Every time I think have cleared the Grief Monster, it jumps out.
Any metaphor works: it lurks behind the bushes, it hides under the covers, it’s the annoying neighbor who you hope not to run into, it’s the sleeping dog you don’t want to wake.
It’s an old injury that flares up when it rains.
All this to say, sometimes I feel like I’ve made it past a hurdle, a big hurdle, and the distance created by time might dull the attacks. I get to the point where I’m able to block out the buzz just enough to turn it into white noise. Mommy is dead mommy is dead mommy is dead fades into the background long enough that I can laugh really hard at something. Hope becomes real.
But just wait.
Since my move to Doich-lant, I’ve been hustling to get a visa together. My original intention was to apply for a freelance artist visa, special to Berlin, which requires letters of intent from prospective employers. Burgeoning relationships with small opera companies, agents, comedy clubs and show hosts allowed me to feel comfortable grabbing an appointment at the immigration office to try my hand at applying for it.
Concurrently, I applied to every job on LinkedIn that looked remotely related to my muggle job skill set (Muggle Job being the formal term in the opera world, a world in which one rarely survives by art alone), writing content and web copy and social media stuffs like this newsletter.
I applied to about fifty jobs, interviewed for around fifteen, did the “task” (speculative, unpaid labor) for ten, and then, to my great shock and delight, received a job offer. A job offer means a “visa for employment with academic training” (college degree). I sat on the internet during the mad dash for the weekly release of visa appointments, grabbed one the next day, and less than a week later received approval for residency.
This was a swift, unexpected win. I went down to the water next to the East Side Gallery and I cried.
A visa! The dignity of work! Money!
And yet, my week has been filled with relief coupled with an unexpected bout of shame. I have a job, a way to stay, and allegedly I’m going to be paid for my time at the end of the month. What a concept. On the other hand, I’m not doing “what I came here to do.” I get to edit and write, which I am good at (and enjoy!), but the obligation of going into an office (for the first few weeks at least) means no singing during the day. I come home exhausted after staring at a screen all day, reading about our industry and drumming up ideas and pitches for how we can best present it and editing articles and blogs and managing personalities and being on my best behavior. I’m reintegrating into society post-covid, and also learning how to integrate into an office for the first time in my life. I’ve worked long hours in education and the arts, doing hard, good, satisfying work. I’ve been in tedious meetings and written curriculum to exacting standards. I have managed deadlines my entire life. But I have never stood next to a coffee machine to shoot the shit with a dev guy.
I keep reminding myself that this was always an option. I operate by the theory of doors. I knock on all of them, all the time, and walk through the ones that open. When I got into UCLA for my masters, that become a big, beautiful option, but it meant walking away from television auditions and my quest for an acting agent. I was going to spend my time in grad school, because that choice made the most sense at the time. In 2019, I had two job offers alongside the Fulbright, and I chose to walk through the door that opened to Europe.
I have been applying to full-time, salaried jobs in Berlin for months, as a possible avenue to secure a visa and support myself as I find my footing here and develop relationships. Relationships are the absolute bread and butter of my life and career, and they take time.
In the depths of covid, with the end of my Fulbright looming and most singer colleagues digging into a parallel career out of sheer necessity, I worked with a friend who’s also an HR specialist. She had the idea to pivot my main non-opera skill pitch from education to writing. She tied together all of the odd jobs I’ve had in the past half decade and helped me develop a small creative firm, which has kept me floating for the past year. I talked to another friend who worked as a freelance writer in Luxembourg, and she introduced me to the world of newsletters and female writer groups and job boards. I reached out to a business coach, who took me on pro-bono and taught me how to value my time and price myself. Then I needed to pick a niche, a way to stand out and position myself as unique in the vast sea of freelance marketing creatives. I picked SEO. I took online classes. I taught myself about metadata and the Google algorithm.
These are things I did alongside voice lessons and concerts and training, because I knew they could facilitate more doors. The more doors I have, the more options I have for my life, my location, and paying my grocery bill. The more options I have, the longer I can stay in a game in which a woman’s voice finally comes into itself in the mid to late thirties. My mentor and teacher, a wildly successful singer, began her career at thirty six. I am playing a very long game.
And then I got a job. Job = visa & funds = power to stay in the opera training & audition game = ability to play longer and stronger.
I’m working for a tech startup that is really cool, doing things in the world of crypto a lil’ Pollyanna opera singer like me has never even heard of. It’s exciting. It’s hard to understand. I’m knee deep in articles about Ethereum and smart contracts and Web3. It’s quite fun to enter into a sector and a sub-culture that’s totally new, and it brings the same rush I had in AP Bio. It has been years since I’ve felt that kind of wonder, entering into a totally new knowledge space in which I have the freedom to be dumb. Today I looked up from my laptop and just yelled, “Is a ‘dapp’ a ‘decentralized app?’” The eyerolls I received. (Yes, a dapp is a decentralized app that runs on a blockchain. Do you want to know what a blockchain is? Good. I’m getting paid to tell you.)
But on Friday, as I ran from the U-Bahn to the tram at 6:30 pm with the rest of Berlin, heading home for the weekend, I felt like a week of my life had just disappeared. I like what I’m doing, but it’s not the same kind of accompaniment that I got to share as a teacher, and it’s not the urgent beauty and life-telling of performance. But as Europe continues to play chicken with impending lockdowns that would, of course, immediately end making money via live performance, I am grateful to have a steady source of income and the dignity of work.
I have made a deal to trade my time for my location. I’m giving hours of my life each week in order to lower my financial anxiety. I spent the past six months actively training for and applying to get this job. But every yes comes with a string of unspoken no’s.
Fear ye not: I’m doing an opera here in January! I’ll be singing the Fourth Maid/Die Vertraute in an artist-funded performance of Strauss’s Elektra. I’m also covering the (big) role of Chrysothemis.
Most of my colleagues on this project have sung at massive houses around Europe. They’ve all worked at “A” houses (top of the top). They’re fucking fantastic singers. One owns a translation service, one runs a professional development program for young singers, one sells high-end whiskey. What I mean to say is, these are working singers with international careers, and everyone’s got a day job.
*cue rage about how the economy of the modern world is not set up to properly assess the value of and/or compensate artists*
The other hue coloring this season of my life is that I finally attempted to return to the world of dating. I don’t often speak publicly about it (even though in private I force my friends into the overshare zone constantly, bless them). I haven’t really gone out with anyone in a couple of years, just dates here or there. I could write a book about what losing my mom did to my body (I hope one day I will), because one aspect of it is that the thought of being close to anyone became strange. How could I possibly fall in love in a world without my mom? It is a dead world, and my body often feels dead, too.
I met a visual artist and we dated for about two weeks. What I mean is, we went on dates, as one does as an adult who is not in college having organized fun, or immediately living with someone because we live in a sped-up world. We talked in the evenings, and we got dinner together on the weekends. And my body remembered what it is like to have a crush.
It ended as fast as it started, and I was left with a whiplash of emotions I’d forgotten could be so strong. He sent me the it’s-not-you-it’s-me-thanks-but-no-thanks text while I was waiting for a train, as my headphones played — I shit you not — Hold On. And did I ever. I sat in that U-Bahn weeping and snotting into my mask and wondering how on earth I let my guard down long enough for the possibility of another hard emotion to slip in. It was barely a blip on my events calendar, and yet I had totally forgotten how deep that cut can feel, only after a couple of weeks. The loop of my seventeen year old brain started right up again. What is wrong with me? What did I do? Am I defective? What didn’t he like? Am I too much? Did I do things wrong? Am I just not meant for this game?
These are ridiculous, universal thoughts. I dipped my toe back into the world of heartbreak and I’m bummed to report it’s still there, and it still stings.
Let time be patient.
Let pain be gracious.
Just hold on.
It’s remarkable that, no matter how much I learn about myself, no matter how nuanced and informed I become about men and masculinity and relationship styles and dependence, no matter how many different marriages and communication styles I get to witness and accompany, and no matter how many colors of attraction and interaction I add to my pallet of romantic experiences, heartbreak feels the same as it did when I was fifteen and Kyle didn’t ask me to prom. I’m 32 years old, sitting on a train and staring at my phone, and might as well be crying in a bathroom stall at Regis.
My beloved podcaster Kate Kennedy said something interesting about Taylor Swift’s Red album this past week. Swift re-released it to regain ownership of her master tracks, part of a project to re-record her entire early catalogue. It also offered fans the opportunity to encounter this epic heartbreak album she wrote when she was in her early twenties all over again, as women in their (our) thirties. Kate remarked that the fact that Swift got an entire album out of a three month relationship is a testament to how big feelings can be, even when they’re not reciprocated, and how important it is to acknowledge the reality of heartbreak and expectation, even if it’s not proportional to the time spent in the relationship.
This guy managed to do what no one has really done in two years, and by that I mean chart on my romance map. (There were overtures of visiting his homeland of Ireland! Irish overtures, people!) He was really excited about me, and I met that in stride. It was a mere fortnight of fun, but it burned sharp and hard when he dumped me. These emotions maintained their half-life, receding with the tide as fast as they appeared. But damn, rejection is hard.
This might be the reason I woke up on Saturday with a pall of dread. Did I just make a major mistake and accidentally tank my opera career by taking a full-time job as a writer? Is there something wrong with me, romantically, that will prevent me from sharing a real connection with a man ever again? Have I unwittingly tied my life in knots and doomed myself to never be artistically, professionally or romantically satisfied? I need to call Mommy right now!!
You forgot! You forgot, you dumb bitch! You forgot that your mother is dead and here I am to remind you that not only must you juggle the anxiety of your profession and desire for authentic love, but you must do it WITHOUT YOUR MOTHER!!! BWAAAAAAAH!
There it is. The Grief Monster. I got so caught up in the other stuff that I forgot the reason I opened the fridge, or what I walked into the room to grab. I sat in my bed and felt the numbness crawl up my body just like it did last summer when Danny called me at that gas station in Pueblo. Come home, now.
I did not get out of bed until noon. Which means I added the anxiety and self-loathing of that ol’ American chestnut, being unproductive.
Grief wraps a rubber band around a pit of my sadness, trapping me inside. I can push away from its center, but it will spring me back and throw me just as far in the other direction, dragging my limp heart through inky despair and longing, tumbling over and over. Maybe it’s easier to just sit in it and try not to move. I felt like I’d made moves in my life. I got a job, a visa, and a really cool guy telling me about Sicily and showing me art. But I stretched the band too far out of the sadness. It had to snap back.
I saw this post from a fellow singer, who’s Jewish, and I thought, well, there we go. That’s what prayer feels like. This is my entire experience with God right now.
I do take solace in the fact that God receives me in my anger. When I was in college, I’d often go down to the chapel in McGlinn and sit in front of the Tabernacle and just cuss. I’d unload like a pirate about every worry and fear, riddling my words with the worst language I could come up with, stringing together sentences of demands and complaints and accusations and filth. Then I’d curl up on the carpet next to a pew and cry. It was the safest place on campus.
I think one of the reasons I’m still Catholic, and I still go to church, and I still bother when most people I know don’t, is that the notion of God has always been a place to go when I’m totally unraveled. I cannot scare away or cause distance between me and the thing that created me. I think the way my mom loved me had a lot to do with that. She knew everything about me, all the mistakes and failures and points of shame, and she didn’t give a damn. She still thought I hung the moon. And she told me so.
My mother was born on November 22, 1951, which was Thanksgiving. She lived a life of gratitude, which followed her into death. We even put it on her headstone: “She was a gift.”
In the last months of her life she bore inconceivable physical pain, as tumors riddled her body and stole her ability to walk, then sit.
She never complained. She thanked everyone. Nurses, friends visiting, and us, all the time.
“Thank you, baby,” was her refrain. We were all baby.
Today, my dad and brother bought her her favorite Starbucks order and managed to sneak Ziggy into the cemetery. They called me, and we sang Happy Birthday.
It is fitting that the weekend my life dips back into grief is the one before Thanksgiving. I don’t feel like I have much to feel thankful for, because my cup is so full of anxiety I’m not sure how much else can fit. But that’s sort of the point of gratitude, I think. It can always find a way to fit.
I’m not sure where I’ll be on Thanksgiving. I invited a bunch of people over for it, but no one can come. (Thursday night is tough to swing in a country that doesn’t care about Abraham Lincoln and turkeys.) Don’t worry — I’ve got an invite to join an American family.
Since I won’t be conducting my own Thanksgiving, I’m going to invite you, dear reader, to share in my favorite part of the meal. I think a lot of people do this anyway, but just in case, I’ll describe it. It became a bit of a habit in later years for our family to share what we’re grateful for at the Thanksgiving table, going around and sharing as much or as little as folks want. Big things and small things. Emotional things and silly things.
So I invite you to celebrate the birth (and life) of Susie DePrez this Thanksgiving by asking everyone at the table what they’re thankful for. Be specific. Be grand. Be funny. Be trite. Be honest. I guarantee, when you’ve gone all the way around, food will taste more delicious, and everyone will be smiling.
Happy Birthday, Mommy. I love you, every day.
Happy Birthday Susie. Thank you for your girl, she is loved <3