Sunnyside up
Not just my favorite egg
A way to be in the world
Not pretending, can’t do that
But steering towards the light
Can’t avoid the dark and grey
But I can keep the sun in mindsight
Breakfast of Champions
affirmation
A Perfect Ten
I was always ashamed of my hands as a child.
I bit my fingernails. I was always picking at the nail bed and tearing the nails. Though sometimes I made them bleed, there was a weird pleasure in the pain of that self-destruction in the moment it was happening. Later, regret set in, and then shame.
As a young girl, I would make play fake nails out of Elmer’s glue and stick them on, pretending I had lovely, long nails like the women I admired on TV and in magazines. They did not stay on very well, however. Just a few, brief moments of the illusion before they fell off, semi-hardened ovals of Elmer’s again.
I also had what I considered a misshapen right thumb. It was shorter and wider than my left. I hated my right thumb and it’s squat ugliness. I would sit on my hands in elementary school. Didn’t want anyone to see my defect, fearing it as outer proof of my innate defectiveness.
Around the summer between sophomore and junior years of college, I discovered artificial, or acrylic, nails. There were also, at the time, inexpensive, temporary stick-on nails available in stores, but for whatever reason, I never tried or trusted those. They were too obviously fake. They would never pass as my own. (So I would never pass.)
But the acrylic nails? They were an answer to my prayers.
These artificial nails were not a replacement, but an extension for natural nails. They involved the application of tips made of lightweight nail-shaped plastic forms that are glued onto the end of the natural nail. They would then don masks and brush on acrylic powder to cover the nail. Then an artificial nail is sculpted out of the acrylic and shaped and buffed to a shine.
In over an hour’s time spent in front of a nail salon employee, I, too, could have perfect, long, beautiful nails.
But the best part of it all was the polish.
I chose the richest and darkest red being made at the time. This was before get manicures and the myriad of colors of polish in fashion today.
I was drawn to the red. I had always loved old Hollywood glamour, so I guess that influenced my taste. Subsequently, I also started wearing red lipstick to match. It became my signature look in my last two years of college. (I also wore a lot of black before it was chic. I got a lot of comments on all of these things. I didn’t mind the attention as long as my nails were perfect.) My nickname was Maybelline.
After discovering acrylic nails, I fell in love with my hands. I felt more attractive in every way. Suddenly, my hands were available for self-expression and communication in a way they had never been before.
Great, right? So what if I had to pay a fortune. So what if I had to spend two hours each week in the nail salon breathing what must have been toxic fumes and having toxic substances put onto my nails in order to feel whole and worthy? Small price to pay if you ask then-me.
The problem is, when you rely on an external factor of your appearance for your sense of worthiness, you are depending on something that is transient.
And acrylic nails, while petty durable, were known to break off at times in-between salon visits. They were a system not without flaw.
If my acrylic-enhanced nails were less than perfect, I felt unpresentable, imperfect. Life had to stop until I could re-perfect myself again. But salons are not open 24/7. So that meant hours of waiting, feeling awful, until I could be restored to lovability again.
I remember literally plummeting to the depths of despair one time bowling with friends.
I am right-handed, so I was using my right hand to bowl. My “special” right thumb had trouble fitting into the thumbhole of the ball that fit the rest of my grip. It was a bit snug for it. And, well, you guessed it, disaster struck.
There I was, in all my shame, my deformity not only exposed but highlighted. The naked odd man out against perfect and polished siblings.
When I think back, I feel compassion for the girl I was then. Sad that my entire esteem of self was riding on such a superficial thing as my nails. But it was.
It took some years after college to begin to learn to let that kind of outwardly-obsessed perfection go. It symptomatically focused on my nails then, but that was not the only area of my appearance that suffered.
I have had to delve deep, to find my core self, the self worthy of love, having nothing to do with externals of any kind. I am still working on that one.
Perfectionism and obsessive-compulsiveness seem to be a shape-shifting animal that morphs from one area to another.
Whereas over the years my perfectionism has often been fixated on my appearance (nails, weight, sustaining a youthful appearance,) in the last 15 or so years it has also been on my career and accomplishments.
I am still working to find full value in myself just as I am. Nails or no. Big acting credits or no.
Today, I try to love who I am, how I look, just as I am. I try to enjoy the work I get and to treat every job as if it is “big time” because in my heart of hearts, where I don’t care if anyone else is looking or not, it is.
In over words, I am trying to live from the inside-out.
It is challenging. The outside world with all of its social media trappings and the business-of-acting business bytes is like a siren call that draws me off course to crash on the rocks.
Am I doing enough? Am I meeting the right people? Do I have the best headshots? The right representation? Am I in the right mindset? Am I relevant? (Yes, I have actually just recently gotten an email from an industry professional who council actors suggesting that as the focus of what actors must ask themselves. To whom? In what regards? And what if I am not relevant? Does that mean I should just stop pursuing what I love?)
And then there are the ever-present questions of well-meaning people: What have you been doing? What have you done that I would have seen you in? Anything big? Are you doing anything important? Yikes. So easy to slip off my own core-driven track of loving what I do and start to question my validity. Easy to feel lost at sea and doubt that I am on the right path, despite having a map that I love right in my own hand. Easy to feel like I have to use yours or hers or buy a new one in order to be marketable “enough” to feel worthy.
But thankfully, I know what is what. I may have to work hard to stay centered within my self some days, navigating the seas of the outer world that used to have such reign on my sense of worthiness, but today, I know what is what. And that is huge. I recognize the siren calls for what they are. I can course correct back to my own route.
I confess, I do still love nice-looking nails. Today, we have gel technology, so I only have to go to the nail salon once every two weeks. (I can barely stand to be in there. Some people love it. I just spent too many hours there for the wrong reason in the past to enjoy it. It is a reminder to me of where I have been. I do not want to go back to that.)
I have a new signature nail polish. It is called Always and Forever. It is a purplish nude matte color that is subtle, like a pink or a white without being pink or white. It is different, unusual. I love it. It suits who I am right now. Next year, it might be something different.
I do still wear red every so often. I enjoy the bright red shock of color. I always feel a bit more glamorous when I wear it.
My nails do not have to be perfect today. Neither do I. I am the captain of my own career ship most days, and the sailing is fine.
Inspired by The Daily Post Daily Word Prompt: polish
The Dance
When I was a little girl, I took dance lessons. From the age of 4 or so, I took, tap, jazz and ballet. I have vague memories of doing some kind of moving across the floor and the teacher saying “Jeté, jeté!” as we stepped from foot to foot.
I loved those lessons. There was a big dance recital, where my mom made costumes for me: I played a bumblebee and a munchkin.
When we moved to Dallas when I was 5, for some reason, the dance lessons stopped. It was a hectic year, and the business venture that my Dad had moved us there for failed, so after the year, we moved back to Houston, to a different part of town and a different set of circumstances. Finances were tight, so extras like lessons were put to the side.
But. I did not stop dancing. I would put my parents’ albums on the record player and dance my little heart out. This was way before MTV or dance videos. The only references I had were old Hollywood musicals, which I adored. So my dances were my own versions of what I had grown up watching: Fred Astaire, Ginger Rogers, Doris Day, Audrey Hepburn moving dramatically across streets and fields in passionate, emotive and song-filled scenes.
I had plenty to be working out. In my young life I had already suffered a great deal. But my trauma had been locked away tight in a safe room of my psyche, so I wasn’t consciously trying to tell any particular story through these dances. My body-mind just needed to move and my soul just needed to express through that movement.
Favorite songs were Wings’ “Live and Let Die” and most of the album “Whipped Cream” by Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass Band. But I would dance to just about anything.
The dancing stopped somewhere around age 11. By that time, I had discovered food and TV and they became a kind of narcotic, a way to numb out the confusing feelings and thoughts that made life difficult. They became my number one coping mechanism, and saw me through until the teen years when other substances became available and appealing to me.
Did I dance again? Sure. At dance clubs in the 80’s and 90’s, where alcohol and often drugs were a part of the mix. At weddings, always somewhat self-consciously. There were a few attempts to go back to dance lessons so that as an actor I could be more marketable for musical theatre. I’ve danced in musicals and loved every moment. But the kind of dancing that I did in that living room back when? Nope.
Through my 20’s and 30’s, I had pics of me from that recital in my costumes, beaming. I think I even still have a bumblebee wing. Over the years, I have often used those pictures as self-reference, proof that there had been a time when I had been confident, happy in my body and free-feeling. I looked to those pictures to try to find hope that perhaps one day, I could find those ways of being again. Through much healing over the years, I have made a lot of progress. I go deep in my work as an actor and singer, and work from a place of a great deal of freedom often. But it has always still seemed to me that the girl I had been – with her total lack of self-consciousness, innocence and creative freedom – was to be forever out of my reach no matter how hard I worked for it.
Then. Last week, a young director reached out to me and asked me to do his film. He’d had me in mind for the Woman in the script, he said, and he really, really wanted me to play her.
In the script, during the character’s most private inner moment, she transports herself through fantasy from her home bathroom to a gorgeous copper bathtub in a tiled tunnel in Central Park by the Bethesda Fountain. She is wearing a beautiful dress and a sax player is playing music in the background as she has this very free, very private, very joyful moment.
From the moment I read the scene, I imagined the woman dancing around the fountain.
I asked the director had he imagined the Woman staying in the tub in her private moment. He said yes, but that it was my private moment, and he wanted me to have complete freedom. (What a wonderful gift he gave me, that freedom. So grateful for his desire to collaborate.) So I had imagined my moments in the tub and was excited and curious for how the shoot would go.
I had not seen the location, so did not know that the tiled tunnel was a beautifully lit space that had arches in the background and copper hues, and that the tub would be placed in it, not near the fountain.
So that morning, as we arrived on location, when I saw the actual scene – the brick tunnel and the beautiful space that was surrounding the copper tub – and then heard the song the saxaphone player was to play, I knew that I had to dance out of the tub and around that beautiful tunnel.
And so on the first take, as the camera began to film, I began my private moment, made my way out of the tub, and I began to dance.
It was one of the most magical experiences I have ever lived. In the moments of my improvised dance, with the sax player playing for me and with me, the sun beginning to come up behind the fountain in the distance, hearing only the music and the echo of my own laughter, I felt myself dancing simultaneously as the woman I am right now and the little girl I was then. The tunnel and that living room became one across space and time. The joy that bubbled up through my body was total and whole, and it was such an honor to be in those moments bringing the Woman of the film and the director/writer’s vision to life.
Afterwards, we did more takes, and they were each wonderful but different in their own ways. There was no way to repeat that first take, and that was perfect too.
But I walked away from that shoot forever changed.
There are moments in life where you feel that you are in the exact right place at the exact right time doing exactly what you were meant to do. In those moments, you can see that every other moment of your life has been a part of the making of this one magical moment. Every thing you’ve lived, every person you’ve met — the good, the bad, the ugly — it all makes total sense in those moments.
Those moments are astonishing. They are when I know I am a wondrous creation, a part of the whole that is this incredible Universe. I know in those moments that my life has been intricately designed, just as a rose has, or a peacock, or snowflakes. That nothing in my life – from the worst trauma to the most brutal pain – has been for naught. That it has all led to this moment in time, to this me that I have become.
That dance is forever in my heart now. It lives inside me, and it is the beginning of a whole new level of personal and creative freedom. I do not know what will grow from it, but I know that I have re-awakened something important inside, and I am so very grateful for that role finding its way to me, for giving me back the Dance.
#actorslife #danceforever #theheartremembers #itsnevertoolate #TheDanceoftheHeart
Triggers and Pink Pussycats
I have been hard-pressed to write a blog since before Inauguration Day.
Like many, I am still processing significant losses that were, for many, contained in the recent election: the loss of President Obama, the loss of the America I thought I knew: the loss of the America of my own personal dis-illusion.
It took until two days after the Women’s March for me to realize how triggering the Inauguration and ensuing Presidency have been and are for me. I think I was operating in a kind of denial until then. While at the march, after first feeling incredibly hopeful, I began to feel uneasy. And after seeing that the march seemed to have had such little effect on the administration, it hit me.
I was triggered. Feelings of powerlessness were flooding my system. I was feeling overwhelmed with the sense that my truth, my voice was falling on deaf ears and was of totally no consequence. That things happening were not of my choice, and I had seemingly no recourse to stop them. Reality mirroring crucial traumatic events from my past blasted open the floodgates of remembered trauma.
I know I am not alone. Anyone who has been violated at some point in their life may be triggered again and again in the next four years.
So what can we do about it? How do we survive the daily onslaught of confirmations and executive orders and hard-won laws being threatened from powers-that-be?
Thankfully, I have found some very helpful posts that address this very issue. And if I cannot bring myself to write about usual things right now, I can write about why and I can share what I am doing to address the problem.
One of the best I have read is “How to #StayOutraged Without Losing Your Mind
Self-Care Lessons for the Resistance” by Mirah Curzer. Some great things to consider as we move forward, together.
Another article has been very helpful to me. N Ziehl’s “Coping with Chaos in the White House”. The author shares their experience of living with a person having narcissistic personality disorder (NPD.) I am not diagnosing anyone here. But this article spoke to me. It made a great deal of sense and gave me some helpful insights.
What I have been feeling are awful feelings to re-experience. But it was a relief to recognize that they are happening: to know that though there is a present reality that is indeed traumatic to me, there are many other layers happening that are from wounds from the past. Knowing this, I can let the current situation be “right-sized,” and then process the past triggered pain so that I can take good care of myself today. From this place of awareness, I can then take actions to do what I can in order to stay empowered and able to persevere the next four years.
I am finding for me, in addition to practicing the best self-care I can, taking actions each day that help me stay informed and connected to the lawmakers that I voted for, as well as those I did not, is crucial. These actions – calls, emails, letters, non-violent protests and marches, donating to re-election campaigns and organizations that I believe in – they keep me sane.
I am careful as I digest the information that pours forth on social media. I check in with my body, a lot, especially after getting shockingly bad news, such as the “alternative facts,” the travel ban, the recent confirmations, the silencing of Elizabeth Warren. I never know when something new will spark a trigger. I take deep breaths and ask my body what is going on, and I listen closely.
And I lean on my communities. I stay connected to like-minded people who are also active, because it is too easy to begin to feel hopeless as all of this unfolds. We can remind each other that there is power in love and that our actions and our voices do matter. They can remind me of the headway that is being made in our causes when I am feeling low. Together we can persist.
My artist friend Laura Baran created the “We are One” illustration at the heading of this post the weekend of the Women’s March. I keep her beautiful image near to remind me to keep love at the center of all I do.
I also reach for my “Don’t Sass the Cat” tee created by another friend, a clothing designer named Jacquie of jqlovesu. It reminds me to keep a sense of humor and to remember the power of love and of people who love people. I run and I sweat and I cry and I sleep and I work to stay hopeful no matter what by taking action.
I am a Lover of Humanity. I am an American. And I want to be a part of the solution. It will be work. But I have never been one to shy away from a challenge.
#neverthelessshepersisted #pussyhat #dontsassthecat #weareone #beapartofthesolution #loveaboveallelse
Altered
The course of my life was irreversibly altered in miraculous ways on a Wednesday night in January 2011.
The dictionary defines the word “alter” as the following: change or cause to change in character or composition, typically in a comparatively small but significant way.
If you’ve been reading my blog, you may have noticed that I am very interested in (aka obsessed with) the seemingly small moments that occur in life that often end up holding huge significance. Meanings that are unknowable at the time later reveal themselves. The course of history is changed in those small moments, the sometimes seemingly random decisions we make.
This is the story of one of those moments for me.
I had been having a tough time in the latter third of 2010. The whirlwind of my wedding and its aftermath had finally settled down, and the events of the years leading up to the wedding finally really hit me. I’d lost my mother, my brother and my father in succession, and I just sort of imploded.
That December, somehow, an email made its way through my inbox. (To this day, I am not sure how). Perhaps the angels sent it to me. It was about a movement class taught by someone named Erin Stutland. I had been unable to get myself to the gym for a year or so, and felt as awful physically as I did emotionally. Something in the description of the class spoke to me. It wasn’t just your typical workout class. There were affirmations involved. What?!
Something made me sign up. And on that Wednesday night of January six years ago, I went. Little did I know that meeting Erin would be the gift that just keeps on giving. Erin believes that movement in your body creates movement in your life and that all good things flow out of a deep self-love. I have seen and experienced firsthand the power of her philosophy in action.
Not only did Erin’s class start me on a new course in terms of movement for my body, but it helped me begin to make shifts in my relationship to how I thought about so many things.
And if that weren’t enough, I was welcomed into a community of women and men there, amazing people, many of whom I am still in contact with today. The work we did with Erin created powerful change for so many of us.
I have watched as people in that community made their dreams become reality. Major life changes such as weight loss (one woman lost 100+ pounds), career path changes (one woman fulfilled a dream she uncovered while in the class of becoming a minister), recording artist dreams realized, dream roles acted on stage and film, cross-country moves to dream jobs and cities, dream soul mates, marriages and babies born, and more.
One of my goals in the class was to find my inner athlete. Two NYC marathons and countless half marathons later, I can say I found her. It has been a deeply gratifying journey that continues.
My other goals had to do with my career as an actress, and finding more belief in my talents, in what I had to say through my art. I can actually say that the creation of this blog had its seeds in her class. Much of the positive movements I have made in the last 6 years grew forth from the mindset and the tools I found there, and were supported and nourished by the community there. That support and that community continues to this day.
I am so grateful for having met this beautiful, extraordinary and dynamic teacher, and for all of the gifts she has given to me.
I want to introduce you to her, too, because she is on the rise, and someone you should know. I am so proud of her and excited for her! (And for the many, many more people who will soon be benefitting from her expertise.)
You can find out more about Erin at her website here.
Erin is now a co-host on an exciting new show called Altar’d (perfect name!) that is set to debut this week!
Altar’d follows 6 couples who are looking to not only transform their bodies, but more importantly adopt healthy lifestyles and habits before they come together for the most important day of their lives, their wedding.
The first episode will be airing THIS TUESDAY, JAN 17th at 8pm on Z Living. You can read more about this show here. Take a look at the trailer below:
Here’s how you can tune in! To make sure Z Living is available through your cable provider, click here.
I cannot wait to see how this remarkable woman helps to shape the worlds of so many more as she gains exposure and continues to co-create the platforms to share her gifts.
I celebrate the growth and movement I have made in my life with Erin’s help since wandering into her class that fateful evening six years ago. I took a chance and I am so glad I did.
#erinstutland #altar’d #powefulchange #takeachance #loveisthekey
Beyond the Skinny Branches 