Two years ago this week, in February of 2020, I was in Denver on a last minute trip during the Pädagogische Hochschule Niederösterreich’s winter break. I was teaching English. My mom had just started immunotherapy and I had a breakdown about it in a voice lesson. My teacher/mentor told me to go home, see my mom, and come back ready to work.
I took my voice teacher’s advice, booked a last minute round trip flight from Vienna to Denver and spent two weeks hanging out at home with my mom, which proved to be a great decision, because she was gone five months later. At the time we had no idea. I went with her to radiation, the kind where a mesh face mask made out of plastic bolted her to the table as laser beams battled the osteosarcoma tumor in her lower back. We ate a lot of chocolate.
I returned to Vienna at the end of February, ready to do a long-haul of time away from my mom. I ended up on the last flight Austrian Airlines offered to the continental US on March 18th, surrounded by study abroad kids from Steubenville and a bunch of Peace Corps members from Africa. One girl on my flight, who was deep in Tanzania when the pandemic hit, had been told by the Peace Corps coordinators to “get on a bike and just start riding.” She went from a village to a city to a bigger city to Europe and hadn’t slept in a few days.
I stood on the curb in the ghost town of the Denver airport as my brother threw me the keys to his truck so I could drive to a family friend’s empty house, which was on the market, to quarantine for two weeks. No hugs.
I returned home again on April 1st. I ran into the house, right up to my mom on the couch and fell on top of her. We were both at the top of a mountain, about to tip over the edge and begin a descent into hell and death and faith and goodbye, but we didn’t know that. Her death and a pandemic and the sideswiping of my career were all in the balance at the top of that mountain. We just hugged.
On June 18th, she stopped breathing in my brother’s arms.
I have always been a creature of hope. I loved high school, I loved college, and I loved teaching high school right after college. I didn’t have to deal with actual rejection and professional hiccups until I moved to Los Angeles at age 26 to be an actor/comedian/writer. Even then, I reveled in the rush of Doing the Thing, working as a tour guide at Universal Studios and desperately saving up cash for acting classes. It was glorious and messy and I loved it. I began dating in earnest, something I’d managed to mostly avoid up until that point. I met people wildly different from me. I ended up on TV sets and at parties with comic book writers and making out in a car on Wilshire or on the sidewalk of Ventura Boulevard, all with the luxury of being able to navigate these new experiences as a person in my late twenties. Who knew where I’d end up — the only thing I knew was that I was just happy to be there.
There are still people from that time in my life who I follow in earnest. Colleagues from comedy classes, fellow tour guides, friends of friends I met at parties who work at Netflix or regularly book national commercials or voice characters Cartoon Network are sprinkled throughout my feeds as a reminder of a time when anything was possible and we were all desperate to show up, to be in the right place at the right time. There was an energy and a delight in the sheer possibility of Los Angeles, of one day being part of telling a story that might change someone’s life. This is, of course, the dream that floats the entire economy of Hollywood — that I, one day, may also change a life, the way visually storytelling changed mine.
I went to grad school. I got a Fulbright. I was Doing the Thing.
My entire life up until the death of my mother was unnaturally blessed. I was frequently overweight, riddled with student debt, and wildly inexperienced with many of life’s more common vices, but I was generally really happy. Content. Pleased with my life. Able to suss out a win in the thickest weeds. Even in the midst of a frustrating relationship with a narcissist-prime during grad school (you know the one), I liked myself.
Then my mom got sick, the economy shut down, my performance career came to an abrupt halt, social media became a political battleground and 900,000 Americans died. I stopped counting the friends who lost family members after twenty.
I sat alone in an apartment in a foreign country for seven months. I visited the grocery store and hiked in the woods.
Sadness becomes a habit. Humans are remarkable at adaptation — we can get used to anything. I got used to waking up in an angry fit and dragging myself through the day by clinging to the small strengths of tea and sunshine. I returned to Vienna to grieve my mother and began explaining myself with the phrase, “I’m like the Hulk. I’m always angry.”
Everyone has tragedy. Everyone carries a bag of brokenness around, patched up or ignored, dealt with or avoided. No hurt is new. But the context can be. For me, my mom’s death unhooked the pins of my life. The fabric unfolded and when I looked at myself I saw an image that was both underexposed and overexposed, but never in the correct light. I was too gaunt and too fleshy. Don’t touch me. Don’t look at me. Don’t remind me that I am me, because holding the me of now up to the row of me’s that I once was is painful. Shameful. Inappropriate. Grotesque.
I saw pictures of what it was like when I was happy, but I forgot what it felt like.
The whole world tipped sideways and I learned to walk with my feet on the wall. Like we all do, when reality shifts in the face of tragedy. We rearrange the furniture. We adapt.
When I move, I do what we all do: I freeze any unnecessary emotion in order to adapt to a totally new situation. In the case of Berlin, I bought bedding and groceries and hit the pavement hard to reach out to agents and houses and find a full-time job.
Four months after moving in, I realized I was living exclusively in one room of my two room apartment, and I hadn’t once turned on the TV. I don’t think it really computed that I even had a TV. The space felt too large. I felt like an interloper in someone else’s life, an American rudely barging into another country without a pre-existing reason to be there. I didn’t move to follow my German boyfriend. I didn’t come on an opera contract. I was just here, begging the city for a reason to let me stay.
After Christmas was the first time I “returned home” to this apartment. I now have a fondness for the darkness of winter. This time last year I was nursing the deep fractures of grief in total solitude, morphing into an introvert due to lack of use. But part of me now craves that sense of sanctuary, the quiet mornings and evenings spent reading or cooking or watching Netflix. We adapt to the situations in which we find ourselves. I became very, very accustomed to being alone.
When I returned to Berlin in January, I finally rearranged the furniture, bought a new lamp, and got a bookshelf from Facebook marketplace. I unpacked pictures and used some comedy cash to buy plants I cannot name nor water correctly. I began to nest.
I like my apartment. I like my job. (I switched around a bit – I now work for a fab tech PR firm with some fab ladies.) I love my neighborhood. I work from home during the day and then feed my latent extrovert in the evenings with comedy or a beer with a friend or a date.
Speaking of which, dating is very fun, and I am an unashamed dating apologist. I have met men from all over the world, some meh, some fascinating, some who have dented the bumper of my ego and some whose egos I have deflated. Perhaps this is the karma of that extrovert coin — the pandemic was a real bitch, but damn it, I think am a great date. I will ask great questions, and I will make you laugh.
Perhaps this is another gift of the pandemic. As I have re-entered the dating chat, I am no longer so invested in someone after two dates that I am heartbroken when it peters out. I bear my heart close. Or perhaps losing my mom was so jarring to my system that being dumped by a guy no longer registers that high on the emotional Richter scale. Whatever it is, I feel like I’m centered so deeply in my own emotions and needs that I am not expecting every man I sit down with to hold them all and fix them all. They might not even get to see them all. If you grew up with me, or knew me as a teenager, the idea that I might not wear every emotion on the tip of my nose seems anathema to my operating system. Temper emotions? Cannot compute! And yet, the river of experiences inside of me has cut a path so deep that the waves have stilled. Maybe I’m guarded and jaded. But mostly I just feel calm.
I realized last week — in the days before Putin’s war — just how much I am enjoying living. This might seem like an odd thing to notice, as one is generally always living, but I take Sertraline, I have a therapist, and everyone who knows me knows in my grief can quickly whip out some royal crabby-pants and proceed to wear them all day. Imagine my surprise, then, when I went four days without feeling the anxiety weight fall on my chest, pressing down into my heart. I went a week without needing to lean on the comfort of Memento Mori, knowing I’ll die one day and join my mama in heaven, yearning for that day. I’ve been totally disenchanted by the sheer length of life I am sentenced to bear without her. For the past two years, my baseline has been anxiety and anger. This week, I felt lighter.
And immediately became suspicious.
I think, no, this isn’t allowed! You’ll ruin it if you feel too comfortable! My scarcity mindset about how much happiness I am allotted came roaring back. Don’t get too comfortable, because your dad might die, too! Danny might have an accident! Ziggy is getting old! Everyone you love is one breath away from leaving you forever!
The drop from how much baseline hope I carried at 30 versus 32 is so steep that I fear having to make that drop again. If I allow myself to be too happy, something unexpected will happen, and I will end up at the bottom of the mountain again. It’s better to camp here and just wait my life out, right? Then I never have to worry about being disappointed. Just lower those expectations, girl!
But then I wake up to discover I am single (free from many obligations), in a lovely apartment, in a beautiful neighborhood with four cafes straight out of a movie, with a job that covers my expenses and a vocation that feeds my creativity. Well, I haven’t woken up so much as I started peeking out from the curtains of my heart. Tentatively. Quietly. Sometimes I’ll look around and be like, my God, this apartment is so big and colorful. These windows are so large. These flowers smell so good. This street is so picturesque. This job is so structured and clear. These friends are so genuine. This date is so fun.
My all-time favorite song is one I can’t listen to anymore because it reminds me so much of my mom, and how much my dad loves my mom. It’s an anthem about discovering how lucky you are. This is not my beautiful house! This is not my beautiful wife! But then realizing it was there the whole time. Same as it ever was…
Recently I’ve had many moments of standing and looking around and thinking, Well, how did I get here?
Last week I went to German Home Depot (OBI) and bought a bunch of plants. I bought pots for them. I can’t name a single breed (do plants have breeds?) but I gave them names of my own and put them around my room and told them they are beautiful.
A few days a week, in the morning, I hang out with a six year old (singer friend’s kid) and watch Avatar or Ninjago, take him to Kita, and I feel like I’m helping a family. On days I don’t babysit, I wake up, journal, do yoga, and sing. Then I sit at my desk and use my creativity to solve problems with my arsenal of words. Then I put on lipstick and headphones and do interpretive dance when I think no one is looking as I skip to the tram to do comedy. Maybe it’s five minutes on stage. Maybe only three seconds of those five minutes are me actually singing. But it makes me feel alive.
Or I go on a run and feel the strength in my thighs and the endurance I have gained.
Or I go on a date and learn about Flemish painting or the history of Samba.
Then I come home, drink tea, and go to bed in a lovely bed with a multicolored duvet that would greatly impress my sixteen-year-old self.
This week, the pieces of my life began to tell a new story. The shift from survival to enjoyment was subtle. It’s as if I accidentally leveled up in Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs and the only reason I noticed is because I stopped being angry all the time. Or at some point I just noticed I… wasn’t.
These days I approach bubbles of contentment with a scarcity mindset, which, as anyone who’s read a lick of Thomas Merton or Thích Nhất Hạnh knows, is baloney. I honestly worry that I burned through my allotment of good fortune in the first three decades of my life.
But that’s not how life works. That’s now how joy works.
The variation of my experiences got bigger. I’ve transferred my feelings to a bigger bucket. The plant outgrew the pot. If my depression and grief and woe can contain multitudes, shouldn’t my capacity for joy, as well?
Gorgeous