goodbye to Trey, who was still in bed. He could tell something was amiss. I was running late and didn’t want to risk more tears on my freshly made-up face, so I said we’d talk about it when I got home.

I went to the audition. It was good. I saw some friends there who really made me smile.

I got coffee with a friend on the way home. It filled up my tank in a lovely way. I had a snack, which we all know is the only thing that really cures a breakdown.

I got home and told Trey the story of what had happened. I naturally began sobbing again, telling him how cosmically unfair it felt to have one of my last vestiges of femininity literally pour over my steroids and down the drain. That was too poetic for even me. I was so tired of feeling like a lump, and so scared of not knowing when I wouldn’t.

Trey listened, wiped my tears, and then disappeared into our bedroom. “Well, he’s finally quit,” I thought.

Instead, he emerged with a small white box. Of Roses de Chloe.

The lost Amazon package had randomly arrived with no explanation or fanfare the DAY before my breakdown. Trey had picked it up from the doorman and hidden it away for a future birthday present.

He gently put the box in my hands. An immediate, free replacement of the femininity I had washed down the drain. A sign that all things come back around in their time. A notion that the universe is always looking out, even when you’re at your worst.

He helped me throw away the broken bottle and we put the new one back in the cabinet. Like nothing ever happened.

Through tears and emotions and drugs and questions, if you keep the faith and hold the course, trying to be as authentically YOU as you can, and honoring the moments when you can’t, the universe and its sweet (sometimes Amazon) angels on the ground will take care of you.

So I’ll keep taking my rose-scented steroids and keep living with rose-colored glasses, because that is authentically me. For now.

Oh, P.S.- I got the job.

It’s not lost on me that the last time I wrote a public post was while in recovery from my first spine surgery over two years ago.

I love to write, I love to reflect, and I love to note observations about our crazy world and its passengers, but writing requires quiet time. It requires focus. It requires passive stillness that I usually don’t allow myself unless I’m forced to, like that time I found myself flat on my back in North Carolina with a reeling head and healing back.

So here we are again, reeling and healing, so it seems only right that my fingers gravitated to the coffee-stained keys of my laptop. But this time I’m convalescing in the most inaccessible city in the world as opposed to the lush, slow beauty of the south.

When I was hobbling around NY before surgery number one with my cane, I became so sympathetic to the plight of the injured and handicapped in Manhattan. If you can’t pick up, keep up, or step up- you’re lost.

There’s never enough escalators, elevators, cabs, or wide sidewalks. Tripping hazards abound. You have to actually follow the street crossing indicators instead of jaywalking. Everything takes longer. Eyes up and gird your loins.

It’s much the same this time around. I’m using a cane again, mostly for stability when I stand still, and wearing a required back brace when I’m outside my home. This is to supposedly prevent damage to the three-inch screws gelling into my spine should I fall, get smacked, or accidentally jaywalk.

Even with these unfortunate accessories, I found myself getting jostled and bumped while on the subway or walking in a crowd. I wanted to yell, “This brace is not a waist trainer! This cane is not fashion! I am not Lady Gaga!”

So I took a gold Sharpie paint pen and scribbled on the back of my brace “Just had spine surgery. Please be gentle. Smiley face.” This actually worked to give me a wider berth and subway seating because now people are genuinely sympathetic or think I’m insane. I’m fine with both.

All in all, this recovery has been gentler and kinder than my previous surgery. It was all planned. I handpicked my surgeon. I had time to mentally and physically prepare myself and my schedule. And while the specifics of what went on inside my back are much more graphic this time around, a minimally invasive technique was used and no muscles were cut in the pursuit of my spinal fusion. This is key, because muscle repair is usually the longest and most painful part of any surgical recovery.

Just a tiny recap for those who are joining us for Act II of my back-ventures; my first surgery was an unexpected and extreme emergency to save my spinal cord (and bowels!) from the disc that was strangling them.

The good folks at NYU Langone took a conservative approach for Act I. They cut through my muscles and removed the portion of the disc that was causing the trauma, leaving a small 2-inch scar on my back.

My rehab was hard because not only was I recovering from the surgery itself, but also healing from the nerve damage that had wreaked havoc on my body from belly button to foot.

I healed incredibly well all things considered, and I regained feeling and motion in every part of my body except my left foot and ankle. That’s dead and will be forever. But our bodies are amazing recalibrators, and while I still can’t balance very well on my left leg, I’m able to walk and dance and move with no visible handicap.

About a year and a half post-surgery, however, my back started to hurt again. It was a deep, gnawing pain. Getting out of bed took ten minutes and every ounce of energy I could muster.

Scans showed that the portion of disc that was left behind had herniated out again, and without any cushioning my vertebra were grinding into each other like a mortar and pestle. It was time for a fusion, to separate and stabilize that area of my body. It would give me back the half an inch or so I’d lost in height, eliminate the pain, and to help me get my life back. I hadn’t run in over a year. I hadn’t picked something up off the floor in the same. I’m still not wearing underwear. (That’s by choice.)

So now we cut (ha) to take two, August 5th 2019, at the Mountain Surgery Center in Orange, NJ. I was wheeled back to the OR around 11:30am and chatted with the anesthesiologist about my eyelash serum (Grande Lash MD, available on Amazon. You will not regret it.).

The surgical assistant gave me time to look at all the metal pieces that were shortly going to be my forever friends per my request, and then I remember waking up to a sweet nurse handing me my clothes and a protein bar for the ride home. Now that I’m thinking back- I didn’t even finish it. What a waste of a Quest Bar. I was on my couch in NYC with thai food delivered by 4:30pm.

Right now I actually feel pretty good. Deceptively good. My muscles may be fine, but the real work is going on quietly in my spine while the spacer and screws settle in their new home and my bones grow around them like ivy up a brick wall. This part takes time, and you don’t want to muck it up.

My surgeon said that when he got into my spine a piece of paper couldn’t have fit between my two vertebrae. I needed the room, and they had to make it.

So although I feel great, I have to abide by the same strict rules I had for my first recovery, only this time I’m a little unsure for how long. Some articles say two weeks, some say six months. I’m hoping for somewhere pleasantly in between for me to begin running, jumping, skating, dancing and all the other gerunds I love to do.

I feel unworthy of the wash of love and help and guidance I have every day and for the friends and family that stepped up YET AGAIN in my time of need. I’m so lucky.

I’ve been living alone for this first week post-op because Trey is upstate directing a show. My mom was with me for two days that I don’t really remember much of, but Mama and the Oxy hit the road on day 3 and I’ve been pretty cognizant ever since. You all know I treasure pooping more than being pain-free.

So when I’m not trying to avoid manholes and tourists, I’ve been reading, watching, strolling, visiting, and trying to clock some very still “cement time” for my curing spine.

During some of this cement time I decided I should name the metal pieces doing the good work inside my back. I wanted to give them their due. I wanted to empower them to do their job, but gently.

Originally I was told that only two screws would be used, but in the end my doctor used four because good old L5 and S1 were dusty broads. I kept joking that when they finally cut me open bats were going to fly out of my spine. Or the sands of Agrabah. Or Larry King.

So back to my task. I have five pieces of metal to name. A difficult job indeed. If it was two pieces, easy; Milo and Otis. If it was three, easier; Marie, Toulouse, and Berlioz (the kittens from The Aristocats). If it was four, easiest: Samantha, Carrie, Charlotte, and Miranda. But Five.

I’ve had a long time to think long and hard about anything that needs to be thought long and hard about this week, so I decided to think long and hard about how my life-long obsession with naming things came about and hope that would guide me to my five little answers.

Growing up, we were a family that named our cars (Ollie the Volvo, Toby Toyota), named our homes (Little Blue, Peaceful Acres), named our favorite trees, and even named our scars. Good things and bad deserved to be recognized and honored with names.

All of my toys and every stuffed animal had a name, even if half of them were Brownie. Inanimate objects frequently got nicknames of endearment if they didn’t have a complete moniker of their own. (‘I’m trying to turn on Home Improvement, have you seen Mote-Mote?’)

When it came to naming things that naturally demanded names, like pets, I was always deeply concerned with making the right choice. I usually passed the duty on to my parents, with the exception of my first and current cat.

Jenny, my first cat, was named after my favorite babysitter. The natural choice for a four year old. Henry, my current cat, was named after the eighth British king following a brave battle with a cockroach. This sucker was almost his size and had been taunting our Washington Heights apartment for days. Trey and I had dubbed the bug Cardinal Wolsey for his pesky invasions, and so when our wee nameless trash kitten fought him to the death, there was no better moniker.

My parents did a great job helping me name things. We named the things we loved with as much fervor as we named the things that scared us.

You see, when you give a noun a name you can give it power or take it away. You can show respect. You can show ownership. You can show care, gratitude, and even deference.

Or when you finally call something nameless and esoteric by its name; an illness, a feeling, a bank balance; you gain knowledge. You take away the power of the mystery and move forward with a plan. The knowing, the naming, puts you in control for better or for worse.

That’s why I’ve always felt giving things names has served me in both regards.

When I named my steely blue car Claire, after the strong-willed, ice-cold protagonist in House of Cards, I wanted to endow her with strength, with power in the elements and speed on the road. Despite her size and mine, I wanted to be brave and safe when we were together.

When I slam the breaks on a nameless rental car I don’t feel emotions, but when I slam the breaks on Claire I usually apologize. Mostly because I’ll be the one footing the bill for new pads in a year, but also because when we name things and endow them with respect, we treat them better. They last longer. They serve you well.

When I finally went to the emergency room in May 2017, a visit that quickly lead to my first surgery, I was told I had Cauda Equina Syndrome because of my severely herniated disc. All of my pain, all of my ineffective remedies, all of my worry and fear finally had a name. And we moved forward. Just like now.

Giving inanimate objects emotional qualities may be strange, but it helps me be kinder, gentler, and more understanding with my things, my pets, my home, my life.

So back to the task at hand- the Naming of the Screws. (Shakespeare would have liked that joke I think. Or my Dad will.)

The inevitable answer came so quickly and so full circle that I was startled.

When I name something I usually start with my favorite things- characters, movies, plays, books.

My favorite book is The Neverending Story by Michael Ende. It always has been. I loved the story as a child for its outward fantasy and because I thought Atreyu was a babe and the Childlike Empress was the EPITOME of beauty.

As I grew up, the story revealed itself to me as one of self-preservation, of courage, of risk and reward and kindness and the soul we leave behind, which is not our corpse or a spooky ghost, but the joy we give to the world. Our soul is actually the joy we leave behind in the world. I mean come on now.

I’ll wax poetic on the Nothing and Morla the Ancient One another time, but if you recall The Neverending Story, Bastian’s entire literary quest involves him NAMING the Childlike Empress in order to save Fantastica. He must give her a name. Only he can do it.

When he finally cries out her name (Moon Child, because apparently 12-year-old Bastian is a hippie and Carol isn’t going to cut it), the Nothing retreats. The world is saved. He names the Empress and that act alone makes the scary, uncertain, horrifying unknown powerless.

Sound familiar?

I truly hadn’t put together until now that my penchant for naming was so closely tied to that of my favorite novel. I was agog that I had wasted years in therapy without flicking on this lightbulb.

With this knowledge, the task was easy and left me feeling surprisingly emotional. The large spacer in my back is the Auryn, an amulet central to the story’s plot. It belongs to the Childlike Empress, and all of its power must flow through her. It’s a symbol of fantasy and reality, protection and rebirth.

The four screws are Bastian (tweenage hippie with brains), Atreyu (babetown USA), Artex (reminder to STAY OUT OF THE SWAMPS OF SADNESS you dumb pony), and Falcor (because I want that stoner luckdragon vibe in my spine.)

You realize what all this naming makes me, right?

So there you have it. My dreams have come true and the circle is complete. I’m using my fancy new Auryn spacer to channel the strength of the realist, the adventurer, the emotional, and the unicorn-dragon-dog.

THIS Childlike Empress feels saved and ready for her sequel. Michael Ende may not have written that book, but some pretty badass 80’s film writers did and I encourage you all to use it as your lodestar. For the soundtrack alone.

Again, a wash of gratitude to all of you reading this, helping me regain my footing. It allows me to throw joy into this world with abandon, stillness aside, and lean into this next exciting chapter of my life.

Do you remember the Walt Whitman poem “I Hear America Singing?” (I hear America singing, the varied carols I hear/Each singing what belongs to him or her and to none else/Singing with open mouths their strong melodious songs.)

I remember singing a 10-part choral arrangement of Walt’s ditty in high school choir circa 2002 and analyzing the text as a personal anthem for doing one’s best at all times, actively contributing to both personal success and the success of our nation.

These days I think we’d refer to this sentiment as “living your best life.”

We’re all constantly encouraged to have a plan and stick to it, to maximize every minute, to exercise willpower, be our best selves, and make all that hard work appear effortless, especially on social media.

But what happens when you focus so intently on YOUR voice, YOUR plans, YOUR ideas. “Him and her and no one else.” What happens when you start to miss the beauty of the journey, of the unexpected, of the things meant for you that you couldn’t even dream up if you tried? These are the things the universe sings, and I’m not sure Walt took them into account. Or took into account what can happen when you completely stop listening, like I did.

I spent the first six months of 2017 on a hyper-planned, selfishly directed war path for personal maintenance and success, and ended up ignoring some road blocks along the way that ultimately led to me at the mercy of New York’s most talented surgeons, hoping to regain feeling and function in my lower body.

I’ve always tried to live by the motto “don’t shout until it’s time to shout. Then SHOUT.” And that’s exactly what the universe served me.

So here, in three parts, is how six months of putting my cosmic headphones and horse blinders on ended with me in the hospital having emergency spine surgery.

Part 1: She whispers

In January 2016, something bad happened to me. And that’s ok. Bad things happen to people every day. While I chose not to discuss this particular thing in public forums, what DID happen compelled me to change. It made me realize that there were things about my life that I was unhappy with. And I decided to change them.

This started with taking a long, hard look at my ever-present food compulsions, my physical activity, and general health. I had long been ignoring the fact that I was addicted to sugar, an emotional eater, and hadn’t really committed to giving my body the kind of physical release it needed to go to sleep tired and wake up refreshed.

I was having residual knee pain from an onstage injury, a bout of plantar fasciitis, and felt unable to compete in my industry as well as I wanted to as far as dancing and auditioning went.

I started using a food and activity tracker, working out regularly, and watching what I ate for the first time in a long time. I began falling in love with barre workouts, along with my usual running and cardio routine. The trauma of what I went through also motivated me, gave me something I could control. I had a purpose, focus.

Then, while on a contract in Sacramento that summer, I was introduced to Tim Ferris’s Slow Carb Diet by a castmate. I did my research and realized that this was a potential solution to truly kick my sugar addiction to the curb. I adopted the plan and its principles on June 26th and REALLY enjoyed the way I felt on the program.

It was the first time (of a million tries) that I felt excited to feed myself. I was excited about the food I was putting in my body. I wasn’t deprived. I won’t delve into the plan much more than that, but it was the longest I’ve ever stuck to a lifestyle change. It felt simple and right.

Everything seemed to be heading in the right direction. Then I had an out of town gig in Texas that led right into a holiday show in my hometown, and I inevitably put on a few pounds of barbecue and festive treat weight.

The panic set in. I decided to fully recommit to my fitness as soon as the holidays were over, which coincided with me beginning a contract in Rhode Island. I had my own apartment, a structured schedule, and figured it was the perfect way to get back on track.

I was playing the lead in Born Yesterday, a political comedy that resonated deeply with me and gave me the opportunity to live on my own and embody a character who truly gave me joy and glee every day.

During rehearsals and performances, I was incredibly nervous and incredibly fulfilled all at the same time. It had been a long time since I’d been in a straight play, let alone a lead character in one. I displaced that pressure into maintaining an incredibly strict diet and workout regimen. That I could control.

So now I was following my slow-carb diet, but not eating enough. I was portion controlling and meal planning with fervor, along with working out two hours every day. I would do an hour of barre in my living room, then drive to the YMCA and run for an hour on the treadmill, memorizing lines as I ran. Then I’d bundle up and head into a full day of rehearsal while consuming around 800 calories a day.

I was also over-planning my days and activities rather than giving myself any rest or room for spontaneity. My trusty day planner looked like a presidential agenda; endless errands and to-do’s and workouts and things that truly didn’t need to occupy as much brain space as they did.

Then came my first warning. It should come as no surprise that during the second to last week of our run, I got sick. And I never get sick.

It’s a special skill that I’m proud of; I get sick once every few years and never for long. I attribute it to being a chronic nail/cuticle biter- I’m constantly ingesting tiny bits of bacteria and city slime, so my body has built up a remarkable resistance to illness. Makes sense, right?

In any case, my other castmates had been sick and I finally caught it with a vengeance. I lost my voice, in an incredibly vocal show with no microphones, and I was weak, snotty, feverish, and sore all over.

Nevertheless, I persisted. But in a bad way. I loaded myself up with drugs; steroids, Zicam, Dayquil, Mucinex, ibuprofen, the works. I limped through my last few days of shows, kept working out, kept driving into New York for auditions, and kept battling the winter weather in the name of perseverance.

Trey came to visit me while I was sick and I had our perfect day off planned to the hilt (of course), but Mother Nature had other plans and pummeled the northeast with a huge snowstorm.

I should have taken that as a sign to FINALLY slow down and enjoy being snowed in with my honey. But even sick, on a day off, with my husband snuggled in my bed and the snowstorm looming, I got up at 6am to get my prerequisite workouts in before the gym was shut down at 9am for the blizzard.

When my show closed, I drove back to the city that night, in another blizzard, and dove straight back into NY actor life with three auditions the next day. I went and went and went, loving the social reunions with my friends and working out without fail.

It took a long, long time to feel physically healthy again. Like 2 months. It made my auditions subpar and I felt lucky to have booked any summer work at all. But taking time off wasn’t an option.

The workouts had become a coping mechanism, the meal planning therapeutic. The Yelping, the seeking, the planning all helped me feel control in my life; control that I felt I’d lost with my trauma, and control I grasped for in our rejection-prone and unstable industry.

You may be sitting back and asking, “But what’s the end game here? Where’s the finish line?” Well, I had one.

Trey and I had a long-planned trip to England and France set for April 10–21, 2017, over our wedding anniversary. A true pot of gold I was pushing towards.

This is a bad habit of mine. I always find myself setting finish lines to get me through times of stress or discomfort. Which was all the time at this point. “If I can just get to opening night…“ “When we get back from Texas it’ll be better…“ “Just get me through March…” Just another example of plowing through the present in the name of some grand finale that usually wasn’t so grand at all.

But I made it to the end of my audition season rainbow, and with bags under my eyes and under the seats of our 777, we took off for London. I had a guidebook in hand and a highly curated, Yelp-approved itinerary that would make your head spin.

It was a week later in Paris, most romantic city of them all, that the universe spoke a little louder to me via a most unromantic courier; ISIS.

Part 2: She speaks (or, ISIS does)

I stayed on this rigorous carousel of daily workouts, audition after audition, work, and dedicated/necessary social time all the way up to Trey and my’s departure for Europe in mid-April. We left on April 10th and spent 6 days with family in the southern part of England, where I continued to run every day along craggy beaches and cobblestone streets. Then we set off for London and Paris solo.

I micromanaged our way through the cities, walking 15–20 miles and collapsing in a heap at the end of long, beautiful, packed days. I don’t regret the way we spent our time, I only wish we had more of it.

Trey and I spent our last day in France (also our anniversary) at the Palace of Versailles, a true bucket-list destination for me. He practically had to drag me off the grounds. I could have spent eight more hours exploring and appreciating the opulent, curated beauty.

We took the train back to our hotel and gussied up for our final dinner, which was to be a meal for the ages. We had eaten sparingly throughout the day at Versailles and we were HUNGRY.

I had purchased a shirt from H&M on the Champs Elysees the day prior that I wanted to return, and that evening was our only chance to do so with an early flight back to JFK the next morning. It was in the general direction of our restaurant, so we decided to make a pit stop along the way and then continue to dinner, with a long, luxurious walk home from the Latin Quarter to follow. Off we went.

We were strolling in the golden hour sunshine, snapping photos along the way, crossing the Champs at Rue de Bassano and turning right towards the H&M. If you’ve never been, the Champs Elysees is like if Times Square and Fifth Avenue had a baby; bright, shiny, opulent, tree-lined, sidewalked commerce.

We were just about to cross Rue de Berri when we heard a loud popping noise behind us. Being jaded New Yorkers, loud noises don’t really faze us. We’re immune to the sounds of trucks running over water bottles and construction hub-bub. It wasn’t until 10–12 pops followed in the distinct pattern of an automatic weapon that our hackles went up.

The following happened in approximately 20 seconds, but in my memory it retains an almost “underwater” type feel.

Trey and I looked at each other and immediately said the same word; “Run.” We didn’t even take the time to turn around and see the origins of the gunfire. If we had, we would have seen a man shooting at police officers not more than 30 feet away from us, killing one and injuring others, including two civilians.

We took off running at the sound of the gunfire and our instinct was to flee and get low. We ran into the nearest building, a four-story Zara clothing store, and started running down, down, down the levels.

Confused shoppers on the lower floors wondered why a stream of people were flooding in, screaming. We hit an escalator where a man, woman, and small child were meandering. I remember Trey yelling, “pick him up and RUN.”

We made it to the bottom level of the store and paced around, looking for shelter like feral cats. At this point we didn’t know that the sound was only gunfire, or how many gunman there were. We wondered, was there a bomb? Were there people entering the stores with weapons in hand?

A salesgirl finally opened a supply closet on the bottom floor and about 20 of us piled in, barricading the door with a clothing rack. We hushed a crying baby and Trey calmed another salesgirl who was having a full-on panic attack.

It felt like the closet was vibrating with the sound of pounding hearts. Having survived a terrible bombing incident only five months prior, it was clear that the native Parisians were incredibly on edge and devastated.

After about 20 minutes, the door opened and another Zara employee indicated that we could leave the closet. We were so far underground that none of us had service on our cellphones. We cautiously slunk out of the closet in search of information.

Paris had revealed itself to be a mostly bilingual city. We had done our due diligence and learned a dozen or so useful French phrases (“I’m sorry, we don’t speak French. Where is the bathroom? Red wine, please. No, we didn’t vote for him.”). We always initiated conversations in French, but most of the time our accents gave us away and we were responded to in very kind, courteous English.

That was surprisingly not the case in Zara, where we found ourselves among no other Americans or bilingual tourists. There were a few locals who spoke incredibly broken English, so the next hour on the ground floor became a bizarre game of telephone.

The police would shout something into the store, the manager would shout something to the employees, the employees would descend the stairs and address the crowd, gathered scared and signal-less on the bottom floor, and we would ask someone to translate. By the time we got the fractured information it might as well have been a recipe for crème brulee.

Around hour two we felt courageous enough to head up one flight of stairs in hope of getting some cell signal. By that point CNN had started reporting on the incident and we learned there was only one gunman, who was now dead, and that police had closed down the whole Avenue and were searching each and every building for accomplices and explosive devices.

We had my cellphone connected to international data, and were able to text our parents and put a brief post on Facebook. The Zara employees were amazing; bringing us drinks and making sure the children and elderly were tended to. Between their actions and those of the police officers we encountered, we felt safe and taken care of. They were truly kind, respectful, and efficient in the midst of it all.

The hours ticked by and we slowly moved upward, finally to the ground floor. It was dark now, but the street was aglow with police cars, vans, lights, and activity.

A SWAT team in full body armor swarmed around the building to our right. We were able to see just how close we had been to the shooting, with the first yellow evidence flag mere feet from the door.

We had long given up on the idea of making it to our dinner, so we passed the time napping on the floor and mindlessly browsing through the racks of clothes.

We were a very diverse group of captives. We shared cellphone chargers and even sang “Happy Birthday” over the loudspeaker to one of the employees who was missing her big night out.

Around hour five, a very important looking group of police officers and detectives came through the revolving doors and asked anyone who had actually seen the shooting to come forward for questioning. The rest of us would finally be released.

Burning with hunger and fatigue, we were lead out the storeroom entrance into a back alley. At this point it was almost two in the morning, and the Champs was still locked down.

Our hotel was on the other side of the street and we weren’t allowed to cross. Our only choice was to walk an avenue east and then continue north, around the circumference of the Arc de Triomphe, then continue down the other side to our hotel. It’d be like having to walk from Times Square East up 7th Avenue and around Columbus Circle to walk back down 9th Avenue to 42nd street on the western side.

We scoured the streets for any open cafes or restaurants, but unlike New York, Paris on a weeknight is definitely a city that sleeps. Everything was closed.

Near our hotel we found ONE small bodega that was closing up for the night, and the shop owner let us dash in and grab some cheap wine, packaged cheese, bread, and sliced salami before he shut the door.

We finally made it back to our hotel around 3am and warily ate our anniversary bodega feast, showered, and packed our bags. We had to leave for the airport in a few hours.

We took a cab to Charles de Gaulle, still in a daze, and spent the last of our Euros in Duty-Free on snacks and gifts. We landed in JFK shortly after.

One of the hardest parts for me was because of the way our final night unfolded, I never really got to say goodbye to the vacation that I had so aggressively/lovingly planned and looked forward to. We were whisked up in the momentum of the shooting, raced to the airport, and then rather unceremoniously ejected back onto the streets of New York.

I spent the next few days pondering that, as well as the rush of emotions I felt when we first ran away from the gunfire. I know there are so many people who have experienced much more traumatizing incidents, who have seen things that can’t be unseen, but it was the first time in my genuinely sheltered and privileged life that I had looked down the barrel of my own mortality.

As we were running down the escalator and pacing the bottom floor of Zara, I was truly thinking, “Is this how I go? Is this where it ends?” I felt the enormous realization that I didn’t want it to. This could not be the end of my story.

The next few weeks I was on edge. Now I jumped if a truck ran over a bottle. I tensed up when children ran towards me on the street. Even during a mild scene of terrorism in Groundhog Day the Musical my heart started pounding and my ears flushed red.

As a gal with a generally Pollyanna-like outlook on life, it was the first time the world had really fallen off its pedestal in my eyes. As someone used to walking through the streets of New York like an exclamation point, this was the first time I can remember walking the streets with wary caution. Like a question mark?

The feelings faded with time and therapy. You would think having gone through the event with my loved one, intact and together, I would have finally seen the signs to slow down. I should have appreciated that not only was Trey an absolute stalwart in the face of adversity, but that we were lucky to have each other and live in the relative safety of our Manhattan bubble.

We got to hop on a plane and fly away from the attack, but what about the families of those who were killed and injured? What about the city of Paris, which welcomed us with its beauty and kindness?

The horror of it all is that as I wrote this there have been so many other incidents of terrorism that ours is a distant news factoid.

I was contacted for interviews by a few news stations the day after the shooting- the day we returned to New York. When I asked if I could be interviewed the following day, we had just landed for Pete's sake, they inferred that by tomorrow our story would be moot. Onto the next. That’s what breaks my heart.

In any case, I continued on with everyday life, planning and working out, ignoring a new and growing pain in my body. I was obsessed with losing the three pounds I had put on in Europe. I ignored the universe’s cues to open my eyes, to express gratitude, to realize that everything can be taken in an instant.

So then she decided the only course of action was to quite literally knock my legs out from under me.

Part 3: She Shouts

So by this point I’ve ignored whispers (illness in February) and a stern talking to (terrorist attack). The universe was left with no other option than to shout. It was time to yell me off my hamster wheel.

I suppose there was a secret part of my heart that wanted something to sideline me; to break the activity/planning/pushing cycle without me having to actively make that choice. To not have to DECIDE to ease up on my workouts, my pace of life, my hyper-planning. And I must have had that intention humming through my veins because BOY did she devise a cease and desist I never could have dreamed of.

I had been battling lower back pain on and off since the previous October. I figured it was from incorrect posture in barre workouts, housework, or a myriad of other things. I’m a person who uses their body for recreation and profession, and most actors and dancers simply live with an undercurrent of pain somewhere. It’s a fact of life. We take ibuprofen and we move on.

It came in waves. The back pain would flare, I’d take some ibuprofen, maybe see the chiropractor, maybe get a massage, never skipping a workout. Eventually it would fade and I’d move on.

This ebb and flow continued, and I was unconcerned. My temporary goals and daily commitments were much more important than the idea of something being physically wrong with me.

When I was briefly put on steroids during Born Yesterday to get my voice back, I remember noticing how amazing my back felt when I ran, and now I know that the steroids were aiding whatever inflammation was occurring, or whatever beginnings of disc herniation were afoot.

On vacation with Trey in Europe I ran every morning and walked all day without incident, thanks to ibuprofen. As soon as we returned home, the pain got worse.

I started feeling the pain in my left leg as well as my back, which was new. I forced through it, looking ahead to the Pittsburgh Marathon Relay I had roped Trey, my Gusband Mike, and his partner Craig into that May.

The first week back from Europe was nagging and frustrating, but I powered through. May 1st was the last time I was able to workout, because after that the pain stopped me from moving. A truly gripping sensation would wrack me from hip to heel.

Bending over was a thing of the past. Getting up and sitting down were clumsy, painful affairs. I kept trying to do barre workouts, but could barely touch my knee, let alone my toes. I’m usually a pretty flexible gal, but I was unable to do even the simplest of movements.

The second week after Europe I put myself on the best version of bed rest I could muster, which meant I still walked as far as I could without hunching over and crying, and THEN I’d get in a cab.

I went to the chiropractor three times, acupuncture twice, and got a trigger point massage. No one was really able to diagnose me without an MRI, which I couldn’t afford to get because I was in between coverage periods on my union health insurance.

If you’re unfamiliar, insurance in our actor’s union is granted based on weeks worked. It’s categorically hard to get, but wonderful coverage if/when you have it. And I didn’t have it. I had a job beginning in late May at the Flat Rock Playhouse in North Carolina that would give me enough weeks to reinstate my coverage.

Even as I was doing my best to rest and living my life in 300 ft. increments, I just assumed a miracle would occur. It was all going to go away.

I was composing the Facebook status in my head proudly stating that I had HEALED myself and was able to run that marathon relay after all. I pictured my team and I, medals in hand, beers in belly, relishing our experience.

When it became painfully clear that running 11 miles was not in the cards for me, telling the boys and backing out of the marathon was one of the hardest things I’ve ever done. I felt like such a woos, such a failure. They were incredibly understanding, of course. But I still felt like I had let them all down.

It was at the end of week two post-vacation that the numbness began. It was a creeping, tingling, sometimes searing sensation on my left pelvis, hip, hamstring, and down to my foot. Then it began interfering with my bowel function.

I would get up to go to the bathroom and be peeing down my leg by the time I made it to the toilet. I had no ability to bear down when it was time to poop. I would just sit on the toilet and wait for something to happen. If you know me at all you know how critical pooping is to my general mood and happiness, so it was only THEN that I was persuaded to go to the emergency room. Remember, I’m uninsured. I’m assuming no matter what occurs I’ll be saddled with a five-figure bill.

I’ll spare you a long retelling of my hospital stay, but the short version is that the staff, doctors, nurses, and surgeons at NYU Langone gave me an incredible level of care. I hobbled in sobbing at about 10am, was immediately brought back to the emergency unit, and clawed my way into an MRI 30 minutes later.

The surgeons were prepping an operating room by the time I left the MRI. I was shown photos and told I had a fully and dangerously herniated disc in between my L5 and S1 vertebrae that had completely compressed my nerves, causing something called Cauda Equina syndrome. Google that shit. It’s scary.

I was on an operating table just a few hours later. I walked out of the ER, smelly and beaming, 26 hours after I hobbled in.

The hospital food was decent. Trey was a godsend. I cried a lot. I was up and walking pain-free an hour after my surgery. I didn’t sleep a wink. My surgeon was super attractive, and I left his Sharpie signature on my back (done for identity and safety reasons) as long as I could. Total neurosurgery fangirl.

The best part of my hospital stay was undoubtedly when Roxie, a social worker, paid me a visit before my discharge. She was there to talk to me about my alcohol habits.

The night before, right before bed and HIGH as a kite on steroids and pain meds, a nurse had appeared in my room and asked me hundreds of personal questions about my lifestyle and living situation. I let Richard Rockage answer most of them for me, which was my first mistake.

When asked how many drinks I usually consumed a week, I believe I answered “around four.” Nothing to scoff at, yes? And let’s be real; under times of vacation or duress, you might as well triple that number.

Apparently, New York (BRUNCH CAPITAL OF THE WORLD. COCKTAIL KING. SWEET LADY OF WINE.) considers anything more than two drinks a week a red flag for women my age. I kindly reminded Roxie that I was in the entertainment industry, had friends who worked in bars, and was on a low carb diet. What else did she want from me? She got the message and skittered through my curtain.

So now I was home, head-spinning, dealing with the idea of being an incredibly mobile person with incredibly restricted mobility. McDreamy had given me the sentence of six weeks no bending, twisting, reaching, or lifting more than 10lbs. I was to do nothing that would elevate my heart rate or irritate my incision. So basically I could walk, lay, and eat. And not shave my legs. That was a fun part of recovery.

After six weeks and his blessing I could begin physical therapy, resume all activities (Damn. back to shaving), and finish healing. He cautiously cleared me to keep my commitment to Flat Rock Playhouse and perform in Annie, only after I made it clear how important it was to go so I could get my health insurance back. I promised to adhere to his rules and take it slow.

Doesn’t it say so much about our country that I had to force myself to work and potentially injure myself more in order to simply procure health insurance to pay for continuing care?

Two days after surgery I warily packed my bags (Trey packed my bags while I pointed at things) and drove to Boston to observe the Annie national tour. I picked up Macy, who played Sandy, and Mel, who was her handler on tour, and on Sunday night around 10pm we started the long journey from Boston to North Carolina.

Mel had graciously agreed to stay on with me for my first week at Flat Rock to ease me into the rehearsal process and do the mental and physical heavy lifting as far as dog handling was concerned, so I could focus on getting my physical bearings and my actor track under control.

Those first long travel days, full of pain and uncertainty, strange new things, and a HUGE question mark about what the rehearsal process was going to be like, what my body was going to be able to do, and where I was actually heading, were scary.

Once we arrived in Flat Rock I was surrounded by a crew of artists and administrators that soothed my fears and made every effort to help Macy, Mel, and I settle in. Life got better and better each day.

The best advice I received about dealing with a sudden lack of mobility is to GIVE IN TO IT. As challenging as it is, simply allowing guilt-free inactivity so that the body can do its job and heal is the best course of action. EASIER SAID THAN DONE.

I watched every season of Drag Race, laid on my back for hours, listened to conversations, people-watched, snuggled my cat, and read lots of People magazines (thanks, Mom). Small events like walking to lunch were a treat. I strolled to rehearsal slowly and luxuriously, savoring every step. I did more Facebook stalking than you can imagine. I am watching ALL OF YOU.

But what a gift for someone like me to release those negative feelings of inactivity, at least for a while. As far as my body is concerned, I’d be lying if I said I didn’t worry about how my sudden lack of activity would affect me. But I didn’t want it to send me into a spiral of food obsession.

Pre-surgery, when I was in agonizing pain, I made a lot of bargains with myself. I promised I would never body shame myself again if the pain would go away. I told myself I would be grateful to merely walk, or run ONCE a week, rather than every day.

Now I had to make good on those promises. My care was too good, my recovery too swift, my support system too great for anything else.

I’ve been trying my best to truly LISTEN, for the first time, to my sweet, strong, healing little body. I’m trying to feed it when it’s hungry and stop when it’s not, without a measured meal or structured weekly plan. It’s hard. But if she’s hollering for a bite of chocolate or a second glass of wine (DON’T TELL ROXIE), I’m letting her have it. Because she deserves it.

And yes, I lost muscle mass. I’m a little softer. I’m trying not to freak out about it. But this experience was the first time I was really able to have an out of body experience and feel the need to CARE FOR and PROTECT my physical being in the way one might care for a little sister, or a pet, or a best friend.

In the hospital and in my recovery, I truly felt sorry for my body. Now I want to take care of her. I want to do right by her so she can get better, and can keep showing me this perfectly imperfect world and surprise me with her abilities.

I had been distancing myself from the people I loved and the present moment in the name of curating perfection and controlling my life, rather than letting go and loving them back and living in the moment, regardless of what the next one was.

Healing is like giving a baby an Etch-A-Sketch. The course you follow is varied, unpredictable, and without reason. My pain would be a three one day, a seven the next. I fainted in the shower. I’d walk a mile and cry, then walk a foot and laugh. Use the cane, ditch the cane. Wine is a frequent friend.

I’m an open, pulsing wound right now, so I ask for your patience. It’s hard for us type-A’s to ask for help, us ducks with our heads held proud and stoic but our legs moving a million miles a minute just under the water.

It’s super humbling when your husband has to wash you, your mom buy your groceries, your friend carry your purse. I like to do my grunt work in the shadows, so that everything looks effortless. Once you can’t put on your own underwear, all of that kind of goes out the window. Actually underwear just kind of went out the window. What is it good for?

Side note: I had so many generous, kind people ask me what they could do for me in the hospital and beyond, and I didn’t really have the faculties to know or answer. Now that I’m removed, here are some great ideas.

If someone you love has had surgery, a baby, or is laid up, just bring ’em something! It doesn’t really matter what. I got everything from Vitamin Water to an ice cream machine to flowers to a fountain soda. It was all AWESOME.

Even better, get them a Groupon for HOUSE CLEANING (not being able to clean my floors KILLED me), ask what menial errands you can complete, order in some surprise dinner delivery, or have a masseuse or manicurist come to their house for a BIG treat.

For me, feeling feminine and pretty post-surgery was important after days of feeling smelly and helpless. I hated looking at my scraggly nails and roots in that hospital gown under fluorescent lights. As soon as I could I got a manicure, a touch up, and slapped on a (loosely fitted) dress.

And as for now? Come take a walk with me! Let’s have some coffee (wine). Talk to me if you’re struggling with anything and want to share. Inactivity makes you a REALLY good listener. This is a side effect that I hope sticks around. I like hearing and talking about stuff other than my injury. Nothing scares me, nothing shocks me.

I also found myself loving books, movies, and live theater in a way I had kind of suppressed this year in the silly name of being “too busy to invest.” I saw a few Broadway shows while I was laid up and was not only super jealous of those beautiful people, my people, effortlessly moving their bodies and telling their stories, but I fell back in love with the idea of escapism. Because for the first time in a long time I REALLY needed to escape.

So although a lingering illness, a terrorist attack, and spine surgery were not the end of my story, I’m left with a truly fuzzy script for what will be. My mobility is improving every day post-surgery, and the leg and back pain come and go. The pain has never come close to what it was before my operation, though.

I truly gulp gratitude as I walk through my day, able to get where I need to go, do what I need to do, even if at the moment it’s with a little limp and a sparkly cane. (My castmate Tim named him Michael. Michael Cane.)

That said, I’m not quite through processing the immense gratitude I have for my friends, family, and HUSBAND who really stepped up and got me through this ordeal.

I treasure every call, every text, every ounce of advocacy, not to mention the kindness of my employers at Flat Rock and the community of artists that surround me.

I heard the shout, I paid the price, and I feel I am being rewarded with an oasis of support like none other. This is a reminder that those who love you are here for you in health and happiness, so why wait for times of strife to express your love and gratitude?

I’m compelled to share what I feel God, the universe, and my beating heart SHOUTED in my ear over the course of the past six months:

Don’t worry about controlling your story. The stuff we think we’re writing is never as good as the pen that lives within our hearts.

Direction is good, inspiration is good, a simple plan is good. Dedication is important, willpower is important, and fortitude is important. Self-preservation is necessary, rest is necessary, spontaneity is necessary. Love is crucial, your relationships are crucial, kindness is crucial.

Listen to her when she whispers, when she sings. Remember: “Singing with open mouths their strong melodious song.”

Whatever or whoever you hear singing, it’s so much more beautiful than the shouting.

XO, L

What you need to know first is that flying runs in my family. In fact, I am the sole member of my immediate family that hasn’t made their living between 10 and 40,000 feet in the air at one point or another.

Dad was a pilot, Mom was a flight attendant, brother Kris jumped for the West Point Parachute Team and now continues his active service at Fort Bragg and spends his weekends as a certified tandem master. He met his wife, my sister, skydiving at West Point. My mother-in-law Jody is a flight attendant, Uncle Bob is a pilot, Uncle Larry is a skydiver; you get the idea.

These birds of flight all **earn money** while soaring through the air with the greatest of ease, and the closest I’ve come to that sensation is the one time I played Tinkerbell in Peter Pan and got to wear a pimp set of fairy wings.

My Dad was an Air Force Academy grad who started skydiving as a cadet after a childhood obsessed with model airplanes, which he’d fly over the rolling hills of Marin County in California. From the time I can remember anything he balanced work as a pilot for PSA, then USAir (ways), all the while skydiving competitively in the in-betweens.

Yes, indeed, competitive skydiving is a thing. I won’t go into the rules and logistics of all that now, but I grew up on a dropzone the way an Olympic swimmer’s children grow up around a pool.

Dusty weekends and dusky evenings I would meander around small local airports in various degrees of disrepair while Dad jumped. A creaky swing set or long-abandoned sandbox set the stage for early plays with My Little Ponies or whatever found materials were about. The roar of airplane engines was as natural to me as a ceiling fan.

Sometimes I would bring a friend along. It was a rite of passage for all my true childhood friends to make the hour-long trip to Skydive Rick’s in our gold Volvo station wagon (RIP Ollie). We’d spend the day rolling in grass and pea gravel, sneaking orange sodas from the pilots’ fridge, pulling stray cats from trees, and even saving a litter of baby bunnies from a fire pit on one occasion.

His career (and my mother’s) afforded me the opportunity to travel quite a bit to parachute meets and events as a child. Flying standby was much more effortless than it is now. My Dad and the US Parachuting Team would agree to compete, and in the blink of an eye we could be off to exotic locales like Japan, Austria, or North Carolina.

Kidding aside, it was a wonderful facet of my childhood. I’m forever grateful that I started my adult life with some kind of perspective about the rest of the world around us.

Besides airports, bizarre regional delicacies, and lots and lots of souvenir t-shirts, many of my memories of these trips involve long dinners after the day’s jumping was done. I’d feel my sleepy head drooping, drooping, and falling into my dad’s lap as a cacophony of languages, laughter, smells, and sounds filled my head.

With such a glowing preface about the family business, it will perhaps surprise you that I had absolutely no interest, 0% desire, to skydive when the clock struck midnight on my 16th birthday. It wasn’t so much the familiarity of it all, like when you see children of famous actors shun the limelight and become hemp farmers. The fact of the matter is I just DO NOT LIKE HEIGHTS.

Roller coasters: ok. Elevators: ok. Bridges: ok. Looking unrestrained, unrestricted over the edge of a precipice and potentially venturing into it: NOT OKAY.

I’m that friend who FREAKS OUT when the daredevil of the group (YOU KNOW WHO YOU ARE) horses around at the edge of a cliff while hiking. I’d prefer not to lean against the railing at the swanky NYC rooftop bar for the perfect photo op. I actually don’t NEED to see how “tiny they all look” from “up here.” The thought of it all makes my sphincter tighten and my brain scream “XANAX.”

Let’s take a tangent moment here to discuss a few ways in which I delight and disappoint my father.

Tells magical stories in public while wearing cool costumes and singing: DELIGHT

Cannot drive a stick shift: DISAPPOINT

Navigates the island of Manhattan and surrounding boroughs with ease: DELIGHT

Cannot understand military time: DISAPPOINT

Full ride to college: DELIGHT!!!!

Will not jump out of airplane: DISAPPOINT

You see where I’m going with this.

(I will also add that my brother Kris does ALL OF THE ABOVE THINGS very well, even the magical stories/cool costumes part. He’s sent me pictures of himself during training weeks out in the field with foliage camouflaging and green facepaint that Elphaba herself would be proud of.)

Back to the jumping. I put off my Dad’s advances for a few years with the demands of high school, theater school, BOYFRIEND (which, stay tuned, backfires on me in about 10 years), and then my move to NYC for college and career.

I’m busy, said I. I don’t want to jump out of a perfectly good airplane, said I. I have rehearsal, said I. I don’t look good in goggles, said I. I have no health insurance, said I. (This one still works as an excuse for multiple things, just FYI.)

I knew deep down that my Dad was a little disappointed that I wouldn’t jump, even if he never admitted it. It was a bit of a family joke for a while. But as time flies and people grow and the number of opportunities I had to see my Dad dwindled as they always do, it felt like more of a “thing,” especially after my loving (now) husband took the plunge in the summer of 2013. He adored it.

He went up on a load with my Dad, my uncle Larry, and Kris. He might as well have taken my fingernails and cuticles with him and scattered them across Eastern Ohio like a wingsuited flower girl, because surely they were gone by the time he returned safely to Earth. He instantly became an adversary in my quest to remain on terra firma.

Travel with me now to Labor Day weekend of 2015, where my Dad is training at Skydive Rick’s for the upcoming Nationals (our country’s major qualifier for the World Air Games, i.e. parachuting Olympics.).

I have come home to Pittsburgh to do a musical and Kris has driven home with me from West Point to spend his long weekend jumping. That checks out.

We legitimately could not remember the last time my Dad, my brother, and I were all together, so I agreed to come out to the drop zone, watch them make a few jumps, relive the old times, save a bunny or two, grab dinner, and head back to Pittsburgh.

On their last load, as the sun was licking the horizon and lightning bugs were unplugging their chargers, I agreed in a haze of nostalgia to go up in the airplane with them as an “observer.”

Being an “observer” means you sit on the floor of the jump plane, just to the right of the pilot but facing the tail, wearing a big, black parachute with an extremely obvious ripcord (PULL ME DON’T DIE) in case of emergency. You have access to an over the waist seat belt- the kind you would click on your average commercial airliner, expecting to only see Netflix and your snoring neighbor for the duration of your flight. Except on THIS flight you are sitting right next to the door and you do not see The Great British Baking Show but THE NAKED EARTH BENEATH YOU.

A note about these planes. At Skydive Ricks the planes are old, well-maintained war horses. I trust Rick and his wife Kay implicitly, and would never feel unsafe in one of their planes. Yet it must be said that they are SMALL and built for FUNCTION not LUXURY. No hot towels. No snacks.

The only chair is the pilot’s, and they fit about 5 people smooshed and sitting down on the floor. The square footage is that of the average NYC bathroom, for my Manhattan friends reading this, or about the size of a rowboat, for everyone else.

So I “strap in” and sit cross-legged next to Rick. We rattle down the grass runway and lift off, heading to 3,500 feet. The load is my Dad, my brother, and a few of their skydiving buddies. We reach altitude, and someone (TERROR makes the details of the next few minutes a little blurry) opens the door. The door is small, smaller than a car door, and there is a tiny step just outside the plane from which you LAUNCH yourself. If you’re feeling jazzy you could also step on that step and jauntily hang off the wing of the plane before you hurtle yourself towards death. Your call!

The instant the wind and noise and sight of the ground below appear, I get a wave of nausea and panic, I cling to Rick’s pleather chair like a cat on a branch. I don’t see them jump. Then Rick simply rolls the plane to the left to get the door to close, and there’s a relatively nice ride back down in the enclosed rowboat.

When we land the gang is already on the ground, and we head to dinner after a few gentle jabs about how scared I was in the plane.

This is where the negotiating begins. I will spare you the details, but over cornbread and chicken salad my father and brother lob some pretty potent ammo.

“How many times are we all together these days?”

“I wouldn’t let you do it if I wasn’t 100% sure you would live.”

“Would you jump out of a plane to save Trey (husband)?” (Yes)

“Would you jump out of a plane to save Henry (cat)?” (YES)

“So we’ve established that you CAN jump out of a plane. Now we just need to find the conditions in which you’ll do it.” (Monetary bribe.)

“Here’s a completely safe way to face your biggest fear.”

That last one stuck with me.

In college, one of my favorite teachers would always encourage us to “follow your fears.” This seemed very tangible when you were 19 and your fear was a Sondheim ballad. It gets a little more esoteric when you’re staring down the barrel of your own weaknesses, complications, and even mortality.

Maybe it was that barrel that made my Dad’s words stick. Maybe it was the inordinate amount of peer pressure. MAYBE if I did this thing- this unfathomable thing- the other things that render me anxious might not seem so bad. Maybe the career panic, fear of the future, anxiety about aging, the singing of Sondheim, might feel a little more…easy?

Maybe she’s born with it. Maybe it’s imposter syndrome.

And so I agreed. I shook on it. At 1pm the next day I would arrive, take the 15 minute tandem class, and JUMP.

My hands shook the whole way home on the steering wheel. I didn’t tell anyone. Speaking it out loud made it too real. I didn’t sleep well. The only time I could remember being this nervous in recent memory was before my first appointment for Glinda in Wicked. It should have been a breeze and I bombed it because of nerves. That was just singing and flouncing. This was real life.

So I arrived at the drop zone the next day, feeling like a zombie had gotten up, dressed, and driven on the turnpike. I then waited for two hours to begin training because of weather delays. I felt a little like Anne Boleyn on the day of her continuously delayed execution: “Master Kingston, I hear say that I shall not die afore noon, and I am very sorry therefor, for I thought to be dead by this time and past my pain.”

While we were waiting, a few of my Dad’s friends gave me their opinions about whether or not I should jump. Actually, they all said I should with the exception of Kay, Rick’s wife and co-owner of the drop zone. She pulled me aside and said, “Listen. Don’t do this to please anyone else. Not your Dad, not these dudes. Do it for you.”

And this is why women belong in places where (high-altitude) decisions are being made.

I finally proceeded to training with Jimmy, tandem master extraordinaire. He was Trey’s TM for his jump in 2013. In fact, knowing that I would be placing my life in his capable hands was the only thing soothing my nerves. That and the half a Xanax I had just washed down.

We watched a brief video. The only thing I needed to do was ARCH upon exit to stay upright and in a good position for parachute deployment (BRAIN: I CAN’T BELIEVE I’M LEARNING THIS WHY WHY WHY ABORT).

Little did I know that while all this was going on, sweet Kay was getting everything together, the rest of the load and the plane ready, so that as soon as I was done and suited up we could head straight for the plane; no time for reflections or delays or second thoughts. As I reflect, I realize it was no accident that she was my pilot.

I put on a fancy black jumpsuit, a fancy black harness, a fancy black helmet with goggles, and snapped what I thought would be the last selfie I’d ever take. We headed to the plane, squeezed in, and away we went down that same grassy runway and into the ether.

The gang on this particular plane was pretty epic and I was aware enough of that to step back and feel gratitude that the men and woman who were guiding me through the next half hour of my life were the best in the business. These are kind, generous people who were taking care of me in a very delicate way. The cast is as follows:

PILOT: Kay (won’t judge me if I abort mission)

VIDEO: Uncle Larry (will definitely show footage to Trey if I do anything embarrassing)

PAX1: Dad (doing a good job of distracting me by pointing out neat cloud formations)

PAX2: Brother Kris (no help at all)

PAX3: Tandem Master Jimmy (cool as a cucumber)

PAX4: Yours Truly (obsessively checking FitBit for heart rate while ascending.)

So up, up, up we went in our winged rowboat. (Fitbit HR 85) Now, recall that yesterday when I had been a mere “observer,” we climbed to 3,500 feet. That’s the highest I’d ever been in a jump plane. For tandems, however, you must climb to 10,500 feet because two people are heavier than one and you fall faster. The extra space is necessary. (HR 92) I assured Jimmy that I was *impossibly* thin and *surely* didn’t need the extra 7,000 feet, but upward we went.

There came a point in our ascent when I stopped being able to see the earth below. (HR 108) Then came the part when we went higher than the clouds. (HR 110) The altimeter on my wrist showed 8,000 feet and I knew the time was nigh. “Two minutes!” yells Jimmy. (HR 115) Uncle Larry holds my hands and we breathe together for a few breaths. (HR 100)

Now comes the time when Jimmy tells me to sit up and turn around so we can attach to each other. (HR 118) I sit on my knees and he attaches his harness to mine twice at my shoulders and twice by my hips. The order out of the plane is to be Larry, who will HANG OFF THE SIDE OF THE WING (remember that shenanigan?) to appropriately video my exit, then Jimmy and myself, then Dad and Kris.

Kay gives the high sign, the plane slows. Uncle Larry yells “DOOR!”

This is where shit got REALLY REAL.

The door flies open and I see the abyss. It is so far. We are above the clouds. The roar is deafening and the wind is whipping. It seems absolutely UNFATHOMABLE to be out there. Uncle Larry climbs out and hangs off the edge of the wing. Neat. It’s our turn, and an interesting thing occurs. My audition reflex kicks in.

Here’s what that is. As actors, we audition all the time. It’s never NOT scary, but at a certain point you get used to that MUST WALK IN THE ROOM moment. That flash of “It’s time!”

At auditions you’re frequently in a line waiting to be seen, or in a small seating area with a few other actors waiting for your name to be called. When that door flies open or that monitor calls your name, it’s go time. Regardless of your nerves (or level of preparedness) you must smile, stand up, and walk in that room like there is NOWHERE ELSE you would rather be at that moment. They can smell fear and desperation. Like bears. Or dinosaurs.

I knew my job at that moment was to shuffle to the edge of the door, SIT DOWN, and put my feet outside of the plane on the step. After that I would cross my arms on my chest. Jimmy would rock us forwards, backwards, and then launch us out of the plane.

So I did that. I put my butt at the edge and tried to put my feet on the step. But the wind was so furious I couldn’t get my sickle-footed sneaker out. (STICK WITH ME KIDS there’s video of all this at the end) Jimmy eventually pulled the leg of my pants to get my feet in position, and then my job was over. I had walked in the room.

In theater, we call this “The Moment Before”

Indeed, we rocked forwards, backwards, and then Jimmy shoved with love and out we went.

How horrifying was the rocking, the launch? I had long abandoned my Fitbit but would see later that my heart rate was over 170, which is higher than it is when I run.

I arched as instructed, and we did a somersault in the air upon exit. And that was the exact moment it stopped being scary. As soon as our bodies left the plane I remember thinking “OH. This is what it is.” You can see in the photos taken by Jimmy’s wrist camera that I am immediately smiling upon exit. Grinning even when we’re upside down in our somersault. It was that instant. The evaporation of expectations, the weight lifting.

I opened my eyes. We were freefalling, but it didn’t feel like falling. It felt like SUPER loud swimming, with wind rushing up my nose like water would. Weightless. Noisy. No floaties. I could see Larry, but was a little too stunned to wave. I remember seeing my Dad and Kris off to the side.

We fell for 20 seconds or so, and the last thing that happened before Jimmy pulls the ripcord is we fall THROUGH a cloud. Remember those white, puffy, billowy clouds in various shapes and sizes that we flew above? I know what those feel like. I’ve been inside one.

What does a cloud feel like, you ask? It feels cold and misty and magical. Like if you scraped your knee and God was blowing on your boo-boo.

Jimmy pulls the ripcord and my legs kick out from under me. Instantly it gets quiet. My Dad and brother rocket away below us. Jimmy can now speak to me and he points out some sights below us. I’m still grinning. The view, as best I can describe, is like being suspended in front of the largest Omnimax screen you can imagine. It’s unreal and so, so big.

Jimmy swoops us in tight circles to get a little closer to my Dad, who is below, and then we quickly approach the ground. I politely decline Jimmy’s offer to steer the parachute (even a-ha moments have their limits), and we prepare for landing; a graceful dual butt slide into the drop zone’s grassy field.

The moment comes, I lift my knees, and just like that we’re back on the ground. There are cheers and hugs and happiness. We take photos. I get a hug from Dad. He whispers, “I’m so proud of you.”

In the days following my jump, it’s pretty much all I can think about. Not in the sense that I want to do it again. I don’t. I meditate on the fact that the INSTANT I did the thing I was the most scared of the fear evaporated. It’s empowering. And even though skydiving may be a thing that is not scary to many others, it was scary to me and I did it. I feel…better. I keep going back to the rush of freedom. The letting go, the release of control.

So, let’s celebrate the things that scare us. As I revise this post in our current climate, it feels especially apt. If you are given the chance to do the thing that scares YOU in a controlled environment, DO THE THING. It will put the other THINGS in perspective. You will live better.

Now, as a thank you for your patience, enjoy this video of me mentally (and physically?) pooping my pants. May it inspire you to DO THE THING and JUMP.

P.S. If you are so inspired to literally jump, visit skydivericks.com for more info and tell them I sent you. Or head to Skydive Paraclete XP in Raeford, NC and let my brother Kris take you for a jaunt. Say hi to my Dad for me while you’re there. He looks like me but cooler and will probably be wearing a bat suit.

WHY I JUMPED: (the door opens at 1:02 and watching this video still makes my sphincter tighten, even 5 years later)

First things first. Before we discuss the pulse of our major metropolis, let us take a moment to mourn the 175,000 actual lives lost to Coronavirus across our nation, 32,451 of which are New Yorkers.

And for those of us who have been lucky enough to remain healthy, to have contracted the virus and survived, to be asymptomatic, there is still a sense of loss. We’ve all died a million little deaths in the loss of our jobs, our gatherings, our places, our trips, our autonomy, our identity.

I’m an actor. My community and personal identity are deeply tethered to New York. I was here to see bodies forklifted into freezer trucks, the run on supplies, the marches, the curfews, the fireworks, the plywood, the influx of homeless, the blatant drug use, the petty crime.

I do not have a Pollyanna-ish view on what this town has seen and done and weathered and I recognize that my privilege automatically makes my experience easier than what so many New Yorkers are facing.

And yet- I feel the heartbeat. How can it be dead?

How can it be dead as I take a walk on a sunset-drenched Thursday night while outdoor dining, dripping in string lights, is alight with inventively placed tables full of sweating cocktail glasses and nattering conversations?

How can it be dead when I pass a sleepy nurse in scrubs and she lights up to return my high-five?

How can it be dead when I run past the park and see spaced out revelers inhaling the sweet green air with covertly covered beers and stacks of books?

How can it be dead when I weave in and out of bike lanes full of intrepid delivery makers and double-parked vans for a million different businesses?

How can it be dead when our animal shelters are nearly empty and the sidewalks are full of long, languid, happy four-legged walks?

How can it be dead when a spat with a stranger over a coveted street parking spot devolves into a tearful, moving conversation about race and community?

How can it be dead when we marched and advocated and learned and knelt and flooded the streets?

How can it be dead when we’re actually listening? When, for the first time, we actually have the time?

Yes, New York is dead as we knew it. And it’s my belief that it needed to die. It was cold, harsh, busy, unsustainable. It was addicted to more, to amassing, to crashing forward into the future without reverence for the past.

And the New York that’s emerging in the wake of this pandemic? It isn’t perfect. It’s challenging. It has battles to be fought, new paths to forge. It’s different. It’s changing. It’s adapting. It’s transitioning. And so are we.

In the way it always does, New York City is mirroring a greater transformation that’s happening inside all of us.

None of us will ever be the same folks we were in February of 2020. Those versions of self have died with all the preconceived notions we had about our lives. But so many of those lives were unsustainable, just like New York’s. We pushed too hard, went too fast, spoke without listening, assumed without learning, told ourselves stories that just weren’t true.

Those of us who are lucky enough to survive this pandemic must understand that this season of our lives happened for a reason. It will be different for each individual, but I implore you to quiet your fear just long enough to look inside and understand what you might be meant to learn and hear right now. It isn’t what we wanted, but maybe what we needed.

Learning to live in a sticky, uncomfortable place usually means you’re growing. Following the fear usually means you’re learning. Letting go of schedules, plans, and assumptions, allowing grace, forgiveness, and humility, releasing control while asserting your power, self-care above all and devotion to others- I see these things within us all, where we never could before.

Especially for the young- it’s time for us to understand WHO you are without the publicized quantifiers of WHERE you are and WHO you’re with and WHAT you’re doing.

In such a politicized, divisive time, who and what keeps your soul singing? What makes you want to shout, and can you shout without announcing it? What are you doing for optics and what are you doing because it’s the heart-forward honest use of your platform? What will you do when you’re given the gift of time?

But back to New York.

If you need to justify your departure by imagining the death of Manhattan, I understand. There is no fault in leaving a situation that is fiscally unsustainable or wrong for the mental and/or physical health of you or your family. I do not begrudge anyone who has left our city temporarily or permanently. I myself have been privileged and fortunate to take small trips to the lake, to go camping, to visit relatives in neighboring states. Taking care of you and yours is a priority that needs no judgment.

But to call an island dead that still houses so many- so many who are working, hustling, inventing, trying, thinking, listening, learning, and adjusting like CHAMPIONS- well it just isn’t true.

We’re all mini-New Yorks, even if you’re not a New Yorker. We’ll never be the same. There’s a lot of unknown and a lot of work to do. But we’re most certainly, and gratefully, alive.