So what can I do about that?

I notice what is happening. I sit with the sensations in my body and allow this nervous system response to have its breadth of expression. And then it goes away. (Until the next time, haha.) Also, I am proactively not seeking out audience responses or reviews. I get enough of their response when I do the show. I know when I’m connected and we are having a good time together, and yes, perhaps there might be someone in the crowd who doesn’t quite resonate with my style of play, and THAT IS OK!! It doesn’t define me as a human worthy of love.

But, somehow, somewhere, deep in my nervous system, there is a story that critique means DEATH!!!!! It sounds absurd, and in a way it is, because, I am in fact, safe, and ok. And it’s JUST a Fringe Festival and I LOVE creating and sharing comedy and clown theatre. I am here workshoping a new show in front of a live audience and the experience is going so well. I can see what changes will happen for the next run, and I’m able to cut and expand bits at each show. I’ve done two performances of Queenage Wasteland for full houses so far, tickets are selling great and have six more shows to go.

So, I am aware of not putting “therapy” on stage, which means writing from the scars and not the wounds. It means being far enough away from the event that we as an audience are NOT ONE BIT worried about the performer on stage. They say comedy is tragedy plus time. A lot of my material stems from trauma and dysfunction, and I feel that I’ve done the work where these stories are absurd and hilarious to me, and in no way trigger a survival response pattern in my nervous system. Even though it’s not therapy, creating and performing the material itself is “therapeutic”. I am being called to step up, into the type of person who can do this, as well as expand my nervous systems capacity to remain regulated, or at least more regulated in the face of being critiqued.

I am a recovering people pleaser. The patterns to fawn for survival run deep. This means making sure everyone around me is happy and feeling good, even if it means sacrificing my own discomfort to ensure this. Why? There can be many reasons, but it all comes down to a primal feeling of survival. There are learned nervous system response patterns from past experiences that can motivate a person to be constantly ensuring folks around them LIKE you. This is so they don’t kill you, or abandon you to die. Sounds so dramatic, but this is what is happening in the nervous system and its story no longer matches the external situation. This is called incoherence. It is considered trauma when the the actual threat of death or abandonment is not present, but a nervous system response pattern is activated. A person stuck in fight, flight, fawn or flee when there is no imminent threat of danger has potential for illness, because that’s a lot of stress.

So what do we do? The first step is to even notice. Some people, aka, my younger self, don’t even KNOW that this is happening. They just live life in a mostly anxious state. So noticing is the first step.

A regulated nervous system is also called; Social Engagement, or Rest and Digest. A gurgling stomach is a good sign. Also, it must be mentioned that a regulated nervous system doesn’t mean calm all the time. An arousal or charge in the nervous system is normal for mobilization and maybe be called on in appropriate situations. An example I like is jumping out of the way, when something is coming at you. This is appropriate and coherent.

The nervous system, in a way, is breathing. Expanding and contracting with small, manageable cycles of charge and discharge. Again, the trauma cue, is when it gets stuck in one of the survival responses, or, goes beyond one’s capacity and into overwhelm. Too much expansion; dissociation, ungrounded. Too much contraction; anxiety, hypervigilance, shut down.

I fell in love with SOMATIC EXPERIENCING, because it is a tangible practice to support our nervous systems in being more and more regulated. Bit by bit this practice can grow our capacity to be with our discomforts, and guess what? Also to be with our JOYS and good feelings. Interestingly, a lot of folks are more challenged to sit in comfort, or to simmer in feelings of joy. But this makes sense if one has always had to watch their back.

A practitioner can support a person to learn and practice noticing and being WITH the self. I still see practitioners and can also practice by myself. These are skills, and skills I think kids should be learning along with math, science and art. (I have a new clown show idea for kids about befriending the nervous system. Grant submitted to Canada Council… come on big money!!!!!)

So, here at the Fringe Festival. I get an arousal when someone doesn’t quite like my work. THERE IS NO IMMINENT DANGER. I actually go into this flight response with just the IDEA that someone might not like my work. I know it’s ridiculous, but at the same time, I get it. In the steps of noticing, it is also accepting, and allowing this response to play itself out. It gets easier, and eventually there is no trigger. I have to say, that a clowning practice is so on par to somatic experiencing as we are noticing what is alive in the room (body) acknowledging it, being with it and allowing it’s breadth of expression.

I talk about it in Queenage Wasteland, but one time, a show of mine seemed to make a reviewer angry. Ok, sure it wasn’t the best show, but folks seemed to like it enough, and it received a 4 star review from another publication. However, this guy was admittedly mean spirited towards me, and gave me a zero star rating. Which now, is hilarious to me. (Tragedy + time = comedy).

But here is the traumatic part. I was just having a great time doing the show, and being WITH all of the folks who were laughing and having a good time.

I didn’t notice there was a sniper in the room.

So now, I’m kind of always on the look out for a sniper. Not everyone has to like me. I KNOW THIS. I accept this. In fact, I think it’s a beautiful gift to allow people to have the freedom and autonomy over their opinions of me. NONE OF MY BUSINESS. However, it takes some work for me to metabolize my nervous system response to the feeling that I MIGHT DIE!!!!

Man, what a trip. And also, a fucking joy and privilege to be in a position of creating and sharing art.

A Big Thanks to everyone who has come to see QUEENAGE WASTELAND thus far. I have received such heart felt private messages and have connected with so many QUEENS and CRONES and Crones in training! I feel an Underground Crone Network forming, and it is so fucking wonderful!!!!

Happy Fringing my loves!

Wide cut: A two-story suburban home, with a sprawling green lawn. The garage door is open. A red truck is parked with the hood up. We see two men leaning under the hood with their heads together, troubleshooting mechanical issues with the engine.

Cut to: A shot from inside the engine looking up at the men, and we see one is a dark-haired, ruggedly handsome man in his mid-forties. The other, his teenage son with brown feathered hair.

Dad: Son, hand me the sprocket wrench.

Teenage Son: Sure dad, is it this one?

Dad: You got it, kiddo.

Teenage Son: Uh, Dad, can I talk with you for a moment?

Dad stops tinkering, looks at his son, steps away from the truck, and begins wiping his hands on a towel.

Dad: You know you can talk to me anytime, son.

Teenage Son: a little shy and embarrassed… Dad? Sometimes, I just don’t feel…. fresh, you know? down there?

Dad: I’ve been wondering when we’d have this talk, son. Come here, I want to show you something.

Dad and the son walk around to the passenger side of the truck. Dad opens the glove box and pulls out a package of disposable wipes. A close-up on the package shows a stallion with its front hooves in the air, black mane blowing in the wind. A strong red font is written across the top: Stud-Man Penis Wipes.

Dad: Nothing can leave you feeling cleaner, more refreshed and confident than Stud-Man Penis wipes, son. Who’s a stud-man?

Son: smiles up at his dad. I am Dad.

Dad puts his arm around his son, in a one-armed hug and punches him on the shoulder.

Cut to slow-motion montage:

Dad throws the truck keys to his son.

Cut to: Son gives a big winning smile.

Cut to: Close up of the son’s hand closing the glove compartment.

Cut to: Son opening the side door of the truck for a pretty teenage girl, holding her books to her breast.

Cut to: truck driving away.

VOICE OVER: STUD-MAN Always fresh. Always confident.

This piece was written in response to ye old Massengill Douche commercials from the 80s that used to embarrass the hell out of me as a young teenager. Turns out, the vagina is like a self-cleaning oven and will flush itself out with its own juices. In fact, introducing soapy fluids, fragrances or vinegar, can alter the healthy balance of bacteria and the natural pH of the vagina and even cause bacterial infections.

I wonder who it was that decided we needed to a multi-million dollar shame campaign about cleaning our filthy vaginas? They told us a smelly vagina is a threat to a happy marriage as well as a moral failing. Buy something and keep that pretty little head occupied.

This satire was written as part of the process in building my new solo comedy show, Queenage Wasteland. It did not make the cut, so I share it here. What do you think?

View the commercial here:

How does one make a show? There are a myriad of ways. My previous show, LARRY for example, was written on its feet in a series of 10 minute cabaret bits that fed into a story arc. I threw in an opening, a closing and a dance number and there ya go, a show!

For this new piece, I wanted to try something different. I’ve had inklinga/ideas around; the Cure For Fear, or Confessions of a People Pleaser or Big Crone Energy but none of these drafts were coming through. I thought, I’ll write out as many memories that come to me or tickle my fancy and I’ll see what emerges. And, thus begins a strong daily writing practice, which leads to a certain combo of all three of these ideas!

Welcome to the world, QUEENAGE WASTELAND. A comedy about the pursuit of becoming a dangerous old woman. QW will premiere August of 2026. If you are curious how this show came into being, read on.

1. RESOLVE TO MAKE A SHOW

At the beginning of this year I decided that creating a new show would give me a greater creative purpose and satisfaction. The creation process is a state that I feel most myself in. Sure it can be challenging, but I find joy and satisfaction in working through those sticky bits. Having a creative project makes my life feel more meaningful. It lights a fire in my spirit, and gets me excited to get out of bed in the morning. Why else make a show? Because I want to.

2. SECURE A DEADLINE

I think a deadline might be the highest form of motivation for me. I can create until the cows come home, but without a specific deadline there is no need for me to commit to anything. So, with the decision to make a show made, I apply for a “bring your own venue” at the Edmonton Fringe Festival set for August 2026. I am accepted and it is official.

More deadlines will come. A write-up and photo is needed by April, even though the show isn’t finished by then. So I do it. Check.

3. FIND COMMUNITY SUPPORT

Feeling anxious? Why not try stand-up comedy? So I do, and it’s freaky and for a couple days I wake up and think, WHAT THE HELL HAVE I DONE?

What I notice, and what really pisses me off is that in sharing during class it feels like I am being hijacked by my nervous system. Excuse me? Why are my insides spazzing? I have fun material that I am excited to share, and now I can’t breathe and my heart is going to explode. When my nervous system leaps into action like that, I lose connection to my faculties for simple things, like listening to the audience. Perhaps listening to the audience is not so simple, but I’ve had years of training for this specifically, as it is one of THE MOST valuable skills in clowning.

Interestingly, as child raised femme with a certain amount of developmental trauma, I was conditioned to be a people pleaser, and part of my survival response is to be hypervigilant. Hypervigilance is a state of heightened alertness where your nervous system remains stuck in overdrive, constantly scanning your environment for potential threats even when you are safe. So, I’m familiar with tuning into whether I am being seen and heard or not. Any minor shift in someone’s vocal tone, or eyes flickering will show me that the listener is no longer present, or, perhaps even mad at me.

4. GET PROFESSIONAL SUPPORT (THERAPY)

It’s interesting that this hypervigilance could be used as a superpower in clowning, but it can also be a kryptonite in that all of that self focus can turn into extreme self-judgment and oppression. Fuck. I’ve been so self-oppressed. It feels embarrassing and shameful, even though I know intellectually that developmental trauma is a real thing. Apparently, I must have internalized all of the verbal lickins’ I received as a child, and now I can do it myself. Can, but don’t. As much as I can, I am aware when those thought-beatings invade my brain, and with a little discipline and awareness, I simply just don’t engage. Simple, but not easy. It’s a practice. I’ve learned that these are learned patterns, and they can be deep grooves or well worn brain pathways. Like bad habits, hard to break, but not impossible.

Anyhoo, in having the nervous system hijacked, everything is on high alert for possible impending attack. I think it might actually be impossible to be funny in this state. I mean, I guess some comedians do/have done their thing high on cocaine, but they must already feel very grounded and comfortable in what they are doing, before they speed up their heart like that. I don’t think I need to test that theory.

So I do that five week stand-up comedy class and it’s ACTUALLY fun. I feel that I break through a limiting belief that I can’t talk to an audience as myself. The five minute bit for our showcase, or what I like to call recital, goes well, and I think, now I only need eleven more five minute bits to make an hour long show. I know our recital audience is a very supportive audience, but I remember hearing some big belly laughs that come from being surprised. The nervousness I have this night comes mostly from worrying that I won’t remember my lines. With the Queenage Wasteland I have sixty minutes of jokes and stories to remember. It’s a good thing I can do hard things.

Contrary to popular belief you CAN teach an old dog new tricks, and it’s actually easier than teaching a new puppy old tricks. Not that I’m an old dog, but I’m between dog and old dog. I’m in that sweet sweet spot of mid life. I’m not kidding, it is really sweet. I’m having the time of my life.

5. FIND OTHERS ALSO MAKING A SHOW

I take a workshop with Karen Hines called Creating New Work Without Killing It. A person doesn’t need to pay for a workshop, but I think creating in community even if it’s a “solo” work is really important. It helps the work make sense and be relevant in a world where there are so many distractions and directions that a person can place their focus.

After that workshop I form a club with my pals Tahina and Heather. Our comedy coven. We start meeting every two weeks to coach each other. We share what we are working on, and talk out what our next steps are and give ourselves homework. At this point in the process, my show has a name and a write up and there are a few anchor pieces, but it is wildly different from what it has become.

6. TALK IT OUT

I enlist another hilarious friend who knows comedy and give her something as an exchange so that we can spend our evening talking out my show. She keeps making faces, and not the good kind. I realize that there is some material that doesn’t seem to phase me that is quite disturbing to her. She says, how are you going to lift the audience back up after taking them down there? In talking it out with her, I also realize that I don’t actually want to play a bunch of characters and would ideally like to be myself on stage. (!!!) So I scrap a lot of what I had created and expand on the bits that I love.

This is my show and I get to do what I want in it. I want to LOVE being in it.

I decide to take the stand up comedy class again. Katie-Ellen Humphries is an amazing teacher in Vancouver, BC and I know this be a fun and safe space to share the jokes and stories I am working on. I have never gone to an open mic, and frankly, at this point in my life, I don’t want to nor do I plan to.

I am only able to do half of the stand-up class this time, as I am heading to Europe to open musically for a class act named Frazey Ford. My harmony pal Caroline Ballhorn and I have been singing in the kitchen for over 15 years, and suddenly we need a name and an online presence. We decide on the Sawtooth Stars, as we are both connected to fabric arts and a Sawtooth Star is a gorgeous quilting block pattern as pretty as its name. This whole experience is for another story, but, as we tell our audiences, it’s never too late to follow your dreams, and as Caroline says; It’s never too late for her to become a child acrobat.

In the second round of stand-up comedy class, it happens again. I am very excited to share a bit that I am working on, but when I go up to share for the class, I start shaking and my heart starts racing. FUCK. Calm the fuck down, Candy. What is this? I do the somatic practice where I notice what’s going on in my body without trying to change it. I feel you heart. But it doesn’t work in THAT moment. Tahina, who is also an actor and clown and movement teacher at the Vancouver acting school tells me to move that energy through and use it. Shake it out, or jump up and down, she suggests.

This does the trick. Of course. I am reminded of the clown shake-down practice and am having a deeper understanding of the bio-kinetic release we do in clowning. We are discharging stored energy from the past, and also, it seems from the present. Shake it out! Shake it out! Amazingly, each time after this, I enter the stage with a grounded excitement. Ugh. Finally.

7. DISTILLING THE WRITTEN WORD

I get to present at three of the classes before heading to Europe and I share a different bit from my show each time. I come up with the bits from a process of taking the written, literary word from the page of my essay and then putting them into a more natural conversational form. It’s a distillation practice of deciphering the key information that I want to impart, and then, often what I think about said information. This may come as a comparison, or an unlikely surprising connection to another idea, which is usually where the joke comes from.

Katie-Ellen likens our first tight-five to the five point essay structure. As a non-academic intuitive writer, I have to ask what it is. This organizational form really makes sense to me. You have your thesis, three points to prove your thesis and a conclusion. BAM. Mine is: Growing up, everyone seemed to know I was destined to become a clown. I give three funny examples and a conclusion. A whole show has it’s own thesis with the scenes/bits supporting this.

And then, off to to Europe I go and put the show aside for three weeks while I have an experience of lifetime playing gorgeous rooms for listening audiences in Milan, parts of Germany, Holland and Belgium. I am very grateful.

Home, and I am back at it again. I continue with the enlisted support of Tahina Awan as dramaturg and director. At this point, we are working mostly dramaturgically on the script. I want an arc and an emotional journey and to have it wrap up neatly. I pay Tahina so that it is official and I don’t have to feel selfish for spending chunks of time focusing on me and my process.

Tahina guides me in grounding and warming up and continuously reminds me that we are not SELF-EDITING. We are in a non judgemental space where I can be cringey and awful and read out bits that are embarrassing in delivery. As I read out, or tell Tahina stories and jokes from my writing it becomes clearer what sounds off or unnatural being said out loud. We also figure out which stories are important to the overall arc of the show. There are so many stories and jokes and many of them get cut. You can’t tell a lifetime in one hour.

8. DON’T WORRY ABOUT THE ENDING

As the story is unfolding, the parts that are important are floating to the top. I want to wrap it up and put a bow on it, but that is not possible until all the parts show themselves to me. I leave the ending kind of loose and frayed knowing it will wrap up when it’s ready to wrap up. Spoiler alert: I find the ending!

9. RESIDENCY?

There are many ways to create a residency for yourself, especially if you are connected to any theatres or community centres or a friend with a big house. This is where you take a chunk of time, 3 days to a week or more of focused intensive time. Better yet to know you are going to do a showing at the end to really light a fire of motivation. I have found residencies or intensives to be invaluable and efficient to the creative process.

I am blessed to have built relationships with folks who work in the theatres around BC and have built my own residencies that do not involve any money. As in, I do not get paid, nor do I pay the theatre. Many organizations want or need to support artists as part of their mandate, so make a proposal! I will work in your empty utility room, not in use space, and offer a community showing or workshop in exchange.

Tahina and I go to Oliver, BC and work for 4 days in the gorgeous Venables Theatre and do a community “Work in Progress” showing on the last day. Being that time is limited you can be sure we are there to start at 9 am each day and stay some days until 7pm. Working on a big stage looking out at 400 empty seats can really expand one’s vision.

10. WIP (Work in Progress) SHOWING(S)

I do this at the end of my residency and will now take the show back to the studio for a couple of weeks in July. I am organizing another showing for the Vancouver community for late July. People have different opinions about talkbacks. I like to know what the audience LOVED, what they connected to, and also if and where they were bored or were confused. Then it will be back to the studio to work out any kinks or rewrites.

11. GET MORE PROFESSIONAL SUPPORT

Apparently, the sharing of my show in Oliver, though it went really well, brought up a lot more family grief, and what feels like, a universal grief. Maybe it’s the digging around in my psyche, maybe the sharing of funny stories that have deeper lay lines, but holy bujeezus, I am literally slapped in the face with grief. I see a somatic practitioner to support me in sensing through the uncomfortable feelings and once again, stretch my tolerance, my capacity to be WITH what is here.

I am not a fan of people putting “therapy” on stage. I love the phrase; “Write from the scar, not the wound.” Meaning, that the sharing comes from a certain level of healed reflection, wisdom, and perspective. This is important as a care for oneself as well as for the audience. No audience is comfortable when they are worried for the performer.

My intention is always to create a shared space of joy, surprise, humour and emotional transport.

12. DO THE DEADLINE SHOW!

For me this will be Aug. 14th to the 23rd at the Edmonton Fringe Festival. Happily, I’ve also added three shows at the Sunset Theatre in Wells, BC August 6, 7 and 8th. I love that theatre is alive. Queenage Wasteland will find its groove. Parts will get cut and new parts will be added along the way. Tis the nature of the work.

So there! That’s it from me today, where I write from Rhizome Springs on Salt Spring Island. I am attending FOOLS PROOF Clown camp facilitated by the one and only Nayana Fielkov. We are only halfway through the first day, but I am thinking a reacquaintance with clown fundamentals like this would be such a gift to myself to do every year.

Thanks for reading.

He didn’t do this out of desperation, but simply because it made sense. If there’s one thing that sticks with me from my mom and my grandpa, it’s to leave a place better than you found it. That phrase is practically burned into my brain and has me tidying up the Airbnb before leaving, or cleaning my hotel room for the cleaners. I feel that a little extra effort goes a long way. Either that or I’m a schmuck.

Grandpa walked every day. I’m not kidding. He walked for an hour and a half to two hours every damn day. His attitude was, well, I’m out here anyway, might as well clean up the trash, and I might as well return the bottles and cans for cash. He’d use that can money for gas.

This was my Mom’s Dad. Grandpa lived to be one hundred, and I think it was because he was responsible for his five adult children and his garden. He gardened, canned salmon, made jam, cleaned the house and made lunch for the cleaning lady, as well as his daily walking all the way up until his last winter at ninety-nine years. That’s when the doctors broke the news that he had terminal cancer and was going to die. Maybe not tomorrow, maybe not next year, but soon enough. Did they really have to tell him that? He’s ninety-nine! Of course, he’s going to die.

Grandpa lived through the depression, and certain ways stuck with him. One thing we all remember about Grandpa was his new potato soup. Every year, upon the first harvest of baby potatoes, Grandpa made his traditional garden-fresh vegetable soup that featured a hunk of bologna. Not the packaged pre-sliced reconstituted meat, but a fresh slab from the deli. Grandpa would cut it into square chunks that would float around his homegrown vegetables. He could have purchased any type of meat, but bologna was it. It’s just what you did.

I have a photo of Grandpa with a wheelbarrow full of garlic that he grew. Whenever I went to his house for a visit, I always left with a reused plastic Safeway shopping bag full of beats. Candice loves beats, he’d say.

Grandpa kept a journal. It was to the point; the weather. Also, was something planted, or harvested? Was there some pertinent info or an extraordinary event? Did he write it down when his daughter was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s at only sixty years young? Grandpa outlived his own daughter, my mom, by about 2 weeks. I don’t think he liked that. I think that’s when he probably decided it was time to go.

I, too, keep a journal. I check off boxes when I complete my daily practices, like writing and yoga. I write down pertinent information, like moods, bowel movements and extreme states. One time, while trying hard to be ok in a non-ethical, non-monogamous relationship, I had 16 days in a row of overwhelm. I can look back and see cry-faces on each day. I wrote down the day my mom passed. It’s all there. I like to wonder about the patterns.

I come from collectors. My Dad was also a bottle and can collector. He’d roll up and down his street on his bicycle, collecting cans from the side of the highway. Just like my Grandpa, he’d use the money he got from the cans to put gas in his scooter. Though he wouldn’t know that, since my Dad wasn’t in communication with Grandpa in the wake of cheating on Grandpa’s daughter with her brother’s wife. (Yeesh.)

After Dad got a DUI, from driving drunk down to the liquor store, he probably used the can money for booze. Like my Grandpa, he didn’t do it for the money. My dad was well enough off. A humble means, but still a nice renovated trailer to his name on a piece of property outside of Courtenay on Vancouver Island. When Dad died, we found large plastic bags full of cans in his shed. There was also a bag with what had to be over a hundred of what we called forty-pounders of plastic vodka bottles. Those babies were from him alone.

My brother has also spent time collecting cans. There was a time when his back deck would be covered in giant bags full of empty beer and soda cans. He put word out to friends, family and neighbours that he was doing a “bottle drive,” and then drove around and collected their empty cans. In a community like Campbell River, his pals have a lot of empty beer cans. He raised over $3,000 to send his kids to choir camp. So fucking resourceful, bro.

I also had a time collecting cans from the alleyways, but I was on the hunt for old soup and bean cans. I had a vision to make a couple of musical percussion hoop skirts out of tin cans, so I went out hunting the night before recycling pick up. I had a few run-ins with the usual can-collecting suspects of the neighbourhood. Typically, older asian women wearing a visor, gloves and some incredible power-clashing patterned outfit. I imagined them bringing their finds to the big crone energy boss lady, mafia-type, lord Canpin, as she sits and snarls upon her throne made of alley-scores. I’d meet these ladies over the recycling bins for our wordless exchange. They’d stop, look me up and down, and eye me suspiciously as I rooted around for the tin cans and them for returnable cans. What is she doing? I imagined them thinking, Are soup cans worth something now? We have to tell the boss.

Well, I made those soup-cans worth something. Those tin-can skirts have gone on to make me over $20,000 in 10 years.

I come from collectors, and I come by it honestly. It’s in my roots. We take what we find, and we make it work. We make it matter, and we make it better.

As artists, how do we maintain that open, vulnerable and sensitive state while also being “thick-skinned” towards the haters? Can we create from a broken-open-hearted state of divine dissatisfaction, while still nurturing creativity?

How does one (ahem, me) become more resilient towards criticism? I know some folks who don’t seem to give a lick about whether others like them or their art. They seemingly continue to create with unabandoned and relentless fervour. Dang.

It seems that when faced with a challenge, we can either give up or become more determined. But how do we find resolve when mistakes, a desire to be better at our craft, or some outside critique sucks the joy and life out of what was originally a childlike and gleeful creative experience?

This is sounding like grit. Grit is described as “working strenuously to overcome challenges and maintaining effort and interest over time despite failures, adversities, and plateaus in progress.” In psychology, resilience is one of the five characteristics of grit, which also include: Courage, Conscientiousness, Perseverance, and Passion.

On a personal level, this last week, I got a teensy bit of negative feedback on an artistic piece, and it rocked me to my core. I can for sure say that it didn’t even come from a respected colleague, mentor, or someone with any sort of expertise. It wasn’t even constructive. It was something more like: they didn’t understand it, and they didn’t like it.

I am gutted and surprised at my reaction. In sensation, my breath leaves my body in a whoosh. My gut grips itself and pulls upward. I cry.

I bring this topic of cultivating resilience to my coaching class to brainstorm. In coaching, the coach doesn’t give advice; instead, they listen, reflect, and ask powerful questions that instigate the coachee to come up with their own answers.

The story that emerges through these sensations is that, not only am I unworthy of being loved, but I am also a bad person. I am morally wrong. I am an abominable, who shouldn’t be here, let alone be making art. Oh, hello shame.

Is it just me, or is unworthiness getting kind of boring?

Nervous System: That’s it, I’m outa here.

Brain: Get a grip, Candy. YOU GET TO MAKE ART. Fuck this, get back to it.

Nervous system: But, I will be abandoned, I WILL DIE.

Brain: That’s ridiculous.

Nervous System: EMERGENCY! EMERGENCY! Sound the ALARMS, there’s been a breach! PULL BACK! PULL BACK!

What the hell? How can I be morally wrong, just because someone doesn’t like what I have made? I wouldn’t even say my work is that controversial.

This experience is directly related to the FAWN response. Fawning is rooted in developmental trauma that shows up as people pleasing or co-dependent tendencies as a survival response. If someone doesn’t like my art, they don’t like me; therefore, I’ve done something bad. Fawning puts a person in charge of managing the moods and emotions of those around them. Phewf. That’s a lot of unnecessary responsibility.

My upbringing taught me that one needs to be good and agreeable to be loved and accepted. Being a clown-artist, showing my underbelly and holding up a mirror to all has put me in a rather dangerous position, but I’ve been making plays, costumes and characters for as long as I can remember. I was making them before I even knew it as a thing in the world. Perhaps this is part of my purpose in this process of artistic expression: to rebalance and release the inherited shame, guilt, and unworthiness lodged in the nervous system.

I do understand that a nervous system flare-up to criticism partly comes from a Negativity Bias, which is described as:

I always explain it like this:

It was valuable to present this topic to a coach to dig deeper into these false ideas that I could be morally wrong and a bad person if my art is negatively received.

I already knew the outcome I would come to: Work with my somatic practitioner to have support in noticing the physical sensations related to this experience, and also, reignite a morning practice of conscious breathing.

The nervous system holds a story, and it expresses this story through physical sensations, images, emotions, movement impulses and meaning-making. A halted, or stuck, survival response pattern (freeze, flee, fight or fawn) needs to be heard and sensed to be completed and released.

Is it that simple?

In theory, maybe, but one has to have the awareness to first notice, and then the gumption to be present with these uncomfortable and sometimes painful sensations.

This is where a somatic experiencing practitioner is helpful. I like the word “practitioner” because, somatically sensing, IS a practice, and once one becomes familiar with it, they can begin to practice on their own.

One can get caught up in the storm of spiralling, splashing and grasping for their very life. A somatic practice can expand our nervous system’s capacity to be present with any discomfort associated with emotional or physical pain, grief, rage or shame, without going into the freezing, fleeing, fighting or fawning overwhelm. This practice also expands our capacity to be more fully present in JOY and PLEASURE, too!

And with that- Resilience. BOOM.

I’ll end with this idea of the blessed unrest of an artist, and a quote from dancer, Martha Graham:

“No artist is pleased. There is no satisfaction whatever at any time. There is only a queer, divine dissatisfaction, a blessed unrest that keeps us marching and makes us more alive than the others.”

This positive and energetic force is not to be confused with self-loathing and unworthiness. Divine dissatisfaction is a constructive discontent and a healthy, relentless drive. Perhaps we allow the struggle to be folded into the process, as part of the art.

We are born to be loved. That’s my story, and I’m sticking to it.

Coaching, clowning and Somatic Experiencing are all practices which support a heightened capacity to be present and be available to respond to the here and now. We are strengthening our ability to trust our impulses and to connect more deeply with ourselves and others. We are cultivating our curiosity and self-understanding while expanding our tolerance for discomfort. We are cross-training for a coherent nervous system so that we can be available to be with what is here and now and respond appropriately to the moment.

• Do you desire more presence and clarity in your life?

• Would you like stronger resilience, accountability and follow-through?

• Are you looking to sustain and cultivate intrinsic motivation?

• What is getting in the way of your ideal dream-life?

• Is there a pattern you are stuck in?

I’m offering Somatic Coaching at a discount rate of $75.00 a session until I am certified. Book a free consultation call to see if this feels right for you. :)

BOOK A SESSION WITH CANDY

I am currently on tour with the Myrtle Sisters, resting in Kamloops en route to Golden, BC. What an honour, truly, to be playing some lovely soft-seat theatres throughout this gorgeous province. Our last stop was at the Venables Theatre in Oliver, situated on the traditional, ancestral, and unceded territory of the Syilx/Okanagan people, specifically located within the lands of the Osoyoos Indian Band. We are talking about high desert, blue skies, sagebrush, and tumbleweeds. Oh, and wine. A heck of a lot of vineyards and wine tours.

Today, I’m writing about my latest inquiry, the subject of my work-in-progress, which will premiere later this year.

The show, in its working title, is called: QUEENAGE WASTELAND. An epic journey through the wastelands of what we discard and what we keep on our quest for Big Crone Energy. I say we, as in the grand we, if you indeed are one of the ones who chose to journey also.

And what is it, this Big Crone Energy?

It’s just that. An energy. A vibe. It is the embodiment of equal parts love, wisdom and peace with a generous portion of regulated I-have-no-fucking-time-for-your-claptrap. It is the time when the nice-ness filter grows thin to non-existent, and the bullshit-detector rises to an all-time high. It is the time to accept yourself, your body, mind, and spirit, utterly and completely. Can it be so? Imagine, standing in alignment with the sun, moon and stars, trusting and knowing your place in the universe. How might that feel?

Sadly, we have been socially handicapped by the patriarchy and many men have been conditioned to miss out on numerous subjective, nonrational, nonverbal, feeling-tinged, connection-based experiences, but alas, exceptional men can be crones too. Growth-based, curious, open-hearted, open-minded, compassionate people across all spectrums of gender can cultivate BIG CRONE ENERGY.

To have BIG CRONE ENERGY is to BE in one’s power. It is an “I own this experience. I own my age, my appearance, my joy, my rage, my grief.” It is not a power over, but a power with. It is a power within.

BIG CRONE ENERGY vows first to cause no harm, and second, to whatever the fuck pleases thee.

My mom was so scared. She taught me to be small. “Do not rock the boat,” she said. “Do not question authority.” Of course, I would ask her, “Why?” Which rocked her boat, and she would respond, “Because that’s just the way it is, OK??? Stop asking questions!!” I’m glad I never stopped asking questions.

Fear, repression and suppression got to her. Sidenote: Repression is the unconscious and involuntary blocking of unpleasant thoughts and memories, while suppression is the conscious, intentional act of pushing down unwanted feelings. My mom taught me both, and it’s been a lifetime of unlearning and relearning.

At the relatively young age of sixty, my mom was diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer’s. The first thing to go was her ability to speak, and then we watched as she faded away in front of our very eyes. They say women disappear as we pass through midlife. PLEASE!! I do not want to disappear, unless there comes a time when, by my own choice, I don a cloak of invisibility.

I think a person who continually grips tight with fear and stress becomes vulnerable in body and mind to get sick. I mean, just ask Dr. Gabor Matte.

He argues that roughly 80% of cases of autoimmune disease are in women and is brought about by chronic stress, emotional repression and trauma. It’s not that it’s a gender issue, but a cultural one, where women are often culturally conditioned to prioritize others’ needs over their own.

He goes on to talk about the “Type C” personality, characterized by being overly nice, passive and self-sacrificing to keep the peace. He says that suppressing emotions, particularly anger lead to the chronic secretion of cortisol (stress hormone), which, in due course, dysregulates the immune system.

That was my mom, and that is how she taught me to be. To care for one’s own needs was selfish. And, boundaries, anyone? I’m still learning to give boundaries without feeling like I’m being mean.

So, I’ve been musing about the shift from the classic archetype of The Maiden, Mother, Crone Trinity, to include the nuanced space that resides between the Mother and Crone: The Queen. The sovereign woman. I’ve been saying for a while now that I feel like some sort of teen-elder. I’m in a transition phase, experiencing a second coming of age, a reverse puberty if you will. A Queenager.

I am the first sovereign woman in my ancestral line. Sovereign in this sense of having autonomy over my choices. (As much choice as one can have in a patriarchal capitalist white supremacist society.) What a privilege to have choice.

Hear that. It is the year 2026, and I am the first sovereign woman of my ancestral line. My mother was the first woman in our family to have her own credit card. My grandmother, before her, wasn’t allowed to learn to drive and had to ask her husband for permission to go out into the community. She wasn’t allowed to go out in public while pregnant. How shameful!!

As a sovereign woman, I chose a creative lifestyle. I did not marry and have children like my ancestors were supposed to, and did. My sister was the first person in our family to get a higher education. I put higher in italics, because it refers to me scoffing. That this higher education is gate-kept, institutionalized and financially unattainable is bullshit.

You know what’s higher than higher education? Clown school. Clown school saved my life. Clown school brought me home to my body, my intuition, my presence, and taught me to move through the world with integrity. Integrity as in wholesome to include the beauty, the ugly, the shame, the joy and the pain, warts and all. In Clown school, I learned how to listen to and trust my impulses, and I followed them to stumble upon a career of laughter. I play the fool from a place of growing wisdom, awareness, and experience and share my underbelly while failing, falling, and being rejected time and time again.

As a sovereign woman, I hopped on and off chicken buses through Central America with my djembe and didgeridoo, as you do. I was definitely not always safe, and, amazingly, I was only one-time not-raped. I say not-raped because I gave in and let him, so that I wouldn’t have to be raped. I don’t mean he was holding me down, or being violent, I mean he was relentlessly groping me while I was trying to sleep and would not take NO for an answer. We weren’t even making out, just sleeping side by side in our own sleeping bags. I may have been sovereign, but alas, I am not a dude, and this dude wanted his dues.

This is a scar, not a wound. If anything, there was once a shame that it was my bad for thinking this dude was my friend, and we could go have beers and wander the night and find a hostel as pals can do. No need to feel scared or sad for me. I survived, and the shame has been replaced with a fuck-you-men that still needs some processing. Can you blame me? I am wary of men, but more than that, I am weary of them. What do they say? #notallmen, but #alwaysaman.

The patriarchy, the grand they, really tried to keep women from becoming sovereign. They warned us away from becoming horrible old maids, spinsters, cat ladies or lonely old crones. Don’t become an undesirable spinster, they said, best you get married and do all of the unpaid labour while the main character-husband makes all the choices. What a hustle! Turns out, a spinster was a woman who became financially independent from spinning and weaving. Hmmm.

Today, there is a reclaiming of the word crone, in that it is related to la corona, or crown and that it represents a woman who wears a crown of her experience. Historically, it relates to a carcass. Nice.

Some feminist folklore claims that the word hag, is derived from hagia, or holy one. Alternatively, hag is an ugly, disagreeable old woman. Why do they have to throw in ugly?

The male equivalent of these terms? Bachelor. Or as the internet tells me, a single older man is a man who never married. The end.

And I could go on. We have terms for an aggressive older woman: hellcat, harpy, harridan, she-devil, shrew, termagant, virago, witch, battleaxe, beldam, shrew, bag, biddy, nag.

For men? Well, there are a couple: curmudgeon, codger and old coot (I like that one, and I think I’m going to start using it.) The rest of the terms for “men” are simply describing words for “someone” who is cantankerous.

As a sovereign Queenager, I am living the life that the patriarchy warns us against. I am the dangerous virago who lives alone in her cozy home full of art and space. I am that childless self-employed spinster who enjoys slow mornings and slow cooking. I am an artist termagant, rich in creativity and expression. I am that she-devil with two handfuls of intimate relations of the highest quality. Poor, poor, lonely hag. (Insert cackle.)

I implore you, for the sake of the earth, for peace, for the children, men, women, all-rounders and in-betweeners; let us, as we age, do so with intent for wisdom and love as we cultivate our BIG CRONE ENERGY. To age is a privilege. May still waters run deep.

I am picking at an apple inside my paper lunch bag at the foot of my desk. I am burrowing, with my finger, a perfectly little round hole in the apple. Like a wormhole it is. I imagine a little muppet worm poking its head out of this perfect circle. With each scrape of my fingernail, I put the tiny apple shrapnel in my mouth. I notice Quinn, at his desk one row over, looking at me. He has a perturbed look on his face. “You are so weird,” he says. I am so weird, I repeat in my mind. I haven’t considered that before. I am so weird.

I hear a vacuum coming down the hall, getting louder in the distance. Oh fuck, she’s coming. I jump to my feet and lose my balance. I feel like my head is too heavy, and I crash softly into the mirrors. Wait, I’m sleeping now. So sleepy. I’m on the shag carpet floor as the vacuum slams into and opens the door. The sound fills my ears, but I’m too heavy to get up or look up. Mom, I’m down here. I have no voice. The Vacuum roars up loud next to my sleeping head and vacuums around me like I’m a piece of furniture.

The usual: a circle of cars, tailgates, a bonfire and stereo wars. Of course, there are boys. Everyone is stinking drunk. I’m making out in my car with this little guy named Mike. I like him. I want to lie down and make out with him in the tent, but he doesn’t want to go. I am still a virgin, but I have begun giving out blow jobs. Mike doesn’t get one.

Dad has a bunch of us kids out fishing in the boat. He’s trying to untangle my brother’s fishing line. The boat is gently rocking side to side on the calm lake. We are all watching my dad. He’s swearing, which is nothing we haven’t heard before. God-damn-cock-sucking-whoring-fuck-face. All dads drink, and all the dads swear, as far as I know. Our eight-year-old ears have heard worse. His self-described meat hooks are fumbling with the tangled line, and now we ARE surprised as he stands up and hucks the entire fishing rod and reel, with a for-fuck’s-sake, into the drink. Our eyes widen, maybe, just a little bit terrified now. Dad grins a big smile and says, “Whatya say we go for a little rip around the lake?” And for a rip around the lake we go.

The mother reaches down in disgust and says. Your bra is showing. I realize that I have no clothing on my bottom half, and my ass and legs are spread out on the carpet. It feels scratchy and gritty, like there is sand in the polyester fibres. The mother is looking down on me with disapproval and disappointment. I know I shouldn’t be naked or sleeping.

Ronnie’s voice wakes us. “Ewwww!” Some disgusting person took a shit in the middle of the campsite! “Ew!” I exclaim, along with everyone else. Echoing the revulsion around me. “Ya, gross, who would do that?” I know who did it, though.

I can dress myself now, but I am playing and haven’t done so yet. I think we might be running late for something, though that thought does not enter my mind. Mom likes to be early so we can wait when we get there. We are to look tidy and well-put-together, so that people know we are a good family. All I know is that she is very mad. She asks if I’ve changed my underwear. I try to lie a bit, but it comes out that I did not, indeed, put on clean panties. She whips them off my little body, and they tear as she pulls them down over my head. I am to wear the underwear around my neck. I am disgusting.

We are in the McDonald’s parking lot. I’m so hungover that I puke on the inside of the driver’s door of my car. I tried to pull over, but didn’t make it in time. My friends, trailing behind me in another car, laugh so hard. We are gross teenage drunkard dirtbags.

Integrity? What’s this? Self-worth? Never heard of her. I am a junk drawer full of crumbs, dirt and random items that might have a use one day. I am a piece of garbage without a proper disposal system. I am a tangled brain, a delusional dream, a maybe-later, and a we’ll-see. I am a burp in a purse and a fart-propelled bicycle.

This week, I am participating in a six-day creative workshop with the illustrious Karen Hines. It is called: “Developing New Work Without Killing It”

DEVELOPING NEW WORK WITHOUT KILLING IT walks you through practical, effective, and powerful exercises to begin writing, break through blocks, or focus and deepen your work if you are close to completion. Work at any stage is welcome: the desire to write is more important than having a full production in mind.

Karen is a (real) Canadian playwright known for her Pochsy Plays. I knew of her as the director for the Canadian Clown Duo, Mump and Smoot. You can even read about her in the Canadian Theatre Encyclopedia. I never knew about this Theatre Encyclopedia until I just now looked her up.

I am developing a new show to have its WIP (Work in Progress) world premiere at the Edmonton Fringe Festival in August 2026. When does a work stop being WIP? I’ve been seeing friends show their WIP for years. I guess it’s a personal choice. I very well could just slap this baby up and say: There. Done. It’s theatre, and theatre to me is very alive. I permit myself to shape my shows as they see fit. They grow and evolve as do I.

In this class, we are using Haikus and plenty of exercises, both explicit and oblique, to work with our ideas. Oblique: not explicit or done in a direct way. In previous workshops with Karen, I was calling this “writing adjacent,” but now I understand there is a term for this. To me, it seems to be a way of tricking yourself into writing about an idea that can sometimes get blocked by its “preciousness”.

Two years ago, I entered this very same workshop with the idea of writing about “BIG CRONE ENERGY” and ended up writing about my Mom. Two years later, and I’m seeing how all of the accumulated bits of work relate to my quest for the Big Crone Energy, and why I need to source it, and the mentors of it, out.

My new work is now obliquely connected to Big Crone Energy and my Mom, but now centres the second coming of age of the sovereign women. I’m not going to get too much into the content of what’s brewing in my show. Instead, I’m going to share some of the content churning out from the exercises in this class, which obliquely relates.

One of our golden values in class in Non-Jugement. This is for each other and most of all for our own selves. What if we were to create content without judgment and self-editing? How might that be? This class is about quantity; we can scrap whatever we want whenever we want, but you need to have some content for the ability to scrap something. Non-Judgment also means not sharing effusive compliments- I LOVE THAT! YOU MUST KEEP IT! We don’t want to influence the creator into keeping or killing; something might be brewing.

Karen teaches us about PUNCTUMS. This is my own understanding of a punctum: “That which pierces your soul.” Karen says, it’s the something that you will remember a year later. We offer our punctums with each other when we share our bits of writing, they may look like;

These are real punctums that I wrote from other people’s works. When I look up punctum in the dictionary, it speaks of the small puncture made by an insect. The dictionary doesn’t know the bite of art, and how it can puncture your psyche and change you forever.

For our first night of homework, we are to gather five quotes about writing. It’s hard to choose. Two years ago, I simply googled “Inspiring quotes about writing", but this year I specifically went to the books and authors who have inspired me since then. There was something in “Big Magic” by Elizabeth Gilbert that struck me. It is something that I remember years later. A punctum!

And others:

I loved Mary Karr’s The Liars’ Club. It was said she changed the landscape of Creative Non-Fiction and was a revolutionist of the memoir with her ability to recount her memories with such vivid detail. It truly reads like fiction, and this is the “creative” in Creative Non-Fiction. Creative Non-Fiction isn’t about being creative with the truth, but being creative with the literary devices so that your memories come alive and are, in my opinion, easy to read. The Liars Club is a page turner. If you listen to the audiobook, you get to hear Mary Karr’s lovely Texan drawl.

I learned about Mary Karr because Stephen King mentioned her in his book, On Writing.

This book by Stephen King was recommended in a Creative Non-Fiction class I took through Simon Fraser University, and I found it chock-full of juicy writing inspiration and tools. Here is a link to it from my favourite Indigenous-owned bookstore in Vancouver, BC, IRON DOG BOOKS. I used to read all of Stephen King’s books when I was an early teen. On Writing is also part memoir, and we get to learn about his pathway to writing success. Spoiler alert: HIS WIFE!!! I simply adore how Stephen King gives his wife credit for so much. It shows me what kind of a man he is. She was the one who fished his first novel out of the trash, slapped it on his desk and said, “You damn well are going to finish this.” (I mean, it wasn’t exactly those words, but that’s how I saw it.)

This quote really punctures my soul:

I get that. As a child, I used fantasy as a survival strategy. Now, I might call it creativity, but I use it as a means to stay in this world. Lynda Barry wrote a series of creative writing support books that I SIMPLY LOVE. And yes, fully a judgment. Here is my favourite book of hers.

This is her Tumblr, The Near Sighted Monkey, which, as far as I can tell, is what she uses as a website. She’s listed as an American Cartoonist. I remember her comic; Ernie Pook was in the Georgia Straight weekly publication.

If you are interested in reading any of these books, I recommend buying from a local bookstore or borrowing from the library. FUCK AMAZON.

Next up: Haikus.

I love how creative constraints can help nail something down. As you may know, a haiku is three lines. The first line has five syllables, the second line has seven syllables, and the third line has five again.

Our task in class is to write three Haikus that start with I, three that start with You, and three that start with We. We are to include some aspect of nature, which I kept forgetting to do. We have a time limit. We then pick three of them and add some stage directions, lighting looks, sound, costume or movements. Homework: write 3 more Haikus about anything, add stage direction.

Here are my top picks from the plethora of Haikus I wrote:

1. The actor, a woman dressed as a man doctor from the 1700s, clomps across to the centre stage. Footprint sounds are loud, echo-y and prominent. The Dr. clears their throat, and a projector begins clacking and whirring, and an image of an old woman (the doctor’s age) flickers on a screen behind them.

Man’s body, the norm

Women, a deviation

Toxic, past mid-life

Here is another Haiku, related to this scene.

Middle Age Decline,

Climacteric, Death of Sex,

Names for Menopause

2. SFX: A low hum, LX: red lights, low, casting a big shadow of the character. A witch-type queen woman holds two strong flashlights.

Let me inspect you,

I am here to protect you,

You are disgusting.

The witch queen lands one of her flashlight beams on an audience member at the same time as an SFX light-boom sound.

3. Darkened stage, sound of a car engine and rumbling distant traffic. Lights up on a woman in the front seat of a car, one hand on the steering wheel. She’s rooting around in her purse and pulls out a Chapstick.

Not knowing it’s pink,

I use Chapstick in the dark

and smear a clown's mouth.

These exercises are to be used as a writing lubricant. They help us get the juices flowing without being too precious with it. We can go as big or as small as we wish. Damn, there was some beautiful imagery coming up in the class. It’s amazing how we can learn and be inspired by other people’s journeys. I guess that is why we love stories so much.

Another exercise is SEVEN QUESTIONS. Again, a time limit helps us from being “too smart” or “too creative”. Done is better than perfect in these games. In the first round, we are to write seven questions to a doctor, to a rival, to a baby and to god, a god, or the universe. They can be from a character, the same character for each person, or someone different.

Here are my favourite three questions for a doctor:

1. How much should I smoke a day if I want to lose weight?

2. Is it ok to have sex with the light on?

3. Will I be ok if I go outside while I’m pregnant?

In the second round, we are to relate these questions to our show ideas or a character from it. We could also choose to ask seven questions to a server, a sibling, a grant officer or an Uber driver. I got a little stuck here, but managed to break through that and have some fun. Here are my favourite questions:

To a Doctor:

1. Can you tell me what to expect in this, and what was it you called it, Middle Aged Decline?

2. Are you saying that I’m retaining toxic menstrual blood?

3. Can you explain the process you are recommending for Vulvar Leeches?

To a baby:

1. Do you think people will recognize you as mine?

2. You won’t follow me home, will you?

3. Do you think anyone would notice if I slipped you in with the other babies?

To a Rival:

1. Did the Devil teach you how to read?

2. Why do you insist on showing yourself in public

3. Do you know how hideous you are?

It’s only been two days. I have to do my homework now for today’s class. Which involves writing out 5 more song titles for your show. I found this game very fun. Here are the five from yesterday:

1. Lady Shame

2. Beyond the Rubicon

3. Suitcase Memories

4. Emerald City Blues

5. Big Crone Energy

6. There’s No Place Like Home

Now I am going to add my first-ever PAYWALL for my dear paying subscribers. Beyond this wall, I am revealing my show title and its first draft synopsis, as well as the lyrics to a song in it! Ahahahahaha!

Introducing:

Read more

As a society, I think we’ve put way too much importance on the “romantic” relationship.

Any one of my close female friends has shown up better for me than any boyfriend ever did. They check in on me, bring me gifts for no reason, and they know and ask about events in my life that are important to me. They are attuned to me and my wellness throughout the ages. We’ve supported each other through health crises, the death of parents and loved ones, and children being born and growing up. We are here, before the romantic relationships, through them, and after they are over. I feel incredibly grateful to have a good two handfuls of sister-pals that I can call on any time of night or day. Friendships take time; stick with it.

With friends like these, who needs a mediocre man to offer his measly breadcrumbs for connection? Just so that I can touch his dick? I don’t have time to teach some dude how to be empathetic and emotionally mature. I don’t have it in me anymore to teach someone how to communicate what’s going on for them.

I grew up with emotionally unavailable caregivers, so it makes sense that this is what I am historically used to in terms of romantic relationships. As they say, the nervous system will choose a familiar hell over an unfamiliar heaven.

So, yes, perhaps I AM traumatized, for I’ve been abused by men, and you know what? I recognize this, acknowledge it and am working to metabolize this rage. Sure. Not all men. And yes, perhaps I could be compassionately working towards healing the gender divide, sure. But can the men do it? I’m tired of doing unpaid, unrecognized emotional labour.

As a young human socialized as femme, I learned hypervigilance right quick. How to stay safe by reading a man’s body language or tone of voice. This trauma response has become a superpower in empathy, and I bet a lot of women can relate. We learned how to read the room in order to survive.

I am a single woman, a sovereign woman in her Queenage years, and I will no longer settle for the bare minimum. I live a meaningful life, rich in experience and relationships. I laugh so fucking hard with my pals.

I have a cat to snuggle with. I get regular massages. I make art and have creative visions and travel plans. I can give myself an orgasm faster than any man ever has. They’ve been lying to us the whole time! They didn’t want us to know that being a single middle-aged woman with a cat is fucking awesome! A couple of hundred years ago, I’m sure I would have been burned at the stake.

It must be true that being gay is not a choice; I think a lot of women would choose to be gay. I don’t hate men. I LOVE healthy masculinity! It’s so hot to see an emotionally mature man secure in being as soft and receptive as he is action-oriented and protective. Come care for me, Papi!

On this Pal-entine’s Day, I went out with the pal of pal’s herself, Caroline Ballhorn, to the cutest little Country-Fair themed party.

We get there early for the square dancing, and we hear that the caller is MIA, so we sit down with a glass of wine. Before long, a young cowboy with a big moustache comes over and asks us if we want a carousel ride. He says that a ride usually costs one ticket, but he is offering us a free ride until the party picks up. “Where’s the carousel?” I ask, looking over at the cute little one-person covered wagon with wheels. He points to a metal bar resting on two tripods. He goes on to explain that I’m to grab the bar with my hands and swing my legs up onto it. Then, he and his cowboy cohort will lift the bar on either side and take me for a ride around the room.

“Let me get this straight,” I say, “you want me to hang upside down like a roped-up hog, and then you will parade me around the party?” “Yes!” He says enthusiastically, “But we won’t actually tie you up or anything.”

Well, now, I ponder, I usually get paid for stunts like this. I look over to Caroline with raised eyebrows, and for a moment, I imagine her swinging from the bar by her hands and feet being promenaded around the room. I laugh in my head, for I know Caroline, and I know this is a HELL NO.

Thank you I say to the gentleman. Perhaps after a couple more glasses of wine.

The event is at the Russian Hall in East Vancouver. We used to throw big parties here with the Dusty Flowerpot Cabaret, like 15 years ago. We are delighted by the cuteness of it all. Caroline joyfully asks me in wonder, “Who are these people?” “I think they are our friends’ kids,” I say. When did this happen? I am amused and tickled by this next generation of clowniness and character play.

Ursula joins us, and it doesn’t take much to convince her to try to climb the greased pole to ring the bell. This costs two tickets. She puts on a hazmat suit and gloves. It’s impossible, and even with her superwoman running legs, she can’t get ANY traction whatsoever.

Caroline pays a ticket to stick her hand in the mystery box and gropes around in the slimy boba-like bubbles for a while before finally pulling up a plastic ball. WINNER, it reads. The carnival barker hands over a paper bag. She wins a gun. Well. That’s neat. Caroline becomes drunk on power and uses her gun to get us all sorts of perks, like a light for a spliff and access to the front of the line for another drink.

I pay a ticket to find some needles in a haystack and win a Pabst Beer 45” record. I watch some folks reach into their paper bag prizes to find that they’ve won a couple of cigarettes. There is a ring toss game over whiskey bottles, throw the toilet paper into the toilet bowl and toss a bean-bag dick onto a man form. Extra points if you can get it into the tiny heart hole. There is a jail, and a handsome Sheriff who seems to be having a great time tossing the consenting young women, who also seem to be having a great time, into the cell.

The sound in the hall is terrible, but it’s still nice to hear Joe Abbot sing. His band, the Flying J’s, sounds so tight. Jodi Ponto is a killer drummer, so relaxed-looking on stage, with her beats masterfully disappearing into the wholeness of the music. Caroline doesn’t know Joe, and she gleefully exclaims, “What a crooner!” I tell her that she needs to hear him play the clarinet. “You know my friend Andrea,” I add, “well, she used to babysit him.” We laugh, amused, looking at Joe onstage, a thirty-something man with a moustache. I am at that age, as they say, where I could date the dad, the son or the grandfather. If I weren’t so single and unavailable, that is.

I take Caroline for a little twirl on the dancefloor, but sadly, not many people know how to partner dance or two-step at these events. It seems I have to be the lead if I want to partner dance. I miss New Orleans and other American dances where I’d close my eyes and be lifted and twirled around the room, making many different dance-floor connections throughout a night.

Not a bad way to spend a stupid capitalist holiday. I love my pals, and every day is Pal-entines day as far as I am concerned.

I’m not saying I’ll never be in another romantic relationship, and honestly, I’d love to be. How about a mature, meet in the middle, friendship, and romance, where we imagine big things that grow and change as we do?

I’m not counting on it, so until then, I’ll be enjoying a margarita in Mexico or Italy, cackling with a great pal, and dreaming and scheming up my next creative development.

I think that my mom must be battling her demons from her deathbed. She’ll leave us soon, though we don’t know when. The life force that makes her, her has been bowing out, bit by bit, for years now. The process is near complete, and her body reflects this. She’s so small, hunched and gaunt, her brow looming over her newly sunken eyes.

I sit next to her in the hospital bed. They have her strapped in because she keeps trying to climb out. No shit, this is fucked. I play her some country music from my phone, and her eyes light up while she ecstatically bounces her legs. We smile and laugh together. I am amused, and it seems like a great time. Music is magic.

Before too long, the joy and presence in her eyes dim, and it seems as if she is seeing something or someone in front of her. Her face falls into distress, her mouth downturned in a gaping expression of pain. A grief-stricken howl escapes the hole like a storm wind, forcing its way through a haunted cabin. The sound hits my bones, and I suck in my breath.

Oh mom, I say, with tears welling in my eyes. I try to hug her stiff body as she sobs in utter anguish. I know this sound, I know this feeling. It is heartbreak. I, too, have made similar sounds in processing the loss of love. She wails on, as if her child has just died. I imagine she is grieving her own life.

The mourn in her bellow turns to rage as she reaches for the blankets in front of her. Her non-words, a jibberish fury of beration is spat through clenched teeth as she twits the hospital blanket like a rope. One hand forward and the other back, she warps the blanket and brays her vehement condemnation.

I only wish I had said, Yes, Mom, there is a lot to be angry about. Rage on. Instead, I try to hold her still, while shushing calmly, It’s ok, it’s ok. Her body is stiff and limp at the same time as she arches her back like a child who doesn’t want to get out of the car. She doesn’t seem to notice me.

As I write about this experience, I feel my diaphragm jump into action, and the tears begin flowing down my face. I am sobbing now. I’m so sorry, Mom. I wish I were easier on you. You tried so hard to be a good person and give everything you had to everyone else first. And what did you get in return?

You got sick.

I sit at that hospital bed and see what I deem as a reckoning with a lifetime of unprocessed emotions. I imagine they have been rotting and dementing inside, only to later emerge as this illness.

My understanding is that, in life, she was scared.

She teaches me to keep quiet, to never question authority, and to NOT speak up. I wonder if this fear, this freezing, is what eventually calcifies her brain into losing her ability to speak at all. I’m not saying that any of this is her fault; it is a cycle of patriarchy and unchecked trauma echoing down the line.

In times of my own struggles with self-loathing, I blame her for not giving me the tools to love myself. She teaches me how to clean, but I want her to show me the ways of becoming a strong woman. I leave her to go find this on my own. I feel abandoned.

As I write this, I see now, just how strong she was.

She broke many cycles and gave birth to the first sovereign woman of our ancestral line. That’s me! Sounds dramatic, but it is true. I am the first woman in our family line to have a choice. I choose no husband, nor children. I choose creativity, community and self-expression. Thank you, Mom, for holding my container, even though, at times, my quest seems so uncomfortable for you.

I used to sort of understand in my thinking parts that my Mom did the best she could, yet I still felt angry and bitter. It feels different now. What I’m sensing is a resolution in my body, and it ripples out as compassion. I’m sorry mom, I see you.

Does everyone get the mother wound? In my own Somatic Experiencing Therapy sessions, I learn that my struggles with low self-esteem and loathing could stem from a lack of emotional attunement and incoherence as a child. Not because my Mom doesn’t care for me, but because she has her own unresolved trauma and dysregulation. She bypasses her truth to be accepted as good and nice. She says she is fine, yet her physical expression, and nervous system betray her words. As a child, I am confused, it is not safe.

She shuts me down as she herself was shut down. She is from a different era, and even with the feminist waves of the 60s and 70s, her Catholic upbringing, drenched in shame and guilt, probably kept a lot of the potential for empowerment at bay.

My Mom works at the Kentucky Fried Chicken in Nanaimo until she gets married at nineteen. She has me just after she turns twenty. My dad takes the place of her dad as the head of the household. A woman of these times isn’t allowed to own a house or have her own credit card. She becomes a stay-at-home mom. That’s just what you do.

Clarissa Pinkola-Estes, in her book Women Who Run With the Wolves, refers to the Death-Mother archetype as a mother who is psychologically or emotionally unable to nurture, protect, or foster independence in her child.

My mother wasn’t emotionally available for herself, let alone for another being. This effect on me is half a life of struggle to find my centre and to learn to trust my instincts. Yet, her distorted teachings weren’t strong enough to keep me from searching for my voice, or perhaps there was something in her that pointed me towards it.

My Mom runs a tight ship. She makes dinner every night to be ready on the table, where we kids sit, waiting for my dad to roar up the driveway. He’ll enter the house, wash his hands and sit down before we can eat. Everyone eats while she serves, and then she will clean the kitchen while the rest of the family watches TV. She makes us a school lunch every day and a work lunch for my dad. A sandwich, a bundle of cookies and a piece of fruit. The cookies are homemade, which she pre-bakes and freezes in wax paper bundles of three. She washes sheets on Tuesdays, makes bread on Wednesdays, drives us to sports practices, games, dance classes, and playdates. She sews costumes, does the grocery shopping and cleans the house like a demon on fire. She makes Christmas, Easter, birthdays, and vacations happen for everyone.

And you know what? We complain about it ALL. What a bunch of ungrateful little shitheads.

I ask my mom what she wanted to be when she grew up. A question adults are always asking us kids. We girls are given choices of becoming nurses, secretaries or movie stars. I choose movie star, duh. In one kindergarten sharing circle, I say I want to become a princess. The teacher laughs and says, well I guess you’ll have to find a prince to marry. What the fuck? I need a prince to become a princess? Well, fuck that.

My mom tells me that all she ever wanted was to be a mother and a wife. Later, when I am older, I say, yeah, but don’t you have any dreams of your own? She replies angrily, I don’t have time for dreams. She seems so unhappy, resentful and angry with us all the time. I say, maybe you shouldn’t have had kids.

Being married with kids looks awful. I vow that I will never do that.

I feel my breath stop and my heart quicken at the sound of Mom’s car pulling up in the driveway. She’s home! I yell to my brother. We jump up, click off the TV and stand frozen like deer in the headlights. What do we do? Clean something! She comes in angry, not fooled by our charade. It’s true what she says, we are ungrateful, lazy numbskulls. My dad shows us his allegiance by sneering at her while giving her a middle finger behind her back. What an asshole. So much disrespect. I learn that she doesn’t deserve my respect.

My mom teaches me how to make a wicked bowl of popcorn. She tenderly guides me in shaking the bowl to flip the butter and salt throughout. She teaches me how to properly fold a towel. No one that I have ever lived with knows how to properly fold a towel so that the edges all line up in the cupboard.

She beams at me and laughs with pride and disbelief when I come home from kindergarten and announce: I know how to read now! She is always amazed at everything I do.

Elbow grease, she says. When cleaning the toilet, no scrub brush for us. We use our gloveless hand to reach down into the hole, scrubbing the bowl, flushing, adding more powdered bleach and using the toilet water to scrub the seat, under the seat, the hinge area and the entire surface of the toilet. This is how you do it. I have to do this every week at home, and boy, do I think I suffer for it. Poor middle-class white kid.

I’ve been thinking a lot about my mom of late. Is she out there? Is there a part of what or who she is, feeling me? Isn’t she supposed to be all love and understanding now? Would she understand that writing and sharing about my experience with her is metabolizing? Would she understand that I am completing a self-protection response and reorganizing my nervous system to know regulation?

I like the idea that a relationship with a person can grow even after that person has passed. I think the relationship between my mom and me has just evolved. I can’t remember the feeling of the anger I used to have towards her. My body knows that she loved us to the depth of her capacity, and my cells reflect this. I am worthy of love. We are worthy of love.

I am my mother’s legacy, and I am cultivating the wisdom that she didn’t get to finish in herself. In this way, we get to do this together.

I think I’m a likable character. I don’t feel as desperate or afraid as I used to feel about needing to be liked. I do want to do right by others, but if I seem to rub someone the wrong way, that’s on them.

I have no idea who this reviewer was, but I do remember an older man in one show who had his arms crossed and a harumph on his face. In my mind, it’s that guy. I’d be curious to support him in somatically exploring the depth of his anger.

It seems, sir, and please stop me if I’m wrong, that this show is making you angry? What is happening for you as I say this? Can you notice any physical sensations or images arising?

Women just aren’t funny, you say?

I know, I’m projecting. Maybe it makes me feel better to think that it’s not because I’m a shitty artist and he’s the whistleblower. Or maybe it’s merely the four thousand years of patriarchal conditioning and my personal experience with some men. I’ve lived my life in a way that would make a 1950s man angry, as they say.

I’ve been making shows since about the age of five. That’s forty-seven years. In grade one, at seven years old, there was an important period of my life spent designing a production of The Wizard of Oz.

Where are my Dorothys at? You know who you are. There must be something about that over the rainbow that attracted the dreamers like us. I’ve always been a dreamer. Consider it a survival strategy.

I remember having a fantasy from the backseat of our station wagon on the week-long drive from Campbell River to Nanaimo, which in reality takes only two hours.

The rain is speckling the windows of the car. Mom is in the front smoking. It’s ok though, because she has the window cracked. I’m buckled up in the back, but sitting side saddle, looking wistfully out the back window. Little do I know, Michael Jackson is riding in the car behind us.

“Who IS THAT girl?” He wonders. I simply must know her. He trails behind us all the way to Nanaimo while I gaze out, a dreamy tilt to my head, hands under my chin. At any moment, he is going to pull up beside our car and wave us down. I will be his next protégé.

I am so excited about this upcoming production of The Wizard of Oz that I can’t sleep. I know there are some old pallets in the bushes out back, and I’m thinking, put four of them together in a big square, and bang, there you go, a perfect stage. I could make curtains out of shower curtains that slide open and closed on a metal rod. Easy. My image is missing how the curtain bar stays hovered over the stage- but that’s not important.

Of course, I’ll play Dorothy, because I have brown hair like hers, and because it’s my play. Ronda can play Glinda the Goodwitch, and Charles next door will be perfect as the man with the green moustache at the gates of the Emerald City.

The next day at school, I take a piece of lined paper from my notebook and draw a poppy. Boom. This will be for the meadow of poisoned poppies that makes Dorothy and her crew fall asleep. Quinn, who sits in the row of desks beside me, asks what I’m doing. I tell him it’s the first of hundreds of poppies I will draw. It’s then that I look down and actually see my shitty little pencil-drawn poppy on the thin piece of lined paper. How am I going to make them stand up? Hmm.

This memory runs on as if I worked on this play for weeks, but it was probably only a couple of days.

Charles, in his gumboots and shorts, leans over the fence between our two houses. “What’s this I hear about you putting me in your play?” He asks in confrontation. His hands are dirty with soil, for even at seven years old, he was probably out back gardening. Either that or catching frogs, snakes or saving a baby crow.

“Yes!” I say. Rainbows begin to flip in my eyes like coins spinning on a table. I light up like the North Star as my vision comes alive for both of us. He agrees that he’s perfect for the role.

Earlier at school, I told Ronda that, with her golden hair, she would make a perfect Glinda the Good Witch. But now I’m playing with Deanna, so I tell Deanna she can be Glinda. The next day, Ronda finds out that I gave the part to Deanna. The lessons of integrity, communication and friendship dynamics begin.

My mom melts the production down like water on the wicked witch. “Pallets? How are you going to do that? That won’t work.” I imagine my kid self driving her crazy, talking a mile a minute, all morning, after school, over dinner, and before bed, about my production plans, before she finally says. “You’ll never do it. Can you PLEASE stop talking?”

And she’s right. I never do it.

My first experience in a real play is our elementary school production of The Jungle Book, and I am cast as a monkey. I’m ten years old and in grade five. I love the way they do our makeup, which is framed by our monkey caps with big ears. I really do look like a monkey. Deanna is a monkey too, and we practice flaring our nostrils and making our lips big and floppy. We get to stand around the Monkey King and fan him with giant wicker leaves. We learn how to do the Charleston and joyfully flail our gangly arms and legs around when he sings “King of the Swingers”.

Opening night, we are behind the curtains, in position, all set for when Mowgli enters the jungle scene. Deanna and I have our nostrils flared and mouths loose and stupid, ready for our reveal. A feeling bubbles up inside of me as the curtains slowly part and I begin to see the audience. Third row, stage left of the centre aisle, is Cathy Ford, Deanna’s mom, doubled over my mom’s lap, laughing so hard. Everyone is losing it over us. The rainbows begin to spin in my eyes as I think, “What is this magic?” The seriousness of my commitment to stay a dumb monkey at all costs is clear. This is one of the best nights of my life so far.

And now, a new play is calling me to it from the unmanifest where it waits in its entirety. If I don’t come claim it, someone else will. When I think about making a new show, I get those same rainbows in my eyes. I love to make worlds that I can play in, where magic is real, and people are filled with wonder. Maybe I’ll fly, or disappear or be a queen or a mermaid. Maybe I’ll reimagine what it was like to be my great-great-great-great-Grandmother, an indigenous woman of Gabriola Island who marries a settler.

Being creative lights me up; it gets me out of bed in the morning. These feelings far outweigh the fear that I’ll be judged or get a bad review. I don’t have any delusions that my art is going to save anyone. Making art saves me, and that is enough.

Is mean-clown school trauma-informed? No. Is it culturally sensitive? No. Am I the best in the class? No, but I am the best worst.

I had heard the stories, but I didn’t realize that, for me, this experience was going to be so psychologically devastating. I wasn’t sure I’d be able to get back on the stage, I considered that maybe this clown life is not for me. But I did survive, I did get back on stage, and I did learn something.

Did I learn to clown better? No. I learned that I needed more therapy.

I just wanted to have a romantic European clown training adventure, and I am a reasonably successful professional clown artist in my fifties. What could go wrong?

WEEK ONE

My first day, and I am hopeful. I am a bit shy to be the new student in a group of twentysomethings who have already been working together for half of the year. I realize I’m doing that thing that I label as creepy, which is acting fine on the surface when I am definitely not fine on the inside. I try to just be authentically weird and awkward and give it my best.

The first half of the day is for physical activities with an assistant teacher, and the second half is for improvisation with the main teacher. About an hour into our first game, I fall on my ass. HARD. I bounce up quick, like a punched-down clown blow-up doll. I’m fine! I’m fine! I say, staving off the concerned looks. Totally fine. I wonder, through the tears dammed up behind my eyes, if I have broken my tailbone.

At lunch, I casually ask the administration if they happen to have any Advil? Oh, it’s nothing, I say. Holy fuck, I can’t mobilize myself properly. My breath catches as I move from sitting to standing. What the fuck? It’s ok, it’s ok. I can do this.

First direction from the teacher: Go out on stage and be funny. Um, Ok.

I enter the stage enthusiastically, available to connect with the audience. The group of international students stare blankly at me. My breath second-guesses itself under the scrutiny of their eyes. The teacher breaks the silence by banging his drum and saying authoritatively, “FLOP! Good-bye!” I think every student has the same experience on that first day. Enter. Silence. “FLOP! Good-bye! Go away! Get off the stage!”

This becomes the pattern. I have 30 seconds to be funny before the teacher bangs his drum and says FLOP, then throws in some sort of absurd insult. I need to interject here that the teacher insults everybody with an air of playfulness and a twinkle in his eye. What a fun game for the instructor to play mean-teacher! It actually is hilarious at times watching the teacher creatively insult the other students while they are trying to figure out what in the heck they are supposed to be doing.

The pedagogy tells us we are finding freedom. When it’s my turn to find freedom, the students don’t quite laugh at the teacher’s funny insults. I think because that would be like laughing at a person kicking a wounded dog.

May 22, 2024

I am risk-averse, and I guess that is why I am here. To become a better performer, cultivate a stronger presence and build my confidence.

I am failing. I’m not sure my ego can handle more. I’M SUPPOSED TO BE A PROFESSIONAL CLOWN?!? Aaah. I have no idea how to do this.

In my first two tries, I came out expecting laughter, and there was silence. I need to come out more empty. No thinky-thinky.

Giovanni Fusetti refers to the etymology of STUPID: stupified, “To be amazed or stunned”. I am going to garner this quality today. I intend to come out more stupid, empty, and with no plan.

I am the oldest student in the class, and I feel insecure about this. Like, what’s that old lady doing here in the school? Isn’t it a bit late to be thinking you are going to be a clown?

For our first self-directed clown presentation at the end of the week, we have to do something with a partner. I am terrified to ask someone to be my partner. Gaaaah.

It is becoming clear that I am reacting to this style of teaching with a FREEZE state. This emergency-feeling survival response is so embedded in my nervous system that I don’t know how NOT to freeze. Being yelled at by the funny, mean-teacher just makes me hang my head in shame.

I’m still in my head too much, and I don’t enjoy playing. Sometimes I put up a shield and pretend to play, but this doesn’t fool anyone. I’m full of self-doubt and self-questioning, and it doesn’t feel safe to let my brain go. The audience sees the panic in my eyes and the fear on my face. Fear isn’t fun to watch. Shame isn’t fun to watch. It’s uncomfortable. It’s awkward. At one point, the teacher says, You don’t look like you want to be here.

Correct sir. I’m sorry, sir. I bow my head, and the shame spills out all over the floor.

The students who do not fully understand English get to truly stand in the I don’t know and it is hilarious. It is so funny to see their eyes widen with honest confusion, coupled with an authentic desire to try, for real, to get it right.

How can I pretend to stand empty in the I don’t know, when I know? Can I find the: I know you know that I know you know that I know that that I am pretending that I don’t know? I‘m fucking confused.

I think about trying harder to try less hard. We are supposed to have ideas, but no planning. I’m about to explode at the conundrum of it all.

My survival tactic for life has been to rehearse, plan and be prepared. This is not what clowning is.

We are given 30 seconds to BE FUNNY- NOW! Or be banged off the stage with the teacher’s drum. It feels like trying to be funny with a gun pointed at your head.

WEEK TWO

May 24th.

The teacher says I enter the stage with shame on my face. I am being faced with my shame.

I am a clown who is afraid to make mistakes.

The clown never gives up hope in the face of failure. I know am painful to watch, and I need to change this around somehow.

What will I do differently today? I have bad ideas, and they are good, bad ideas. Yesterday I had ideas, but when I saw the teacher with his drum-donger poised in the air, ready to fall, I froze.

How do I stop the freeze?????

I need to be cracked. I need this fear whipped out of me. I felt very defeated yesterday. It hurt my heart that I couldn’t play out my idea. I am dreaming every night about my ex-boyfriend. I must be careful not to let this failure get too far into my heart.

I am getting in the way of myself on stage, and I am breaking my own heart. I am not allowing myself to play or to flop.

All those childhood years of being conditioned to duck when being swatted at are coming forward in my nervous system.

It’s the same for all of the stupid exercises and games we play with the ball. When the ball comes towards me, I duck and run away. Cover my head and cower. You want it? Take it? Aaaaah. Stop chasing me! Take it, take it, take whatever you want!

How do I break this pattern? I could somatically try to be with the freeze in the moment.

The teacher says he sees me recoil from my own ideas and that I must have a dream. Today I will lean into my fear and bring 27 ideas in my back pocket.

This is the dream; I am proud of everything I do, no matter what.

This pedagogy is competitive. I am challenged by competition. I don’t like confrontation or fighting for things. I just give up instead. If someone wants the floor or the attention, then I give it to them. I do not like people looking at me unless I have something prepared. I only want to work with people I trust, and first, behind closed doors.

We are being thrust into the spotlight via mistakes. This is part of the learning. Now, how will you save the show?

Playing is dangerous for me at mean-clown school.

What do I think will happen? I’m an adult. I’m paying to be here. I can’t get in trouble. Can I? It really doesn’t matter what I think. My body says run, my brain says stay, and it’s like I have one foot on the brake and one foot on the gas. I’m left skidding around in a circle like I’m making donuts in the 7-11 parking lot.

The other students are looking at me with a mix of pity and embarrassment. Pretty much exactly what I am feeling. In hindsight, I could have pretended to be making donuts in an imaginary car; that would be something. But in the moment? Nothing. No impulses. No ideas. No words. FUCK. Still. Silent. Starring. Head down. Mouth open. Sorry sir.

May 28th, 2024

Play a dumb game. I hate games. What kind of clown hates games? I love games by myself, but I’m too timid to play with other people. I’m afraid I will let them down.

Yesterday, the person I was going to work with went and picked a different partner, but didn’t tell me. Omg, are we in kindergarten? So-and-so doesn’t want to play with me! Give me a fucking break.

I am brought to my childhood again and again. How do I complete the charge of freeze held in my body, and from what experience did it come? Does it matter to know? I feel caught for doing something bad, and I am in trouble. I am a bad kid.

I remember standing with my head down while my mom tore a strip off of me. All I can say is sorry. “Get that stupid look off your face,” she says, and then mocks my face with her mouth open and her tongue out. Not in a funny way, it’s an angry way. My little brother and I are called stupid, lazy, numbskull, worthless, dummy- oh god. How many times?

WE ARE NOT STUPID! WE ARE SMART AND CREATIVE! Mother, why are you so angry? Take care of yourself so that we can play like children. Mother go see a therapist.

Today is a new day. Today I look for the dumb game. A simple game.

I talk to my sister on the phone, and she tells me that I should write a pointed letter to the school’s administration and demand my money back. Then I should go and spend the last two weeks lapping up Paris like a kitty.

Oh my god, it is not like that, I tell her. I am here for this. I am here for this. I am here for this. I am not succeeding because there is something here to learn. I can do this.

I can have a turnaround. I can be the one who learns the most!

At one point, the teacher singles me out to ask which classmate on stage I think is the worst. Um, excuse me? I can’t answer the question.

When it’s my turn to go onstage, I notice that the other students begin looking away and looking down. It gets me thinking that I am unwatchable. Oh god. My cheeks keep burning.

A great outcome from all of this would be to find a regulated nervous system within the framework of being expected to perform and be funny under pressure. Maybe this is the whole point of this type of training? Keep going, right? This is where the magic happens? Right when I feel like I’m going to give up?

I don’t think I’m built for this. I start thinking about other career paths I could take.

At about halfway, I call on my Somatic Experiencing community for some emergency therapy. I’m sinking.

May 28th, 2024

I’m afraid that I’m slipping into depression. I need to snap out of it. I feel my breath is becoming short and I am jammed in the thoughts. It’s hard to read or focus on anything without slipping into nothingness.

I feel like a FAILURE in class and that it’s going to define me.

I need a good clown shakedown. (Clown shakedown: Bio-kintetic breathwork- looks like body shaking, laughing, crying and seemingly random flinging or spasming body parts.)

Stay with us, Candy, do not disappear.

I have so much fear that I am not good enough, or worse, that I shouldn’t be here on earth. Maybe I need to go where it’s safe. Find a home and a garden far from society and hide away the ugly face and the shouldn’t-be-here body.

I have gifts, right?

I have gifts. Sometimes I know this, and it’s very clear. Right now, I forget. I feel like my skin needs to be touched. I feel like an ugly old hag. I don’t know what to do with myself.

What if I ended it and took myself completely out of the game? Ouch.

What if I took pills that would make me feel ok?

Why am I not ok? I feel so lost, and I don’t know who I am anymore. I am broken.

Is this what they (the school, the teaching) are doing? Do I need to be broken on stage? Maybe I’m too traumatized to be at this school?

Oh yes, the tears are finally coming. Thank fucking god. It is a gift that I can write with my eyes closed.

And it’s funny. If you could see me now, class. My body is shaking, and my diaphragm is releasing, and I am laughing and crying. It’s about time. I’ve been so blocked up. Maybe I am doing a clown shake down with words.

There’s nothing wrong with me. I am a being worthy of love just for being here. I’m not just that weird lady.

I must keep my head above the water. I must keep taking steps and keep trying something else. Forget everything I think I know.

I want to feel safe to be a gray-haired woman with belly rolls, a double chin and bags under her eyes. I am a 50-year-old woman who feels sorry for herself, and that is a sorry thing.

I want to be a baby, to be held, to be loved.

I can do this.

Today, I will show up as a brand new me who knows nothing. I will forget yesterday, and I will forget all of the yesterdays.

I think about, and crave to be doing the clown pedagogy I was trained in. The one where we’d warm up our willingness and stretch our ability to be present with and share the nothing that is never happening. The schooling where we would practice seeing and being seen, seeing. Where we would look each other in the eyes until we laugh-cried a portal open into the fantastic space of connection.

I think about how we would train our impulse-access with games and exercises, and spend time in the river. River-ing is a type of process, a container of time and space held for physically following images and somatic impulses with our bodies, without words. First, we explore alone, and then we follow our intrigue into duos, trios or group play. My teacher, David, likened this Rivering practice to automatic writing, or freewriting, but with your whole body. He says it is something like: dipping your dreambody into the stream of subconsciousness.

I begin going to class early so that I can solo-River.

May 30th, 2024.

Yesterday, I tried to settle into my quickened heart, and when I came out to walk around the circle, things got all wavey and it felt like I was going to pass out. The teacher told me my face-making was cheap.

Then, finally, he gave me something! I’m standing there, stunned, and he says, what do you want to do?

I say that I want to cry. He says, “Then do it.” My eyes light up with the innocence of a child, and I ask, “But for real?” The class erupts.

And then, I start to cry. Big, beautiful tears of sweet release roll down my face, while I shake and everyone laughs. I swear, I feel the room collectively sigh with relief. Thank fucking god. I start to joyfully play with my crying and begin blubbering through my tears.

The teacher says, “Too many words. Just cry.”

Ok, I just cry.

So I’ve had a little success in class. I have had a breath of relief, and yet, that doesn’t mean I’ll have success today. Also, I still need to find a partner this week. But you know what? I am finally feeling a real- WHO THE FUCK CARES, and I think I’m even having a bit of fun?

I’ve been doing the kinetic laughing and wailing like a grief-stricken widow every morning, and I’ve been leaving my phone at home. I am feeling more present at school.

I am beginning to understand my nervous system a little more deeply.

I am swinging between hyper arousal or sympathetic response (fight, flee, freeze) and dorsal shutdown (scroll, TV, wine, weed, food). A pattern that I am very familiar with and have been living in for maybe most of my life.

I am learning that you can’t force or scare a person into dropping their freeze state. It must be gently coaxed into loosening. It must be tritated safely in tiny amounts. I can’t just stand backstage and somatically sense the gripping fear, the beating heart, and the hot shame, and think it’ll just go away then and there.

Undoing a freeze pattern is a larger project and takes time. It CAN be loosened, though, and I am working on this.

I remind myself: Just keep showing up with the play and allow myself to be seen in all of my imperfections. Being interested and not interesting is enjoyable to watch.

May 31, 2024

I am grateful for this opportunity to face my demons head-on and to look at shame and say I see you. I see that you are trying to protect me, but today I am going to be proud of myself. It will be what it is.

Roll with the fucking punches, Candy. For real, that is what we are learning here.

WEEK THREE

June 4, 2024

I just had a glorious recovery weekend in Paris. I adore walking around and absorbing the sights. The buildings are mind-blowing. My head is tilted upwards, and I have big eyes and a round mouth, and I am repeating wow, wow, wow.

I haven’t really acknowledged the grief I am feeling over the loss of my mom. She died only 2 months ago. I am also still grieving the loss of a dream within a 9-year relationship with a love. It hasn’t been but a year yet. Its challenging to find space and separation when we still live in the same house. He needs to go.

I’m proud of YOU, Candy. You keep showing up.

Something has come clear. In certain contexts, I am afraid of games. In diving deeper. It is a FEAR OF PLAY. If I can find a sense of safety and if I deeply trust the other individual(s), then it’s fun!

Even as I search into my memories as a child, I see I was timid and didn’t like (and still don’t) aggressive horsing around or any type of get-the-ball game.

I’m understanding that GETTING THE GAME RIGHT or WINNING THE GAME feels like a survival need for me, but in this clown-school context, it’s not about getting it right or winning. It’s about being absorbed in the play of the game. It’s about finding the pleasure and enjoyment, and finding your own game within the game.

It’s really hard to do that, if not impossible, when it feels like my life is at stake. I know it’s not, but my body thinks it’s going to die.

I consider the type of play that I liked as a child. Making things, drawing, sculpture, sewing, building worlds and making costumes. I loved making up plays and dances, building forts and the worlds that would happen inside of them. I would quietly play by myself for hours, and I still do!

All of these types of play I still love. I have made a career out of all of the above!

June 6, 2024

I think a lot of what I think other people think of me is not true. I often feel wrong and unsettled. I don’t want to meet or connect with other people, and would rather just go be alone and space out.

A regulated nervous system is also called “Social Engagement.” I want to want to engage.

Intention today: focus on the enjoyment, less about if I am doing it right.

The teacher asks if my stage partner is doing what I want them to do. “No,” I say. “Well, he begins, then go and hit him.” “Hit him?” I ask. Like, does he want me to go over and hit my partner? I’m from a long line of people pleasers. We don’t hit people. I walk over, and I hit my partner lightly on the arm. “That’s not a hit.” He says, “Your hit must make music!” I get an idea, take off my gloves and use them to slap my partner across the face. The class gasps and recoils. “TOO VIOLENT!” Bang goes the drum. “Goodbye!”

June 8th, 2024.

Can I acknowledge how far I’ve come? I’m not going backwards; it’s just that the fears and limitations are coming to light. It’s hard to face, and I’m feeling quite bad about myself, and I’m not sure what to do about it.

It still keeps happening. When I go on stage, everyone goes silent, then my nervous system goes off, and then I’m broadcasting fear and anxiety. My audience doesn’t feel safe to laugh. They are worried for me.

I often hide from people. I hide away. I don’t want folks to witness me being human. I don’t want them to witness me with half a spirit residing in my body. Where is the other part of my spirit?

What a trip this has been. I seriously can’t wait for it to be over. I hope I can recover from this; I hope there is something grand that comes from it.

Today I will go back to school, and I will warm up my willingness. I will go like it is the first time. I will make a flop. I will move, and I will try. I will try and not try.

WEEK FOUR

In the last week, I learn something profound from a fellow student. This man, let’s call him James, for that is his name, first of all, decides, instead of finding a partner, to work solo. Wait, what?! You can do that? He comes out, splashing water onto his face from a plastic water bottle while singing a dumb song. The teacher barks the familiar and playful “FLOP, Good-bye,” which tells James he has to leave the stage.

What happens next blows my mind. James most certainly DOES NOT leave the stage.

What?! But, I could…. never? Could I? Well, James keeps up with his same dumb tricks, while the teacher hits the drum again and again. “Good-bye! Good-bye!” But James’ scenario gets funnier and funnier the more noncompliant he is. The scales tip completely when his backpack splits open, and dozens of water-filled condoms splash out onto the floor. We love him!

June 11th

Wow. Yesterday. Tough one, rewarding one. I bought some baguettes on the way to school for my dumb idea, and then got sooo fucking awkward. I couldn’t look people in the eyes. I sat in the dressing room for a bit, while the tears welled up.

Anna asked if I wanted to sit outside and talk. I did. She held my hand, and I sobbed, and then Daphne joined us. Daphne said not everyone who is a performer actually LIKES to put themselves on the stage. What a conundrum. The clown who doesn’t want to be seen.

This course has REALLY highlighted the traumas that are still lingering in my body. The extreme fear I have of making mistakes and the immense shame I have at being seen.

At improv today, I was ready to play, and I played. I got laughs, and I didn’t give up. I had the teachers and the whole group laughing, and boy, did that feel good. I felt the fantastic space open up, and it was magic. I want to find that again. I really only have 2 days left.

The understandings become clearer:

FEAR OF BEING SEEN- Growing up, being seen means I am in trouble, or being criticized for how I look or talk. Slouched shoulders, hands in my sleeves, bra-strap showing- all criticized, made fun of and mocked. I am micro-managed, with my mom always fixing my hair. She even picks my fucking nose with her pinky finger. This deeply grooved pattern is that being seen comes with criticism, shame and being controlled.

HYPERVIGILANCE- Social anxiety. In a group of people, all of the energy is attuning to what people might be thinking about me, instead of attuning to my internal world. I become hyperaware of any changes in people’s bodies or tones of voice. Instead of connecting, my faculties are occupied with keeping me safe. I really only feel at ease or relaxed when I am alone, and no one is around to witness me.

June 13th

I have spent a lot of time here in FRANCE feeling insecure and small. Not a pleasant or comfortable feeling, and this doesn’t feel like the woman I have become. This is not me.

Interestingly, when I found a breakthrough yesterday, all of that changed, and I felt seen for who I am. I became myself and was immediately seen. I am only being seen by others through my own perception.

I recall a conversation in my somatic training about how long it takes to regulate in a group, and that there is a fairly definable period. How long does it take me to be comfortable in a group? Is it safe to be my whole self? Is it safe to first feel the activation, which is usually hidden, and second, is it safe to expose it?

Then, the group can become a resource, which, after three weeks, is beginning to happen here.

June 14, 2024

Last presentation today. And then it’s over. What a frightfully terrifying experience this has been.

I think the biggest reveal is the childhood trauma lodged in my body. Holy shit. I’m like a dog that’s been kicked too many times. So. Much. Shame.

I am done with it. I would like to complete this halted survival response. It is no longer needed to keep me safe. I am perfectly loveable and my mistakes do not define me. I have let the world keep me humbled. I have self-sabotaged and have made myself so small. Jeez.

Even as I write this, my nervous system is on fire.

I am doing my last presentation today as a solo. I feel excited to share, though I feel a quickened heart just thinking about it. I’m not going to die. It’s just a silly exercise. People might think I’m dumb, but isn’t that the point?

If I feel shame, then I’ll show them my shame. This is real, this is human. I’m breaking. I notice my heart is beating so fast.

Show the shame. Show the shame.

Wow, you read to the end?

My final presentation is a success, and I feel like myself again. The teachers, seem surprised, one of them says- “Wow, she saved the show!” I get to stay on stage for all of my stupid ideas, and I even stay a bit longer. Damn, I feel so relieved. Fuck you mean-clown school.

Gosh, it took me a long time to open up and find my play. Were they working me towards telling them to fuck off? I guess there is some freedom in that. I also understand that there are other ways to find freedom, other ways to learn to listen and respond to my impulses. Other ways to find connection in a group.

Having said that, it seems I did do some psychological excavating there. Its two and a half years later and I feel like a different human.

It seems I finally truly arrived on that last day of school. Theres a part of me that wonders if I should try it again?

Writing it out this experience over the last couple of days has been a certain form of resolution.

A clown teacher of mine, Deanna Fleysher wrote an brilliant article about Via-Negativa. I wish I read it before I went off on my disillusioned European romantic clown adventure. HA!

Don't Call It Clown

VIA NEGATIVA IS ACTUAL BULLSHIT

The other night, I was telling an improviser-friend of mine how funny he was, and he wasn't buying it. "Tell me I suck," he said. "Then maybe I'll trust you…

Read more

7 years ago · 2 likes · Deanna Fleysher

Why am I so weird?

I see the Yukon number on my cellphone and think it might be an important call from the producer of the theatre festival where I am about to perform. So I answer.

From the toilet.

I utterly forgot that I am scheduled to do a phone interview with CBC North. I pride myself on being organized, and I want to tell you that I was mixed up due to the time difference between Vancouver and Whitehorse, but no. I just forgot.

Communicating by the method of words coming out of my mouth makes me nervous, sometimes to the point of blanking out. Do you think that maybe I hid this interview from myself in my subconscious mind?

Maybe, but here we are, live on CBC North, with my pants around my ankles.

The host asks if this is a good time to talk. YES! I say enthusiastically! Now is a great time!

And immediately; We are on the air with Candy Roberts, the performer and creator of the hit show, LARRY.

Fuck.

Uh, hi! I say with a big, crazy smile on my face. Winnie, the cat, pauses drinking from the dripping bathtub to look at me.

Why am I soooo weird????

Tell me about your show! The host says.

I start spouting some random bits about the show while I quietly wipe my ass and pull up my pants. I trickle the water gently from the tap so that the nation can’t hear that I am washing my hands. I do not flush. I scoot upstairs to sit in my morning’ get’er done chair and continue talking about...?...? What AM I talking about?

My heart is beating. So far so good at not stuttering or wumbling my jords.

Jeeebuz!

Honestly, why? Why didn’t I simply say, Hey, give me five, and I’ll be ready to go!

I could have finished my bathroom duties. Flushed!? Washed my hands with hot water and then put myself in my chair to ground with a couple of deep, solid breaths.

Why? Because I’m a recovering people pleaser, that’s why. This urge to please is so carved into my nervous system that sometimes the pattern automatically asserts itself. I understand that this is a strategy for survival, and with a Somatic Experiencing Practice, my nervous system is being re-patterned, and is expanding its capacity to be more coherent to the actual dangers of the here and now. Giving myself a little credit, I’d say being caught with my pants down might be an appropriate time for the nervous system to kick into a little overdrive.

Despite all of this, I think the interview went ok? I can’t listen to it. The artistic director of the theatre festival says it’s great. He still doesn’t know that I’m faking EVERYTHING.

Why am I so Weird????

Do you remember that trend where people were getting “pantsed”? If you know what I’m talking about, then you are probably a Gen X human who grew up in the 70s and 80s. Getting pantsed is where someone sneaks up behind you in a social situation and, surprisingly, pulls down your pants.

I can hear now the sound of a testosterone-filled teenage boy’s laugh. One that’s a little too loud and a little too forceful as he aggressively whips down his friend’s pants in the high school hallway. In the movie, it’s some stupid and mean preppy jock. Getting pantsed wouldn’t fly these days.

I got pantsed.

We are camping, and I’m about 7 or 8 years old. There is a circle of lawn chairs with camping neighbours and parents sitting around the fire. They lounge in the flat folding chairs with plastic fraying woven seats and backs attached to metal frames. It’s daytime, and the parents are probably hungover from the late-night drinking and singing around the campfire the night before. I see that the dads and some of the moms have already uncapped their stubby bottles of hair-of-the-dog afternoon beers. I’m in the centre of the circle with some of the other kids, and we are excitedly engaging with the adults. Maybe we are talking about the forts we are building on the side of the lake, or maybe we are asking if someone will take us out in the boat today.

The next thing I know is that my pants are around my ankles. Also, my underwear. My peepee-bum, as my mother told me it was called; my bald vajin; my prepubescent fajita shines upon my camping cohorts like a little sun. I see Darren Atwood, a boy one year younger than me, put his hand over his mouth while his eyes grow wide. I. Am. Horrified.

It was my dad. My dad pantsed me in front of everybody.

I flee from the circle. Aghast. Ashamed. Angry. I cry, and I cry. Why would he do that to me? I run to our camper and cry at my mom. Why? Why? I feel so sad and betrayed.

I don’t know! She says. She sounds angry, and I take in her anger, thinking that she is mad at me for carrying on like this.

A light comes on, now 45 years later, that she is probably angry with him. That she probably also feels helpless and ashamed.

What WAS he thinking? That it would be funny to literally embarrass his little girl in front of everyone? It was just a joke! He says. Ew.

As I write, I still have that feeling in my gut. A pulling up, an uncomfortable, rotten gripping feeling in my groin. I think I can name it: Shame.

Wiping my ass on the radio has nothing against the crawling skin feeling from that pantsing experience.

Pretty much guaranteed that this won’t be the last time I am seen with my pants down. In fact, being naked on stage has become a part of my career.

NOTE:

When I read over the pantsted-capade that I wrote yesterday, I realize that I no longer have that feeling in my gut. It’s gone.

Here’s the theory.

While writing it out, I was somatically sensing/experiencing the physical sensation in my body that was associated with this story. I felt it, and I named it. This memory held within my nervous system was witnessed, validated and released.

What I’m left with is a funny/not funny, and maybe interesting anecdote.

The end.

What is the you that makes you, you? What is the me that makes me, me? I’m talking about something fundamentally deeper than the conditions or life experiences that shape a personality. What do YOU call it? Life force? Energy? Spirit? Soul? DNA? In my mind, it’s not religion or science. It’s nature.

How do we call someone else’s spirit back to their own body? Is it even possible? Is this where one might need to seek out a Shaman from the hills of Guatemala? Can a person’s spirit be forcibly put back into their body?

I don’t think so.

As they say, you can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make them drink.

A relation of mine has lost her spirit. Or that’s how it seems to me. Where did she go? She feels like a shell of who she once was. That thing that makes her, her, doesn’t answer when I call. She can’t hear me calling her home from the back porch.

I watch, from the sidelines, as she makes choice after choice that seems to send her confidence and sense of self-worth spiralling downwards. It feels like watching a slow-motion train wreck from inside of a dream. Just when it seems that it can’t get any worse, it gets worse. Her actions seem insane to me.

Why would you do that? Please stop!

In All The Way to the River, a book by Elizabeth Gilbert, I learn more about the addiction to Love and Sex. In it, Liz Gilbert writes of her own experiences and says, and I paraphrase- a person will give up everything for this one thing.

How can this be possible, I think, it’s not like a person is cocaine or heroin? Sure, I’ve been obsessed with a lover before. I’ve been a little cray-cray but not to the point of literally giving up my life.

I have worked over a decade in the field of mental health and addiction support. I can say that her behaviour follows similar to a person who is addicted to cocaine. The sense I get is desperation, impulsivity and shame.

My relation says she’s in love with a man who will call her a “scumbag and a worthless whore who deserves to die.” She has given up everything for THIS one thing. She has given up her employability, her family, her home and her very spirit. She tells me that the only way out is to kill herself.

How can I help her? How do we help those who don’t seem to want to help themselves?

****************************************************

I remember feeling worthless.

My insides are a jumble of trash and mire. I feel like the inside of a junk drawer that won’t close properly. I’m a messy hole of random, dirty objects that have no other place to go. I don’t like it in here. I don’t know how to arrange the hair-hat. Where do I put the arms when I stand? I can’t get my own skin to fit right, and now I’m supposed to put clothing on top of it? And the shame. People are starving, at war, and dying. What’s my problem?

I narrow my eyes at the ugly face in the mirror and despise her. I see an anguished mouth. A silent scream. She is ripping at her hair. She eyes the porcelain sink, and an impulse arises to smash her head against it. Just stop. Please.

She lets go into a crumple on the tiles of the bathroom floor. Silence rings through the house and through her ears. A whimper. Is that me?

You poor thing. You poor girl. I am here with you.

It’s me. Ghost of future me reaches back, reaches down and strokes the hair of the girl on the floor.

I pull the sobbing body to my lap and rub her back while she silently cries. You don’t even know the places that you will yet go, my sweetest love. Can you feel that tiny sparkle? This is your life force. Your life force wants in.

I help her wash her face and find her the most comfortable clothing while she stares off, disconnected. Disassociated.

Let’s go for a walk, I suggest. We sit at the edge of the couch and put on our boots. The black cat eyes us curiously as we gather a coat and a bag. Slow. We do this slowly while noticing anything and everything. It is an overcast day, late winter. Lighter than grey, darker than bright. I remind her, us, me to breathe. Slow. No need to try and change anything. Can we be with what’s here? That’s it.

We walk ourselves up the hill of East 2nd and turn left on Commercial Drive towards the park. She’s hoping she will not run into anyone. She knows her eyes are red, and her face is pink and swollen. She feels tender and raw. We walk together until she finds the place that popped into her mind. The sign on the door reads: Yoga.

Over the years to come, she learns about her inner landscape.

An open meadow at the edge of the sea, where there is always a perfectly cool breeze on a warm day. The gentle sound of the rustling leaves enter your ears and spread across your heart. You are chambers full of orange blossom and ocean air. Every inhale expands and every exhale releases. You lie on the soft ground and let your eyes wander at will. Dappled sunlight dances, making golden shimmers on the tiny flowers that speckle across the carpet of grass. What to do but lie here and listen and be? This beautiful space lives and grows inside.

She draws pictures. One has a cartoon image of a moving truck backed up to a naked body stretched out with the mouth open. There is a for sale/sold sign out front. A spark shape has a suitcase and is thrilled to be moving into this body.

Another picture. Tiny Candy in a spaceship is guiding the ship homeward. She’s coming home.

Wherever I go, here I am. My body is my home. It is a miracle, and it wants to grow towards the light.

I do my darndest to get out of the way and let it.

Ever since that moment on the bathroom floor, I have put one foot in front of the other. It has taken over twenty-five years to get to even this amount of peace. A peace that is not always peaceful. I’m no monk but regulation is not about being calm. Coherence is responding appropriately to the here and now. There is a lot of injustice in the world to be angry about. Anger mobilizes and I pray that right action can come from alignment.

As I write, I breathe. I watch Winnie, the sweetest cat, curl her soft paws under her chest. She looks away from me, but I can tell she feels my attention on her.

*****************************************************************************

NOTE: I went down to the basement tonight because I wanted to find the star moving into the body drawing that I knew was in an old journal. What I didn’t expect to find were journals and journals full of this process of TRYING SO HARD TO LOVE MYSELF.

Good on me for not giving up. However, now that I am a trained Somatic Practitioner, I see, that I didn’t need to push myself so hard to change. If I had started a somatic practice earlier, or had some therapy, I would have learned to BE WITH the spirit-of-me that was already there. Slowly, and with support, I would have learned to expand my capacity to remain present in both the joy and the pain of existing as a human.

Well, I’m here now, and perhaps I can be of help to someone else.

I am currently offering Somatic Experiencing and Creative Coaching Sessions at a practice rate until I am certified. I am taking bookings now for January/February 2026. Packages of 3 sessions will be available for 150$. Sessions are one hour long and available in person (in Vancouver) or on Zoom.

Until I get my online booking system up and running, please email candyrobertstheatre@gmail.com to book a time.

This number is a portal. Its specific combination of digits is over fifty years old.

If you call this number in 1975, a new mom at 357 Harrogate Road will answer. Hi Audrey, she’ll say. Come on over, the coffee’s on, and I just put Candice and baby Luke down for a nap. Audrey will park her car in the dirt driveway ahead of the tiny hedges and walk up to the three-bedroom rancher. Maybe she’ll leave her sleeping baby in the car for a moment as she peeks in the front door and says quietly in a singsong kinda way; knock knock!

If you call this number in September of 1980, Aunty Shelly will answer and tell you that we are making a cake in the shape of a house. She’ll tell you that we are cutting flat red licorice (pronounced lickrish) shingles to layer the roof and that we have decided on an O-Henry bar for a chimney. As you talk with her, I’ll be lining the house with spearmint jube-jube trees. I might get on the phone and tell you about the cake design I chose from the cut-up cake book, but I won’t tell you that even though I hate the spearmint trees, I will eat them because they are still candy.

I will want to, but I won’t yet have the words to tell you how this book of cakes covered in shredded coconut comes with future memoryfeelings. How looking at this book will feel like a small town with roads that have no sidewalks, or like bike-riding in kid gangs with no helmets or supervision. Or like an old birthday photograph with a table full of kids in pointy hats with paper plates and bowls of Cheezies, Old-Dutch ripple chips and dip. At least one kid in the photo will have a smile so intense that you’ll know they are about to cry. None of the kids in the photo will like the shredded coconut.

Days later, if you call in the evening, my mom will tell you that she has just had to cut the elastics out of the sleeves of my new birthday pyjamas. Well, I was watching TV, she’ll say, and out comes Candice with hand-shaped balloons at the end of her arms.

If you call this number in 1982, you’ll hear a hoo-ha of parents partying. Their giggling pre-double-digit daughters will be downstairs, birthday camping amongst the pink cotton candy insulation of the unfinished basement. We’ll be lounging around on our unfurled sleeping bags, drinking a real dad’s (mine) homemade rootbeer from stubby beer bottles, while our parents drink real beer upstairs. Brenda will have stains down the front of her t-shirt, and she’ll wobble and slur while playing an air guitar. I’ll be annoyed with her commitment to playing drunk as she falls around onto us, muttering nonsense. We’ll all pose for a birthday photo; pretendedly drunkard with sloppy smiles and lolling tongues.

If you call this number earlier in the year, someone will need to climb a ladder to reach the front door to get to the phone because the house will be jacked up like a car about to get its tire changed. We’ll tell you how it seems to wobble like a fever dream up high on its posts and how the neighbourhood dads had to build the frame in fast motion before the wind got a chance to knock the house off its stilts. Probably all seventeen of us neighbourhood kids will gather to watch this dangerous business of lowering the house onto its new second-story position.

If you call this number in 1983, my mom will tell you how we were in the local paper for saving a dog. It was Jane’s kid, Charles, really, she’ll say, as she reads a bit from the paper: It was as if a page had fallen from a Disney story when a raggle taggle of neighbourhood kids came upon this dog living in the empty lot. Or something like that. You’ll hear the pride in her voice in that we have a neighbourhood kid gang.

You will probably get a busy signal if you try to call this number on a Friday night in the mid 80s because me and Saphona will be making prank calls. You won’t even know that I’ve discovered a way to multi-track record using two tape recorders, and how we’ve elaborately made a layered audio collage of a restaurant scene. The first track will hold cupboards slamming, cutlery being rattled, and dishes clanging around the kitchen. The second layer will have orders being called out in our deepest most manly Chinese accents. (It was the 80s.) The next bunch of tracks will hold different overlapping dinner conversations happening in our imaginary restaurant. With our backing track playing behind us, we will call Ian, a boy from our class and confirm that his Chinese restaurant order is ready for delivery. He will always know it’s us- probably because we have to ask his mom first if we can speak to him.

If you try to dial this number in the fall of 1986, and it’s after school, I will slide on my socked feet over the polished concrete past the glowing woodstove and answer from the newly added downstairs wall phone. I will tell you that it’s too hot in here because my dad has to keep the house warm for the fermenting grapes. I probably won’t tell you how I love the round smell of rotting grapes, and how it already has memoryfeelings of new school clothes and a new high school. I will tell you that my dad makes what the neighbours call porch climber wine.

If you call one morning in 1987, the phone will be occupied because teenage Candy is calling frantically to the LG73 morning radio show in Vancouver. She has heard a snippet of their contest song and immediately knows what it is. She’s dialling excitedly and is the correct caller number 7! Do you know the song? They’ll ask. Bottle of Wine, she’ll shout! They’ll want to know how a young teenager knows of this old drinking song, and she’ll tell them it’s because her dad plays it on the guitar when they go camping.

Bottle of wine, fruit of the vine, when you gonna let me get sober? Although Candy sings, sover, because she doesn’t know that word; sober. She doesn’t know what sover is either, but here we are.

If you are a secret boy admirer or a friend of mine and you try to call me at this number in the late eighties, you might hang up suddenly when my dad answers with an abrupt and jokingly angry; SPEAK! Alternatively, he might say, Quinsam Hotel and you will be confused and say; sorry wrong number and hang up.

If you call one evening in 1988 and ask for me, my little sister will tell you that I’m not allowed to come to the phone. She will explain that I am crying in my room because I got caught shoplifting at Shoppers Drug Mart. Mom and Dad had to go to the police station and pick her up, where she was waiting in a jail cell. She’ll say. They even took her mugshot! Don’t worry, she’ll add, Candice won’t be grounded because our parents don’t punish; they just get very disappointed in you.

If you call in the fall of 1992 and ask for me, my mom will tell you that I no longer live at this address and have moved to the big smoke. She won’t tell you that she cried after dropping me and all of my belongings off at that apartment in Burnaby. She’ll look out the front second-story window, past the cement driveway and giant hedges, smile and say that everything is great. Just great.

If you try to dial within the next couple of years, my brother might answer and tell you that my parents are away on holiday. He probably won’t say that some strange lady was just over, crying at the table because she’s in love with my dad. She’ll probably be one of my dad’s hairdressers because my dad loves his hairdressers, quite literally. If my brother tells you about any of this, can you be gentle and understanding with him? Can you tell him that it’s not his job as a young teen to hold my dad’s secrets?

If you call in 1999 and ask for my dad, my mom will tell you, with a stiff mouth and a tight chest, that he no longer lives there. She’ll then say she’s just fine, how are you?

If you call this number right now, you will reach my stepdad, Joe. Joe says only the telemarketers call this line. The last living person who called this number was Grandpa Bill, and he passed away in 2024.

923.6902.

This number is a portal. This specific combination of digits has outlived both my mom and my dad. Joe talks about getting rid of it. Would the number go to someone else? How will that person ever know where this portal used to go?

As the new McDonald’s restaurant is being built, there is a controversy about the Golden Arches sign being too tall for our town’s 1986 legislation. In the end, McDonald’s follows orders and shortens their sign pole so it is not the highest structure in town. Thirty-five or so years later, the sign is still there, oddly stubby-looking in a town that has grown up around it.

They hire me as the hostess. Sounds fancy, but I want to be one of the counter girls where I’d say, can I take your order and press all kinds of nifty buttons on the till machine. Instead, I am tasked to be a hostess, and at home, we don’t ask questions. We are taught to accept what you get and don’t get upset, so I accept.

The hostess has a special uniform. It is a burgundy apron-like frock tied at the neck and waist, with pockets, and a horrendous ruffle. It is made out of that gross kind of polyester fabric that will snag on a ragged fingernail or a piece of dry skin. We also have uniform slacks of this same (shudder) fabric that locks in the smell of fried grease and meat, as well as a cream coloured dress shirt with small burgundy pinstripes.

I keep one of these uniforms, and years after this job, my friends and I make funny VHS videos about a McDonald’s Killer.

My duties as a hostess include standing at the door to smile and say hello to people as they come in, smile and say goodbye, have a nice day as they leave. I empty the discarded plastic trays from their burger wrappers and waxy soda pop-cups, wipe them down, and stack them behind the counter for the counter girls to refill with orders. I clear tables and wash them with a bar rag. I keep an eye on the lobby garbage and check the bathrooms every hour. Being a hostess also includes facilitating kids’ birthday parties.

Years later, I will talk about this in my first (and maybe only) tight five stand-up comedy set, and the fact that somehow, unbeknownst to me, people around me knew that I was destined to become a clown. Let it be known, though, I am not that kind of clown. I do not do birthday parties, nor do I know how to juggle. I hate balls. If I have a ball and you want it, I will just give it to you, no need to chase me down. If you were to throw me a ball, I would duck and run away. Which is also my strategy for dating- but I’ll save that for another story.

I think being a hostess is lame. I want to stand behind the counter and press the buttons on the machines. I want to fill orders by snatching burgers from the burger line, filling pop-cups, and expertly swirling up a perfectly formed ice cream cone. I bet I would make the best ice-creams there.

I’m basically the up-front janitor with a fancy name. The only other hostess besides me is a woman in her late sixties. I think we are the lowest position on the McDonald’s hierarchy. At least I don’t have to deal with a head visor over my hair like the rest of the staff wear.

At around this time in my life, I am very concerned with my hair. If it looks or feels wrong, then I can’t focus on anything, and I obsessively check my image in the bathroom mirror. I carry a full bottle of Final-Net hairspray in my giant purse, just in case. I imagine that every person I interact with is side-eyeing my hair, feeling sorry for such a weird-looking girl.

On some mornings, after the designated hour of doing my hair, if it’s still not right, I will wet the whole thing down and start again. Only I know what is right. The process involves:

1. Upside-down blow-drying, while scrunching it with a mousse or gel.

2. Curling the bangs away from my face while hair-spraying and blow-drying at the same time.

3. Back-combing them into a perfectly formed waterfall, where the backwards curled hair seamlessly flows into its journey forward, opening like a lotus flower.

4. Blending the bangs into the sides by blow-drying it away from the face while hairspraying the hair as it flows back by the forced air.

5. A final overall hairspray until it is stiff and crunchy.

God forbid there might be weather. In grade twelve, I get voted as BEST HAIR.

When there is a birthday party, my job becomes a little more interesting. I go to the walk-in freezer and get a special McDonald’s birthday cake from the stack of disposable tin rectangles with cardboard lids. They look like the Sara-lee frozen cakes that I see in the TV commercials, but have never actually had. The cakes are what we call white cake, as if white is a flavour of its own. Coloured sprinkles adorn the light yellow frosting, which is buttery and not too sweet. I’m not supposed to eat the cake with the customers, but when the party invites me to, sometimes I do.

I put the frozen cake aside and get empty hamburger boxes for the game. It’s a stacking game. That’s all. Just stack up the McDonald’s hamburger boxes until they fall over. So fucking creative. I then go around the table and take everyone’s orders, like we are in some goddamn fancy restaurant. I write down their orders on a piece of paper from my apron pocket like a real waitress and give the big birthday order to one of the counter girls to ring it up. God-dang, I want to ring up the order, I want to touch and press the buttons on those special machines so badly. At least I get to fill the order. I like doing this. I expertly call out, taking a cheeseburger when I take a cheeseburger from the cheeseburger line.

One time at work, I’m not feeling well. It is probably some sort of teenage heartache, or perhaps it is an exceptionally bad hair day. I call- taking a cheeseburger to the burger chef and then push the warm, round little hand hug down into the front pocket of my apron. I beeline it to the public washroom and sit fully dressed on the toilet. I lift my legs and press my feet up against the locked door, and eat the burger. I feel bad about myself, but as I have learned to do, I slough it off.

Is it Christmas? What the hell is Christmas anyway? For me; It brings to mind words like obligation and pressure to be, to do, or to have something, or nothing. No thanks.

I think of Oscar the Grouch’s Christmas song on my Sesame Street Christmas record. The lyrics of his song rattle around in my head and amuse me.

Christmas Day is almost here

When it’s over, then I’ll cheer

I’m glad it’s only once a year,

I hate Christmas

I’d rather have a holiday

Like normal grouches do,

Instead of giving presents

They take presents back from you

And so on…

The album has an epic story about Bert selling his paperclip collection to buy Ernie a soap dish to hold his rubber duck, and Ernie selling his rubber duck to buy Bert a cigar box to hold his paperclip collection. Classic! They do this down at Mr. Hooper’s store, and Mr. Hooper is so moved that he gives both of them back their prized possessions.

So here it is, Christmas Day. Feels like a normal day, except most people have family obligations and all of the stores are closed. I guess that feels kind of special? I’m holed up at home, and I’m happy. Folks invite me over to their family obligations, but I don’t want to go. I want to do what I want in my own special way.

I’m considering that some people do not consider family as an obligation. Some families, I think, want and love to be together. My family does what it wants. I send good cheer to my sister and my brother, my stepdad, my aunts and my uncles, my nibblings and all of my cousins. I love you.

I’m going to make a stew. I’m going to light a fire. I’m going to make cookies. Winnie will be snuggled. Wine will be involved. Go ahead and judge me, but I will happily be sipping a red wine from the back porch, looking across the neighbourhood rooftops, enjoying my blessings in silence.

I’m thankful for the home I’ve created. I’m blessed to rent this little house in the city. It could be taken away from me at any point, but then I will make a new home, and it will be better than this one.

I am grateful for my creativity. Always have been. I am one magical bitch. I have the eye of a wizard. The way I see things is beauty and magic. I see shapes and relations, relative perspective and depth. I cobble together imagery from a poetic eye. I will draw, sing, dance, cook, bake, write and move it out for you. For the world. I am a reflector of beauty and life and death, amusement and pathos, and for this I am grateful. It is the only way that I can be, for it is the life builder in me. If I’m not growing, reflecting and showing, then I feel like I am dying. Even amongst the growth, I am dying, bit by bit, life and death. I love the cycle, and I am grateful for the cycle of life and death. Compost and regrowth.

I am grateful for my sanity. Sane. Clean. A clean mind that gets intentionally washed, rested and restored. I’m no saint, and I sometimes retox before a detox, but I appreciate the breathing mind and body. The give and the take, the expansion and the contraction. I am in constant flux and flow, moving and observing. Enjoying and enduring. I give great gratitude for my salience. May what needs observing leap out to me from the sidelines. May I see what I need to see. May I hear what I need to hear. May my mind think productive thoughts of good report. May my heart be open and compassionate. May my lips speak words of kindness and love. May my gut be clear and process as needed. May I be up to date, dust-free, clean and clear in the present.

I am grateful for my community, which is my family. I sometimes feel selfish for hoarding my time and presence. My practices mean the world to me. I am grateful for the time I give myself to be silent and reflect. May I balance service, connection and solitude.

Today is Christmas Day. I am alone, and I am happy to spend the day with myself. I will make it a bit more special than an any-another-day. I am my present.

I listen to the rain on the roof as I write and hope for a storm. I give good cheer. I sing out to you and yours that all of your dreams are coming true.

I am troubled on the inside. I am always searching. I guess that sounds somewhat normal for a young adult. Looking back, I see that I’m depressed from about the age of fifteen to thirty-six years old.

I search persistently and try oh so fucking hard to be liked. I draw pictures, I play in a band, and I am so fucking nice that people will have to like me. Only, it seems I don’t like myself. Not good enough. Never good enough. Not good enough at any of my artistic skills- yet, I NEVER give up. I cycle around and around the modalities. I draw until it gets too hard, and then I play a little guitar until it gets too hard, and then I try a little dancing until it gets too hard, and then it’s back to the drawing. I’m friendly with everyone. Everyone likes Candy. She’s so agreeable- just don’t ask me what I think, because I have no fucking idea.

As a kid, I told my mom: I know how to get people to like you. I can tell what a person wants or needs- so I give them that. Wow, talk about empathy. I wish someone could have taught me how to keep my centre in all of that. Instead, I eventually learned to just shut’er ALL down and not feel much of anything. By grade seven, I would brag that I could wear shoes that were too small. Yup, I’d say. If you just ignore the pain, it goes away!

Young adult Candy doesn’t like going to parties because she feels lost in the crowd. Nobody can tell she’s a fucking treasure chest just by looking. She feels overlooked and underseen. Sometimes she purposely makes herself invisible because she wants to meet the person she’s meeting again, but later, when she’s brighter and lovelier. It works; most people don’t remember her.

At one of these parties, she meets a woman named Aprile. This woman has just returned from Austrailia where she has been travelling for the last year.

Travelling, I muse over this word. What is this- travelling? Whatever it is, it seems to have been really great for Aprile. Aprile has a smile as bright as the sun. She has long golden hair, and she is keeping a wicked beat on a djembe drum. Now and then, she raises her hand in the air and makes a kiyiyi sound. Wow. She is so free. How did she get like that? Is that what I am searching for? Freedom? Freedom to be me?

I decide then and there that I must experience this travelling. First, I move to Commercial Drive and start meeting folks who do and have done this travelling thing. These people are going to and coming from places like Thailand, Vietnam, Morocco, India and more. They are tattooed, and pierced, and dreaded and shaved-headed alternative artist musicians who speak their minds and hearts with not just art, but their entire way of life. I want to be like them.

I choose to go to Central America. It could have been anywhere, really. I’m not sure why I choose there. I think a part of it is so that I can learn to speak Spanish. (En estos momentos, 25 años después, escribo desde México, y por eso estos recuerdos son fuertes. I admit, the internet helped correct me with that sentence, but its true, and I mostly wrote it.)

I listen to Art Bell on the radio sell us wind-up flashlights with a built in radio, as we wait out the impending all-systems crash of Y2K before buying my plane tickets. To the dismay of my parents, mostly my mom, I quit my I’ve-made-it, secure job working at Telus.

I fly first to Costa Rica and meet up with some old friends from my hometown, who are on their last two weeks of their travels. They tell me about a local lady they met in Honduras who wants/needs an English speaker to teach the primary grade.

I use a Lonely Planet guidebook with its paper maps, and I talk to the locals who help me find my way to the town of La Entrada, Copan, Honduras. It is a very teensy village built around a highway intersection with a gas station. It is a pueblito of campesinos and coffee farmers with pistolas tucked into their pants. If they are affluent enough, they send their children to The Good Future, L’Escuela Bilingüe, a bilingual elementary school, under the tutelage of Teacher Reina.

On my first day there, Reina slides a stack of teachers’ manuals across the desk at me. Just follow along with these and give them tests at the end of each week. They have to know all of this by the end of the year. It’s not just teaching English, but teaching the first grade, el primo grado, in English. But, I’m not a teacher, I protest. It’s easy, she says, enthusiastic to have me here.

It is NOT easy. I am playing teacher without any teaching skills to a classroom of about 20 seven-year-olds who won’t stay in their seats. There is a reason people go to university to become teachers, and I have only a grade twelve diploma.

I make fun worksheets for them like I remember having in elementary school, and they all swarm my desk, holding out their papers to me in their little grubby hands; Like this teacher? Like this teacher? Like this teacher? I’m being smothered by children; I can’t breathe. I become a yelly teacher. SIT DOWN!

It is so hard. Duro, difficil. I want to leave so bad. Where is all the drumming and fire dancing that Aprile and my new traveller friends were doing? I always did things wrong, and now I am stuck in this small town from out of time with its misunderstood emulation of the USA. I could leave, but the school and these ninõs are counting on me and I won’t let them down. I am here for the honduration. Seven more months to go.

Before long, my sister comes to join me. She is maybe 20 years old when I call her in Canada from the town’s phone. They need a kindergarten teacher, I say, wouldn’t that be something if you came? Within a week, she is here playing kindergarten teacher at L’Escuela Bilingue.

Another person, Meg, flies in from Philadelphia to play teacher with the grade two class. Meg is thirty-five, and I think she is old. Meg is amazing. She is a coach, personal trainer and a runner, super fit and so full of integrity. After school, she takes a backpack full of first aid supplies and snacks and runs through barrios, visiting people and making friends in the community. My sister and I look up to Meg.

There is a young man in town who seems to have some sort of mental illness and is obsessed with my sister. At least one time, he chases us home from school. We make it in time to slam and lock the door while he pounds upon it for a while before going away. Don’t worry about him, they say, he is harmless! We are worried about him.

The whole town seems to be obsessed with my sister. She is blonde, blue-eyed and is as cute as a button. They call her gordita, and she is very upset by this. One day, she locks herself in her room and won’t come out. They are calling me little fatty, she says. I think it’s a compliment to them, I say, trying to soothe her.

She is definitely not a little fatty, but weight is a touchy subject with us. We have both grown up in the dieting era of the eighties. Our mom called herself fat and ugly. My mom was gorgeous.

I have a memory of being eight years old. I’m driving home with our neighbour, Cathy, from a highland dancing competition. I’m not sure how the subject comes up, but I say to her, My mom is ugly. Boy, Cathy just about pulled over and let me out. I never had a friend’s mom give me shit like that. I wasn’t meaning to be mean; my mom herself told me she was ugly. I was just relaying this factual information to Cathy.

Mothers- please don’t talk yourself down in front of your daughters. My mom told me she was fat and ugly- and being reflections of her, my sister and I also grew up thinking we were fat and ugly. We were far from either. I know times were different then; my mom did the best she could. Bless you, mama.

We have a saying in Honduras. Gotta get your corn in. Everything is corn: tortillas, elote (corn on the cob), popcorn, horchata, baleadas, empanadas and tamales. We call the rabbit, which is conejo in spanish, cornhole the bunny.

We are so sick of beans and corn tortillas. My sister and I take a chicken bus to a neighbouring town because we hear they have a pizza restaurant. Sadly, it looks like pizza, but tastes like corn tortillas. It is as if someone who has never tasted a pizza copied one from a photo. We laugh at this. Hard.

We are set up in our own Honduran apartment in a neighbourhood just off the highway. There is a long backyard between two concrete fence walls. We have a cement pila for hand washing our clothes with buckets of water and a bar of cylinder laundry soap. I speak often and lovingly of the avocado tree in the yard, which bears giant fruit that we eat as a meal in itself. A neighbour asks us if they can pick some avocados to sell at the market. Fly at ‘er neighbour, there is no way we can eat all of them. They happily take a wheelbarrow full. What a financial impact to have a fruit tree in one’s yard.

Daily, we have vendors selling all kinds of wares at our door. Knock knock, frying pans? Corn? A handful of live chickens held upside down by their feet? ¡No, gracias!

For a while, we have a local Honduran teacher from Tegucigalpa named Maria. Somehow, she has a midwestern American accent, like she’s from Minnesota. One day, I come home to find the remains of a flattened tarantula on the wall beside the front door. Oh, I smayashed it, she says.

Where are the drummers and fire-dancers???

At school, I start the year by putting the desks in a circle. I’m that kind of teacher, I think to myself. I bring my didgeridoo too. Yes, I am travelling around Central America, hopping on and off chicken buses with a djembe and a didgeridoo, as you do. Every morning, I vibrate the sounds of the didj around the circle on each kid’s back while they giggle. They think it sounds like farts. Teacher Candy asks, in English, What did you eat for breakfast? They answer, I had milk for breakfast. Wow, milk for breakfast? Not to mention it was of the powdered variety. Folks drinks a powdered product called KLIM, which we realize is milk spelled backwards.

When we walk to school in the morning, there are random little fires of garbage here and there on the sidewalk and the comforting sounds of Abuelas clapping corn tortillas into existence. What is this strange place?

Come morning recess, the children rush towards the canteen to spend their lempiras on candy and rainbow coloured soda pop. This is another source of income for the school. Many of the students in my class have rotten teeth. I remember Yolanda with a mouth full of little grey stumps.

I put the desks back in rows. At any point during class, a kid will shoot up their hand and ask to go to the bathroom. I let one go, and then all of their hands start shooting up to also go to the bathroom. I let a few more go before saying that’s enough. Yolanda is one of the kids to whom I say, No! You can wait until break. Before too long, a kid in the front row points back towards Yolanda. Yolanda has her head down on her desk with a pool of diarrhea spreading out around her. Oh no. Poor thing. Teacher Candy is an asshole.

I remember making peanut butter in kindergarten and I think the students might love this. There are cacahuates sold in markets everywhere, but no peanut butter. One of the parents brings us a blender to class. We blend the peanuts with salt and everyone watches intrigued as the peanuts blend into a brown liquado with lumps. The kids have disgusted looks on their faces and none of them will try it. I realize it very much looks like diarrhea. Within the next couple of days a student brings me a special jar of skippy peanut butter that someone went to the city to get for me. My goodness.

I think back to those smiling faces. So earnest and full of love. One day, the children are crowding around the swings in the schoolyard. Teacher Candy comes towards them to see what the hell is going on, and they knowingly scatter. Hernando smirks at me as I draw near. I see that someone has written puta on the swing. I can’t help but laugh.

Some days, though, I cry in the bathroom.

I can’t do this anymore. I’m so tired, and this is not the travelling I wanted. I’m bloated from Baleadas and teaching is hard. The principal encourages me, it’s easy, she repeats- just follow along with the teacher’s manual. Teach them 10 words on Monday and test them on Friday. But, it doesn’t tell you how to teach, though, and I am doing what she says, and they are failing the tests. They are not learning. I’m realizing that grade one is a very important time for a child. It is here that they learn to read and write, as well as learn the beginnings of arithmetic, like addition and subtraction. They are floored by the numeral zero. I realize that zero is a concept, and they just can’t wrap their heads around it. If you have one chicken and you add no chickens, how many chickens do you have? What the fuck? I’m not explaining it in a way that they understand.

I want to give up and go find the fire dancers. At this halfway point, my sister asks one of her students’ dads, who is also a coffee gangster, if there is any way we could get some weed. He brings us a big bag of the cuttings, which we call shake. In a feat of desperation, I smoke a big joint before going to school the next day.

I walk into the classroom, which is usually chaotic with children buzzing around like mosquitos to find that they all stop and stare at me. I stare back. In silence they watch me. They are mystified and captivated by teacher Candy. Holy shit, I think I’ve figured this out.

I am now, The Teacher Candy Show. Each lesson becomes a 10-minute bite-sized mini performance with an improvised song and a dance. Instead of learning ten words on Monday to memorize by Friday, each day is sponsored by two words. We draw these words, we sing these words, and they know these two words inside out by the end of each day. Come Friday, these ten words are their best buds. They are passing tests now! Math becomes songs about sapos and insectos. We draw chickens to count and then add a little poof-cloud for zero. Zero is nada, nada is zero! As soon as I see their attention drifting, I change the channel, and they are all back with me. What is she going to do now? Keep them guessing! I become a fucking incarnation of Sesame Street as a woman.

I don’t actually smoke weed before school every day, but I will say that it only took once to shift the perception of my whole approach. By the end of the school year, we have success. The students can read and do math, and they all graduate to grade two. I have done my duties and can now go find the drummers and fire dancers. The school and parents beg me to stay for another year, but alas, my Honduration is complete.

NOTE:

I’m happy to see that The Good Future Bilingual School in Honduras has just celebrated their 25th anniversary! I was there in 2000 when they had only three grades. Each year, as the students moved ahead a grade, they added another teacher. The students I taught are now over thirty years old. Jeeeebuz.

I am currently offering Somatic Experiencing and Creative Coaching Sessions at a practice rate until I am certified. I am taking bookings now for January and February 2026. A package of 3 sessions will be available for 150$. Sessions will be one hour long and available in person or on Zoom on Tuesdays and Thursdays at the following times: 2:00 to 3:00 pm, 3:30 to 4:30 pm, and 5:00 to 6:00 pm.

Until I get my online booking system up and running, please email candyrobertstheatre@gmail.com to book a time.

I imagine singing like that would feel like flying. Have you ever dreamed of flying? How does one get lift-off with their voice? Is it the weight of shame and trauma that holds a person down like rocks? I’m sure that not every great singer who can split open the space-time continuum is free from trauma and shame. So what is it?

I pause to take in the sounds of the lake. Birds. In the distance, a low rumble of a plane that has already passed by. The gentle lap-lap of the lake on the dock. There is a light breeze moving the water towards the bridge. The small ripple-like waves are processing like a parade to the other side of the lake. What’s going on over there, wave-friends?

What do I imagine singflying to feel like?

It is an opening of the body. A vibrating of skin and bones and muscles and flesh until the molecules start separating. Singing is breathing with sound as natural as the day you are born. Atoms are bouncing off of each other and creating space between all-that-is. It is a miracle someone like my friend doesn’t just vibrate apart into everything. I think perhaps that is exactly what is happening. I long to feel that open heart and soul and skin and bone and atom and molecule. Is that what makes great singers so big in the way that they take up more shimmering space than the average dude?

I have wanted to singfly good, like really fucking great, for as long as I can remember. I have also been afraid of singing since… since….

What kid wasn’t shut down? I was a hopeful, positive and expressive child. I was always singing, dancing, drawing and telling stories. When did it become important to be good at something that was just as natural as being? Nobody seems to be worried about being the best breather.

Birds, breeze, lap-lap of the lake. Eyes closed, I remember.

I am taunted for my ceaseless expression. Shamed for thinking I am great. What’s wrong with being great? What kid isn’t great? They tease me for drawing with my tongue held out between my lips. I think I am a good drawer. My mom even says so. One time, I am drawing a picture for the Girl Guide cookie contest. I draw a giant mushroom and under it an Imp-faery eating cookies. I am sure this drawing is going to win the contest. I show it to our neighbour Cathy, who is over having coffee with my mom. I’m winning the drawing contest, I tell her. Oh! Isn’t that wonderful, she says. What are you winning? Her question shakes me to the core. Well, I’m pretty sure I’m winning, I said, a little unsure now. I wait and wait for the Girl Guide people to tell me that I have won the contest. I ask my mom if they have called yet. They haven’t. They never call.

In grade two, we paint easter eggs, and the grade sevens will pick which one is best. Mine is amazing, I love it so much! It is fancy and different. I use a little black pen and draw swirls on top of the paint all over the egg. No one else has done this. I am sure I am going to win, but they chose Tricia’s egg. Hers is a mess of colours, green, pink and yellow all smooshed together. It looks like she has made a mistake, but they chose this one. I don’t get it.

I become obsessed with: Which one is the best? Who is the prettiest? Who is the smartest? The skinniest? So much that I began to shrink. They are right. I am not so great.

I am listening to my favourite song in the entire world. I love Rock and Roll by Joan Jett. I own the record; it is mine. The record player is one of those two-ton pieces of furniture that holds the player, speakers and records all in one console. I have the headphones on. The kind of 1970s headphones that take up most of my 5-year-old head. I lay there on the golden-orange shag carpet singing along with my feet up on the console while my mom cleans the kitchen. I play the song over and over, singing my heart out until my Mom comes over and says, Can you unplug the headphones and play the music out loud? I am delighted! Oh! You love this song too, I ask?

No, I’m just sick of hearing you sing, she says.

Is this when I learn that my singing is annoying and a burden? Grown-up Candy understands that her mom, like most mothers of that generation, was overworked and under-appreciated. Mom didn’t get to express herself, and perhaps neither should baby Candy. Or, maybe she was just stressed-the-fuck-out and annoyed with this kid singing the same song over and over again. But I mean, come on, how cute would that be? That little kid singing in her chipmunk voice- I love rock and roll, put another dime in the jukebox baby!? An internet sensation to be sure. Grown-up Candy knows how important it is to encourage a child’s self-expression. I’m sure, easier said than done when your husband’s a cheating asshole, and you are up-to-here doing everything to keep a family and home in tip-top shape.

In my twenties, I experience my first and only rainbow gathering. I am wandering around alone, a little stoned. This small town, little city gal is awed by the giant drum-jam and the individual campfires spread out across Sombreo Beach near Victoria, BC. I come upon a song circle and sit down by the flickering fire. There are drums, there are guitars, and the folks here be jamin’. People are singing and toning and improvising, and I am overcome by the beauty of it. Before I can stop myself, a song jumps to my lips, and I begin.

Listen, everybody, I gotta story to tell…

I sing out with the confidence and gusto of a professional performer as everyone turns to me expectantly, ready to hear my song and my story. It is at this exact moment that I realize that I do NOT, in fact, have a story to tell, nor do I have a song to sing. My eyes grow large as I shrink down into a speck of sand and roll away to disappear into the beating drums and crashing waves of the beach.

For many years, I hide away and practice songs. I start recording them and listening back for my ears only. I can hear so much fear in my voice. It makes me cringe. I don’t buy it. It feels like: Sound good or die. Being heard in so much fear and imperfection feels like death, so I do not share.

Is it an absence of fear that cracks the code, which tears the fabric of time and space? Fear holds tight. Fear braces. Is it fear that winds tight the atoms with dissonance and keeps a person heavy on the ground? There is no flying when there is fear. Is it the weight of judgment that keeps a person from lift off?

Now in my fifties and with the support of a somatic practitioner, I am expanding my capacity to be present and WITH the discomforts that come from feeling so much. Finally, a little more, less-fucks are given, and I am rememberfeeling the freedom of my childhood expression. I’m getting there, and I’m still a little bit afraid, but I am learning how to lean into those sensations physically. I’m writing songs with levity for the first time since I was 9 years old.

The first song I wrote, I remember clear as a morning lake. I recruit my neighbour Beanie, and we form a band, The Wetsuits. We wear our bathing suits and play paper plate tambourines. I think it’s a great song.

Look at that, I’m still growing. And, I am cracking the code that releases the heaven between the clouds. It’s happening, I feel it.

I am currently offering Somatic Experiencing and Creative Coaching Sessions at a practice rate until I am certified. I am taking bookings now for January 2026. Packages of 3 sessions will be available for 150$. Sessions will be one hour long and available in person or on Zoom on Tuesdays and Thursdays at the following times: 2:00 to 3:00 pm, 3:30 to 4:30 pm, and 5:00 to 6:00 pm.

Until I get my online booking system up and running, please email candyrobertstheatre@gmail.com to book a time.

That voice. I call her a “lyin-whore-bitch, which makes me laugh, and brings me back to the sound of the rain pattering on the skylight above me. I see you I say to her, making the two fingers on my eyes to the two fingers pointing out shape as a warning to this figure-less voice.

She continues: What are you doing? Why are you even trying? Just fuck it! Wouldn’t you rather go back to binge-watching all 11 seasons of SHAMELESS? You are only at season 7!

I think about the draw of watching other people make bad choices, when I could be making my own bad choices, and some good ones too. TV, sometimes used as another version of numbing out for me.

I wonder if perhaps the urge to dissociate is a sign that I’m getting close to something important, close enough that an old protective pattern is activated.

What is that lyin-whore-bitch voice REALLY trying to say? Come on, Candy. Can you find some compassion? I take a breath, look up from the computer and let my eyes find what pleases them in the room. They land on a deep green plant hanging from the ceiling. Hello, little plant. Thank you for being here. I feel like these plants are shooting pulses of life force energy into my heart via my eyeballs.

Ok MissResistance, I’m sorry I called you a lyin’whore-bitch. I understand that you are only trying to keep me safe from pain and humiliation, but it’s a little too late for that. I am a professional fool, and I practically live on Cringe Mountain.

She leans in a little closer and becomes a little clearer and says; But, Candy, you are moving toward your power. I want to slow you down so that nothing bad happens. You are going toooo fast!

Ah, Ok. This makes sense. She’s scared. She seems to me like a little girl and an immature mother at the same time. I tell her. Hey, I appreciate your support. I’ve got you. I’m going to take this slowly right now, but can you stay close, in case I need you? You can be my sidekick.

I’d rather have her as an ally than an enemy. MissResistance is on my team now.

The thoughts continue to circle my head like flies, annoying and crowding my headspace. What do I do? Where do I start? Ah, this is overwhelm. Can I stick with it and not check out? Just a little longer? Can I notice anything about the present moment? An image, a physical sensation? A feeling? I notice a gripping in my gut. Hello gut, I feel you. I hear a plane overhead and look out the window to see the last of the brown leaves shaking on the tree. They are waving at me before they leaf for the winter. (see what I did there?)

A writing game jumps to mind. MAGIC WRITING.

How far into the future should I go? I decide on one year. This is fun. There are no limits, and nobody needs to read it.

We all work in such different ways- DO WHAT WORKS FOR YOU!

If you give this game a try and you feel moved to do so, please let me know how it goes.

I am currently offering Somatic Experiencing and Creative Coaching Sessions at a practice rate. I am taking bookings now for January 2026. Packages of 3 coaching sessions will be available for 150$. Sessions will be one hour long and available on Tuesdays and Thursdays at these times: 2 to 3 pm, 3:30 to 4:30 pm, and 5 to 6 pm.

Until I get my online booking system up and running, please email candyrobertstheatre@gmail.com to book a time.

Here is my Magic Writing game. Take from it what you will. The idea is to cultivate a feeling. How does living your dream life feel? Can you imagine the best-case scenario? Know that you can make changes as your needs and desires change. We are looking for a feeling.

It is December 5th, 2026, and we are a couple of weeks away from 2027.

This last year has surpassed what I could have imagined. I put my eye on the prize one year ago, to ALLOW the unlived, resisted part of myself to speak up. In 2026, I somatically relearned my nervous system to sense that it is SAFE TO BE ME. In this, I discovered the voice of my true expression, the spirit, energy or soul that makes me, me. I shared this experiential journey through writing, singing and moving my body.

With somatic experiencing and creative coaching one-to-one sessions, I helped others to also discover and live the life they’ve always imagined they could.

Bite-sized, or titrated, processable pieces combined with consistency were key. In other words, small doable commitments to myself that I could follow through with ease. I learned that keeping my word to myself is paramount in trusting myself. Not to do so is detrimental to my confidence and my intrinsic motivation. I am always worthy of love.

How do we continue when there’s a part of us that wants to stop? How do we sustain motivation when the new-project chemicals like dopamine go away? I learned that we can intentionally create those motivation chemicals through action. I made friends with MissResistance, and with her at my side, I began writing songs consistently. The process became fun, though still challenging, the levity, joy and satisfaction outweighed the cringe.

Inspiration follows action- not the other way around. For me, I had to remember to go slow and that I didn’t have to do it all at once.

I feel more like me than I ever have. This last year, I found a stronger version of my voice in more ways than one. I began writing, and I KEPT AT IT. I wrote when no one was reading my work except for my friends. I mean, that is no small thing, and for this, I am so very grateful. I kept on writing when the voice said- YOU SUCK, THEY ARE JUST BEING NICE. (I acknowledge this limiting belief.)

For over a year now, I have been publishing an article a week on Substack. I love writing, I could say that I have written myself home.

I wrote a new show! I mean, I LOVE LARRY, and I’m always a bit mad that more people didn’t give LARRY a chance. You just watch- there is going to be a time when EVERYONE WANTS LARRY. Fuck that self-proclaimed reviewer, Sepsis Brown, who gave LARRY one star. In 2026, I didn’t need any fucking stars. I was the star.

I wrote a new show, and I LOVE IT. In it, I am myself, Candy Roberts, and I tell personal universal stories. Sometimes these stories come in rapid-fire jokes, and sometimes these stories float apart into surreal images and movements, and sometimes they come through the body as a clown turn. The entire set and costumes for this show are packed into one suitcase. I sing original songs in this new show. It is full-bodied, hilarious, poignant, weird and beautiful. People see themselves in this show. I love playing this show so much. I am being called for this show from around the world. I’ve had to hire a team of support to run my website, social media and booking. I am booked solid into 2029.

This is a solo show, though sometimes, I bring my buddy Caroline with me, and we end the show with a set of our original 2-part harmony music. Or we begin the show with it. Whatever is clever, my friend.

This last year, Caroline and I got to sing professionally in cities across Europe. This was the most expanding opportunity this year. I learned so much and gained so much confidence. I allowed myself to feel confident. Caroline and I are booking most excellent music shows!

I learned that my voice, MY VOICE, is what is most important. It is not HOW WELL I can sing, or write, but how much of my SPIRIT my voice can hold. This was the year that I figured out how to ALLOW my soul to express through my voice. WHAT A blessed-fucking MIRACLE. It doesn’t even matter if anyone thinks I am ugly or beautiful. NOT THE FUCKING POINT. I found a way to let my SOUL out. This has been an answer to my prayers.

In 2026, I began my SOMATIC Coaching Practice. I went wild practicing with as many people as I had the energy for, and that was a lot. I started by offering 50-dollar sessions before I became certified in the early Spring.

By May, I became joyfully consumed in my own creative work and had to slow down the Somatic Experiencing and Creative Coaching. I continued to take clients at a higher rate so that I could keep the skills up, but my performing career took the front seat.

I continue to write creative nonfiction about memories and the deconstruction of the creative process, and am cooking up an offering for 2027. I have designed a program that supports clients to develop their creative freedom through a blend of Somatic Experiencing and coaching. The program contains 12 one-hour personal somatic coaching sessions, is client-led, and will be structured to support each person’s individual dreams and creative goals. The work encompasses principles of sustaining motivation, the power of imagination, and personal transformation through supported self-inquiry and Somatic Experiencing. Who do you need to BECOME to be the person who lives the kind of life you envision? Through somatically working with the nervous system, we will learn to expand our capacity to respond with awareness and be present with any of the challenges and blockages that may arise.

Throughout 2026, I kept consistent with yoga. I kept consistent with sobriety being the baseline of my existence. I FEEL GOOD. I feel strong and flexible in my body and mind.

I am writing songs regularly now. I have written songs throughout the years, but they started coming consistently in 2026. It is simply because I learned to believe in my voice, and l was able to step aside and let my soul do the writing.

In 2026, my career, my artistic passions, my finances and love life all came into alignment. It is fucking wonderful.