Bean Sandwiches

These are the opening paragraphs for my November post on RealMental.


The other night I got to craving a bean sandwich.

Ever had one? Spread two slices of soft white bread with some mayonnaise. Sprinkle one slice with salt. Open a can of baked beans and carefully spoon a layer of beans on the other slice. Depending on how dry you like your bean sandwich, you might want to press the spoon against the inside of the can to drain the beans a little along the way. Place the other slice of bread on top. Cold beans taste better.

A bean sandwich can be a little bendy, so the tidiest thing to do is to eat it over a plate to catch the spillage. The stress of maneuvering a sandwich that’s dropping its beany innards onto a paper towel while you shove it in your mouth can result in a wolfing down of the sandwich.

Not that there’s anything wrong with that.

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To read the full article, click here.

A Reading of Sofonisba in NYC

Some of you DC readers may remember Michole Biancosino, Artistic Director of Project Y, back from her days in DC. She's in NYC now, and Project Y had a wonderful production last year that the NY Times reviewed.

Anyway, I've been a fan of Project Y since the beginning, because they explore dark and compelling oddities in their work.

So I'm really stoked that Michole and her company have decided to give SOFONISBA its first NYC reading! I'm still working on the play, but I feel that this script is the strongest I've ever written. It feels like all of the things I've been trying to teach myself for the last 4 years about building a play have finally come together.

So for those of you who can make it, it will be Sunday, November 15, at 7pm in Soho at Lilly O’Brien’s. As I understand it, it's a bar with some sort of performance area, and it's at 67 Murray Street @ West Broadway (close to the Chambers stop on the 1-2-3 and A-C lines; and the WTC stop on the E line).

Crumbs from the Table of Twitter

Hello, dear blog.

I spend all my social media energy on The Twitter. For those of you who are not on The Twitter (all two of you), I wanted to let you know what's going on and what you can look forward to here on this blog.

I've just rounded out my first full year in NYC, and I also just moved into my third apartment in Manhattan. (Because apparently that's what you do when you move to New York, you move again. And again. And again.)

Now I'm in a two-year lease in a beautiful studio on the Upper East Side. I have a view of trees in a courtyard, and enough closet space, and hardwood floors, and a giant tub. There's no stove, but I don't cook much anyways.

My last apartment was a nightmare--the ceiling collapsed, there were 16 or so leaks in the kitchen over the course of 8 months, I could hear a child crying for hours on end (yes, I called Child Services because I had a bad feeling in my gut), I heard horrible fights in the hallways, one of my neighbors' apartments was broken into, a cop killed someone on our block, there was a serial rapist for a while (ok that was 15 blocks away, but still), and dog doo on the sidewalk.

I tried politely to get out of the last month of my lease, considering all the leaks, mold and ceiling problems, but my old landlord wouldn't budge. Until I lawyered up, that is. Then they said sure, I could break the lease and still get my deposit back, IF I signed something that I would never sue them for anything. No problem. That's all I wanted in the first place.

So I took my returned deposit and bought a Burberry handbag at a 30% off sale. It's my first purse ever that costs more than $25, and it's kind of awesome.

Anyway, for $300 more a month, now I'm in a neighborhood where the women plastinate their faces, eat styrofoam because it's calorie-free and filling, and shop for $1,500 handbags.

You might think from the above paragraphs that I'm not fitting in here in NYC, but it's actually the first time as an adult that I've felt like I'm living where I belong. See, everything's extreme here--you have the best of everything and the worst of everything all jammed up together. So I'm blending in.

Today is my last full-time day at NBC. Starting Monday, I'll be working 20 hours a week. They were kind enough to give me a 40% raise--I won't be earning as much as before, but I'm pretty sure I'll be okay, especially since all the shopgirls in the Upper East Side boutiques are so snobby that I'm not even tempted to spend my money there.

The big change will be that I will now have time to dedicate to my writing. I feel like I'm in a great position now where I'm happy in my home, I'll be earning enough to get by (and that's all you really need, is enough), and I'll have precious time to write.

I've been meeting people all along this year, but now I'm actually starting to have conversations that are more focused on finding where my writing might make sense in terms of plays and blogging and maybe this memoir idea. I also want to try fiction and start doing some short video projects. So it's really a great thing that my hours will shift and I'll be able to devote concentrated time to fleshing these projects out.

Thanks to all of you who have been reading my This Is Not a Memoir posts. It's been a few weeks since I've posted to that thread, but rest assured, more is coming! I have sort of an endless amount to write. I'm really enjoying writing the posts, and it means so much to hear that they resonate with you guys. Thanks for the support on that.

Some of you may know that I've been giving talks and interviews about the arts and social media--I think most of them are on my home page if you're interested. I did one just the other day about how to find your artistic voice through blogging, and I'll post it as soon as I have a link.

Anyway, thanks for checking in.

There's Always a Tell

These are the opening paragraphs of my first post for RealMental, which will go live later tonight or early tomorrow.


I’ve always wanted to go to Montana. Remember the film Legends of the Fall? Wrecks me every time. I manage to keep it together while Native Americans are displaced, Samuel dies, and love is abandoned. I start to tip when Tristan’s wife is killed, and I lose it completely when Susannah meets Tristan’s son Samuel. By the time Susannah cuts off her hair and shoots herself, I’m inconsolable, mostly because everyone has put such a pretty, stoic face on their pain.

The only thing saving me from being seduced by all this Grade A romanticized suffering is Tristan’s “good death” at the end, by bear-fight. It’s a fitting and rugged resolution, and it centers me again, reconciling me to all things inexorable, like death, sorrow, and bad sex.

We’re all heroes of our own movies. Some of us may self-dramatize more than others, but I think it’s fair to say we all, at times, present a reductive version of ourselves. Sometimes it’s for the benefit of others.

Often it’s because the truth overwhelms us.

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To read the full article, click here.

Whew

Since my last post, I moved to a new apartment, I fought (and apparently won, though I'll believe it when I get the check) an argument with my old landlord, and started putting steroid drops in my eyes because apparently I'm allergic to New York City.

I've also been eating a lot of cheese sandwiches and writing a long-ish blog post, my first in a series for RealMental, the beginning paragraphs of which I'll post in a few minutes here.

Thanks for all the wonderfully encouraging comments on the posts I'm tagging "This Is Not a Memoir."

"I Just Wanna Be Honest With You."

Some conversations you remember.

We were in the van, moving the last of his stuff to my place. I'd never lived with anyone I'd dated before. It had been a whirlwind, which, in retrospect, means, well, absolutely nothing. When we met, I was dating a Republican who was perhaps the nicest guy I'd ever dated--we just about niced each other to death. Deep down, we both knew it wasn't going anywhere, and when I pointed this out, he was so relieved that I'd finally called Time of Death that we both laughed before parting ways.

On Valentine's Day, I was at the theatre with a group of friends, Adam included, and all of a sudden I just knew that I adored him. We'd been teaching Shakespeare in the public schools for about six months--I was Juliet, he was my dad. He was a natural with the kids, had a great sense of humor, and a fierce understanding of classical theatre. Before I knew it, I was giving him a ride home and he was asking me to move to Vermont, have kids, and start a theatre.

Sounded great.

I don't know why I believed it, but I needed it. And I loved loving someone. He let me love him! And he loved me back! He delighted me and I was filled with the joy of doing things for him and his exceedingly hairy back. He offered to wax, but I said I didn't care about the fur because he was All Mine, and also because I knew he didn't mean it. He had struggled with depression, too, so he wasn't overwhelmed by my struggles. When I told him about my parents, he told me, "I will always take your side."

This was a whole new game.

I met his family; he met my mother. He and my father spoke on the phone, but he was waiting to propose until they spoke face-to-face. An engagement party was in the works, and we had moved almost all of his belongings into my apartment. We were in a borrowed van, on the final trip from his place to mine.

"You know I'm a big believer in honesty. And I just wanna be honest with you, that there's someone else who I think is The One. Someone I knew in college who I felt an instant connection with. And even though I didn't feel that with you right away, my feelings have grown, and I have feelings now."

"Someone you dated?"

"No. She was a lesbian. The minute I laid eyes on her I felt this instant connection."

"Do you, I mean...what are you saying?"

"I just wanna be honest with you."

I didn't know how to respond, so we unloaded his stuff, and I went to cat-sit overnight for a friend. What he had said festered, so I called him from the air mattress where I was not sleeping at all.

"In the interest of being totally honest back, I have a problem with what you told me today. What'd you think that'd accomplish?"

"I'm sorry. I just thought it was important not to have any secrets. Tell you what. I can call her--I mean, I can't call her now because it's 2am, but I can call her in the morning--and if she's not interested, you and I can still move forward."

I had no idea that love could be killed in an instant.

All of a sudden, the fact that he couldn't pay his share of the rent, the fact that he wouldn't put his stuff away in the apartment, the fact that he snored, the fact that I was super organized and did things for him that he couldn't do for himself, all of a sudden that didn't feel okay anymore.

So I did what I did when I needed a sounding board. I turned to my trusted friends, the people who knew me better than anyone else, and who also cared enough to not pull any punches.

I blogged.

I didn't need my blog readers to tell me my feelings were right or wrong, but I did need their reactions in order to gauge my own. I had learned to question my emotional responses to big events, because they were modeled on some fairly histrionic behavior. At the same time, I had an opposing tendency to discount my feelings completely, so I really had no True North on my pocket compass of healthy responses.

I laid it out. The whole story. Folks had been so excited for us both up until now. I wondered if the marrieds would tell me I was overreacting. I wondered if the men would take his side.

Every single reader said some variation of "Evacuate."

This was hard to hear. I wasn't yet healthy enough to parse apart why what Adam had said was so incredibly messed up. And I loved him. It was hard not to defend him.


Now, I get the sense from people that I front pretty well. People who knew me while I was at the worst of my depression were surprised to later learn what I had been going through. One of the biggest contributing factors to my depression was the childhood isolation, so once I worked through some basic social anxiety, I discovered that when I was around people I generally had a good time. They had no idea that I was crying on the way there and on the way home, or that my nights were filled with a nameless terror, or that just breathing was often painful because it meant I was still alive, when I wished I weren't.

Countless were the nights where, after crying for hours with no end in sight, I'd finally power up the laptop--and the second I started to share what I felt on my blog, I'd calm down. I was connected. Meanwhile, I juggled multiple jobs, and I wrote and produced plays. I got up each day because the thought of not doing so was so seductive it terrified me. No one knew the extent to which I was suffering, and so no one treated me any differently, and I have to think that was actually more helpful than had people coddled me.

But I noticed that, after the break-up, everyone started treating me Very Gently. I was a shell. My mother even let me stay with her while he moved his stuff out. People called to check on me, but I had no words. What was there to say?


I was in this numb state when I went to visit my father in July. After a lifetime of estrangement, we had reconnected a few years earlier, after he became a born-again Christian. He had proposed to his third wife, but she had insisted that he make things right with me before she'd marry him. Whatever his motivation, I was happy to finally have him in my life.

But now, I felt like I was collapsing in on myself. My father didn't know what to do--we had no established language for the difficult stuff, no shared experience or common history as a touchstone to deal with something like this. So I spent the entire visit with his wife. We walked on the beach and I poured out everything to her. She'd been through her own trials--this was her third marriage as well--and while she was coming at the issue from a Christian perspective that I didn't completely share, I appreciated her frankness and patience.


The thing about being depressed is, it's like trying to live your life while a bear trap is clamped on your arm. You're bleeding and broken and can't climb a ladder, but after a while, you become somewhat inured to the pain, and can even function fairly well. How often do you climb ladders, anyway? But you can't ever really forget that you're lugging around this bear trap, and anyone who spends any amount of time with you becomes aware of it too, because every second of every day you're trying to figure out how to get rid of the damn thing. You want to fix it yourself, but you don't know how, and no one else, understandably, wants to come too close, because after all, they can't fix it either. It takes a sturdy person to befriend someone who's in constant emotional pain.

I burned through a lot of friends.

Occasionally someone would come into my life--usually a stranger--and I'd get a deeper understanding of the causes of my suffering because of something simple they'd say. Near the end of my visit, she and I were lying on the beach.

"Some people have a hard life, but I gotta say, you've really been dealt a rotten hand, Calla Lily."

"I get so confused. I don't know why it's so hard all the time when I have so much good going on."

"Yep. Both your parents were abused, neither knew their father, they had no support. You were moved around, your poor mother was struggling just to survive, she didn't have any time for you or even herself, and your father was going through his own thing far away. So where did that leave you? You didn't even have a chance."

The compassion she showed not just to me but to my parents was more than I had ever offered myself.

"I wonder...I wonder if maybe one of the reasons I keep finding myself in these relationships is partly because my father didn't have anything to do with me, and so somehow I had to make that okay in my head because I needed to believe he loved me anyway. So I learned to love without getting anything back. And that's why I'm grateful for crumbs. Over and over."

"I think you're on to something."

Back in the house, my father had decided what I needed was a little curse-breaking. The Devil had a hold of me, and he had to be banished.

Now, I had not been raised going to church. My mother's mother was a Jehovah's Witness, and that had turned her off so much that she became interested in Tarot and reincarnation. I had grown up being trotted around to psychic healers my whole life, so I had an open mind. When Dad brought out a Bible and a bottle of holy water, I thought, What harm can it do? It was clear he was trying to help me. In retrospect, I wonder if he'd known all along what I'd just figured out on the beach. Was this his way of trying to undo the damage?

As we all sat there, heads bowed, holding hands, I wished that the curse-breaking would work, that it really would be that simple to erase my depression. When it came time for me to say something, to ask for divine intervention, I muttered a few feeble words and tried to believe.

Little did I know that the worst was yet to come. That in September, I'd head to the MacDowell Colony to write, sleep, and cry for a month. That in October, I'd lose 18 pounds in 3 weeks from the depression. That finally in January I'd get help and find out that I had Major Depressive Disorder, Baseline Disthymia, Passive Suicidal Ideation, and symptoms of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. That most likely I'd been suffering from these things since childhood. Since my dad left. When I was almost four.

I had done a lot of work on myself before, but this round would take two years before I was out of the woods, re-wired and armed with new skills to manage the self-destructive habits of my brain. Two years of hard work, day by day, breath by breath. No meds, because I knew in my gut that what was needed was aggressive pruning of my belief system. Things had started off wrong, and it was up to me to unplug from everything I had known. With the help of good old-fashioned talk therapy, I came to learn how normal I really was.

Some conversations you remember. Others you deliberately forget.

What I'm Doing

For years, I've wanted to thread my experiences overcoming depression, disruption, and isolation into some sort of narrative. It's not that I think my story is that special, actually, I think my experiences are probably fairly common to those of us who came from divorced families.

When I started blogging 7 years ago, I was surprised that anyone understood what I was going through. Pretty soon I was posting a dozen times a day, a far cry from my current rate of about a dozen times a month. When my audience grew to over 1,000 hits a day, and a few agents came around, I wasn't clear on what the boundaries were, and so I did things like shut down my blog, delete posts, etc. Now that I've got things squared away, I'm blogging from a stronger place with a clear identity.

So I'm taking a stab at writing some things down informally here on my blog. I'm not thinking these specific posts will comprise a book--they're really just the beginning explorations of memories and events that were significant to me. Once I've gotten some out there, I'll be better able to decide on story and structure. But I know deep in my gut that my experiences are many people's experiences, and there's a wonderful power in shaping and sharing it.

I've tagged them all "This Is Not A Memoir." I appreciate feedback--it means a lot to know that what I'm doing here might resonate with someone. Email is great, but if you are so inclined to comment on the posts, that actually might help me show an agent or an editor the kind of interest that's out there for this.

Blogging helped me find my voice, and it helped me find people who were struggling with the same issues I was. The interaction with these countless people I've never even met has done more to shape who I've become as a person, and as a playwright, than anything else in my adult life.

In January 2007, I was diagnosed with Major Depressive Disorder, Baseline Disthymia, and Passive Suicidal Ideation, after decades of not knowing there was a name to the feelings I'd fought since I was four years old. Now that I've gotten help and am out of the woods, I can approach this project in a healthy way. I've never felt the need to hide any of this, and actually, starting next month, I'll be a regular contributor to RealMental.

There's just three posts so far, all from my childhood. Because it's time for a little absurdity, I'm next going to write about when my father and his third wife took me through a curse-breaking ritual with a bottle of holy water.