Author’s Note: Forgive me for any spelling or grammar mistakes in the midst of publishing this. This piece is so incredibly long. I will go back in and fix them if I find them, but I simply must get this out. Sincerely, a current English graduate student who reads and writes until her brain is numb.

“BFA” vs my spirit

The spotlight in my eyes was far too bright to allow me to see any of the details of the audience in front of me, but 300 people was what I was told. As I’d anxiously waited for my short cameo, bouncing my leg in a dressing room chair, my castmates had told me the house was sold out, or something close to it. I did my best not to let that shake me. My throat would also get so incredibly dry when I was nervous, and I was not about to shake on any one of the notes I had been trusted to deliver to all 300 sets of eyes that were now looking at me, and only me, all at once.

I’d had dreams like this. I was 10 years old when I would sprawl myself over the twin bed in the room where my mom had painted every wall sky blue by hand, imagining what it might feel like to captivate a live audience. On one of the sky-blue walls hung a massive mirror. I spent most nights lip-syncing and dancing, staring at myself in its glass. When I’d practiced enough, I would gather my parents (and sometimes any friends they’d invite over), and I’d perform for them in the living room. I asked my parents many times if it was unrealistic to imagine that performing for big crowds could be my job one day. I don’t remember their answers, just the feeling. It was as if my heart was breaking at the statistical unlikelihood while my gut set itself aflame, determined to make it happen anyway. I refused to be heartbroken becuase I knew that would mean I was giving up.

As every one of the 300 faces occupying my college theatre shifted their attention toward me, the house lights dimmed. Then suddenly,

silence.

The guitarist strummed while I stared at her and waited for her to cue me. When she finally did, adrenaline took over, and while I was singing and emoting, the moment blurred, each word coasting out of my mouth. I awoke from my passionate haze to find my last line leaving my lips and floating gently toward the stage floor.

It was explained to me very clearly in rehearsal that when the song ended, I should grab the guitarist’s chair and we would exit together as the narrator entered stage right. The show’s director (Professor W, we’ll call him) had primed me for the fact that people may not applaud due to the timing of the transition, but when I finally began to exit, the silence blanketing the audience turned into the loudest roar of praise I had ever heard in my life. 300 cheers, yelling, clapping, releasing the tension built in that moment that I had just held in my hands. My mother was in the audience that day. My director was tearing up in his seat. We were all collectively aware that this was the first time I had ever experienced recognition like this.

It’s hard to explain to anyone why it meant so much to me. I was the only person whose entire world changed in that moment. At the end of the show, once the bows had concluded, I raced to the dressing room to get out of costume and into the lobby as quickly as possible. Waiting to meet me were faces I didn’t recognize, although all of them seemed to recognize me. Little did I know in that moment, just about everyone in the department now knew my name. In the following days, my Instagram would flood with random follow requests from my peers, as I had apparently reached the pinnacle of academic validation in the “BFA” world.

As I pushed through the lobby packed shoulder to shoulder, one face I very quickly recognized made his way over to me: the musical theatre department head.

“What’s your name?” He said it with so much emotive restraint, as if he was hesitant to make me feel too comfortable in his presence.

“My name is Jessi. You accepted me into the program this last fall.” I didn’t allow my tone to clue him into the fact that his pragmatic nature was succeeding in making me calculate my response. This was an acting program after all. I knew very well he knew who I was. He had been the very person to rave about my audition and offer me a talent scholarship (according to my academic advisor).

“That’s right. Your voice is incredible.” His tone held praise, but only just enough.

“Thank you,” I said earnestly.

“You had the house in the palm of your hands. You know that?”

I caught my breath long enough to thank him again, finish the conversation, and move on. Validation from this particular professor felt like a luxury in our department. He boasted a myriad of Broadway credits and a direct phone line to Johnathan Groff. I had been in his program nearly two semesters, and this was the first time we had spoken. Although I was composed externally, I was on the moon.

That was the last time that year I would feel any confidence in my ability to perform in the program. The same professor would just as quickly knock me down a peg as I entered his more acute awareness. Other professors began to spread rumors about how I was planning on leaving the program, as I had discussed my concerns about being able to pay my student fees and had taken a semester off of theatre coursework. One of them told me to simply go learn the craft outside of the college environment and then very quickly turned around and started whispering behind closed doors about my “lacking dedication.” No one came to me and asked. They drew their conclusions amongst each other.

I would go on to audition for the next semester’s musical, get a callback, just to be pulled into a meeting by the same head of the department to tell me I needed to be a better actor, and that was why he couldn’t cast me.

“You have an incredible voice, and I promise you we are going to utilize that voice, but you need to be more dedicated to your acting.” It seemed as though he meant it as a compliment, but it felt more like a challenge.

“I assure you I did not miss a minute of rehearsals for the show you just saw. I just needed to take a few months beforehand to reset. Life was happening to me all at once, but as I’m sure you can see, I am back and ready to learn.” I wasn’t intending to argue with him about my abilities. I was simply determined to improve, as I had been trying to the entire time I’d been there. From moving hundreds of miles to get to my dorm, shaking an aggressive case of anxiety that was taking over my life, to then diving headfirst into memorizing monologues. I knew more than anyone that I had been doing my absolute best.

He didn’t acknowledge my enthusiasm. He just rebutted with a simple “Yes, it does seem like you can dedicate yourself when it’s something you WANT to do, but life is going to keep happening to you, and you need to be able to do the work regardless.” His tone was harsh, implying that I had simply not tried hard enough.

I was crushed. I bent over backward to rehearse, learn, commit, and figure out what it meant for me to be an “actor,” and the head of the department was standing in front of me telling me that I wasn’t bleeding enough. It wasn't the fact that he told me I wasn’t enough of an actor; it was the fact that I wanted to be one so bad, I had tried to learn what that meant, and I was still so utterly lost. I felt like life had sabotaged me, and then I felt like maybe I just sabotaged myself. I couldn’t tell.

I wanted to walk into the program and feel supported and uplifted in the craft, and the only person who had done that for me was Professor W, who gave me that moment in front of a sold-out house. Essentially, every other authority in the department had one tactic, and it was to try to get me to earn their approval as if that was the only way to motivate me. They would give just enough validation to keep you going and pull it all out from under you to “raise the stakes.” This was not the way I wanted to learn what it meant to perform.

I dropped out of my program officially a few months later. I hadn’t been cast in the show, student council voted in other members of my class over me, and I was quickly running out of ways to immerse myself. Convinced I would simply never learn how to act, I tried to accept that maybe the statistical unlikelihood of my success was going to win. In the process, I did my best to drown out the overwhelming disappointment of that little girl, sitting in her sky-blue bedroom, trying to hit the high notes at the end of the Phantom of the Opera title song. She was very upset with me, and it seemed like I just had to let her be.

Even in writing this, I ask myself if I am being too harsh. I still seem to be afraid of disappointing the staff of a program I haven’t been in for years. I know very well (especially after reading some Rate My Professors reviews that co-sign my experiences) that regardless of the intentions of those professors, they were not approaching theatrical pedagogy in a way that taught me anything. I actually only remember ever learning anything from Professor W, even though I had been trying my best to learn from them all.

With that being said, like anything that is meant for you, Theatre kept finding me anyway.

origins

Before applying to my program, I had barely acted a day in my life.

When I was accepted into my Theatre BA (I’ve discussed it as a BFA for the article’s sake, but it was indeed just a BA), I was freshly 24, and I had not touched the theatrical world since High School, where I had done some backstage tech and Theatre 101, but that was it.

Even then, there was a clear hierarchy. The theatre teacher (who was arrested for texting young girls just a few months into the semester) had favorites (clearly), and the rest of us did not exist. When they ultimately replaced him, it took them a while to nail down a permanent teacher, and the substitute had given up on me far before I was able to give up on myself.

At the tail end of the course, I had been assigned to sing a reprise from the Frozen soundtrack. I practiced every single day, belting insanely high notes from each corner of my bedroom, but when the day came to perform, I just couldn’t seem to muster up the courage to do it. The long-term sub looked me dead in the face.

“Jessica, if you are unwilling to perform your final song, I’m going to have to fail you”

All I remember is nodding at her. I’m sure I said some semblance of “that’s fine” and put my head down. I still don’t quite understand what was going through my head at that point. Maybe I was just terrified it wouldn’t be good enough, and that was enough to make me shrink inside of myself. Regardless, I really wish I would’ve sung that day, and while I really only had myself to blame, I wish someone had shown me enough compassion to help me break out of that shell sooner. Sure, the industry is “cutthroat,” but does it have to be that way to a 14-year-old?

After failing my first-ever theatre course, I decided the safest place in the house was behind the curtain, and I fell in love with backstage tech.

My first job was “Dresser” for the spring musical Evita. I spent night after night watching our Eva Perón belt her heart out from the wings of the theatre, thinking, “I wonder if I could do something like that one day.” My job was to help her through her quick change. We crouched under the set and executed it flawlessly every time. It felt like I was contributing to something, and I was just happy to be in the room where theatre was happening. Sure, it sucked when the entire cast went out after shows, and I was never invited. I didn’t really have friends in tech either. I was still such a shy kid, but in that one moment underneath the set I was a part of something, and that was enough.

This was all around the same time the NYU rep came to our school. I told myself I’d get my grades up so I could go there to get my degree in performance one day. 16-year-old me wanted nothing but to live in the big city performing somewhere center stage. Our Eva’s name was actually Casey, by the way. She lives in NYC now, from what I’ve seen her post on Instagram. She is just as much of an inspiration 10 years later. After Evita, I did props for Almost Maine and then didn’t step on a theatrical stage again for years.

Before I officially abandoned the stage, I auditioned for my high school's production of Thoroughly Modern Millie. When I was only given an ensemble role in one scene, I decided I needed to focus on other things like building “real work experience.” Firstly, I wish I had understood how kind of them it was to involve me even though I couldn’t dance and I could barely read the provided sides. Secondly, I wish I’d known that ten years later I’d be seeking that exact experience to build the career path I’d ultimately settle on. Getting a job, and paying the bills required to keep my first car, started getting in the way by the time I was 16. This would be the first of many times I abandoned the arts for “something more practical.”

I graduated High School in 2017, and Theatre didn’t find me again until December of 2022. The interim had been spent dropping out of community college repeatedly, changing my major every time I re-enrolled, then developing, and thus battling, agoraphobia (the medical term for the fear of leaving the house) around the time of the pandemic.

Essentially, from late 2019 to early 2023, I struggled immensely to go outside. While it wasn’t impossible, it was absolutely exhausting. It took a good few years of on-and-off exposure therapy before I felt ready to live a life outside of four walls again. I was pretty sure up until that point that my only option would be a remote job and an online college degree. Planes were my worst nightmare, and I had already held the funeral for all my teenage dreams of seeing the world and going to NYU. The only creative outlet I was able to maintain was a TikTok account where I’d post myself singing, once again, in my room.

That’s when I met Trenton and Marshall.

I had met Marshall first after they stumbled across a post of me promoting my first-ever self-released song (I was doing my best to keep some artistic hope alive). Marshall lived in NYC, and not only did they live in NYC, but they had gone to NYU for theatre. What an odd coincidence. I immediately had so many questions, yet somehow didn’t realize I had even still cared about these things. Around the same time Marshall and I had met, a few people I had been talking with over TikTok formed a group chat. It began with Marshall, me, and two other girls (who I still adore to this day). We all spent hours on FaceTime together multiple times a week. Seemingly, we’d stumbled into each other's lives at a point where we all had a lot of time on our hands.

Then, stage right, enters Trenton. I remember distinctly that it was a Wednesday night, far past an acceptable hour to be awake. I had decided what better time to go live on TikTok, as I had been having a rough day as it was. I’d intended to go to a cafe earlier that day to start working more consistently on exposure therapy, but on my way, my panic had become so loud that I circumvented the stop at the cafe altogether and simply drove myself directly to the friend’s house I was originally headed to. I beat myself up pretty hard for that, failing to see that I had driven myself somewhere after all, and not only that, but my friend lived in the heart of downtown. A place I’d used to avoid at all costs becuase of the “chaotic highways” and one-way roads. I digress.

Trenton and I knew each other in passing, as he was acquainted with some of the group chat I’d created. This was not the first time he had joined a live chat, but it was the first time he’d ever offered to talk outside of the platform. With the obvious gloom covering my face, he said

“Hey, if you need someone to talk to, you can always message me!”

Neither of us knew what that was going to mean in that moment. I sent him an emoji of a girl standing. He responded with “I’ve been expecting you,” and that was it. Trenton and I would become best friends pretty immediately (and stay best friends). He’d get added to our little group chat, and we’d all return to our regularly scheduled calls.

A few weeks after Trenton joined the group, Marshall invited us all to watch a Zoom reading of a script he was working on. I enthusiastically placed the date on my calendar, and when the day came, I glued myself to my laptop for the entire read. Unsurprisingly to anyone who knows me, by the end of it, I was in tears.

Ok, so maybe the desire I had in high school to be “one of them,” the actors, that is, had yet to fully go away. Theatre still, clearly, mattered to me. Now I had more than a lot of questions to ask myself.

In those same few weeks I told Trenton that I wished I could go to college somewhere out of state. I started talking about pursuing English and writing in big-city cafes or performing in front of crowds again. Exposure therapy had just begun to make its first few dents in my psyche, and I was starting to believe maybe I really could live again.

My primary tactic continued to be cafes. I would drive to a new cafe every day and sit there until my body stopped asking me to run back to safety, and then I’d sit there a little longer. I was the queen of cafe hopping, and not becuase I was determined to compare lattes; I didn’t even drink coffee (I actually discovered my love for matcha within this exercise), but because this was how I was going to learn to feel safe inside of my body instead of my room. The big city downtown area that used to terrify me became one of my favorite places to explore, only boosting my confidence that I could be the person I dreamed I’d be.

As Trenton and I discussed my potential desires for change, he explained that where he lived in Colorado, there was a university that seemed like “my vibe.” With my repeated recent mentions of theatre, he didn’t neglect to bring up that they had a program for it.

The preceding details could fill an article themselves, but six months (and a lot of matcha lattes) later I got on a plane to Colorado to visit both Trenton and the state, nearly 1000 miles from my hometown in “sunny California” and the bedroom I used to be terrified to leave. I cried the entire plane ride, learning that clouds made cloud-shaped shadows on the ground and that nothing really compares to seeing the Rocky Mountains from above. Stepping off that plane was one of the last times I would call myself agoraphobic, as after the fact there was no period in my life where I met the DSM criteria anymore. (Exposure therapy works).

That trip told me everything I needed to know. It was now the summer of 2023 when I started looking at housing in Colorado on a plane back to California. Not a single panic attack had found me during my entire trip, and shortly after I got home, I sent in my Theatre BA application. In the weeks before my visit, I had just started an accelerated, 8-week Acting 1 class at my community college, and that was my first time going back to school in person since my anxiety had cascaded in 2019. Further solidifying for me that I both wanted this and could finally handle it. As you already know, I was accepted into my program, and what I didn’t realize at that moment was that I would be making the official move to Colorado two weeks later.

When I was accepted, my advisor told me that the music theatre department was so enthused by my audition that they were willing to do whatever they needed to do to keep me in the program. I wish that sentiment had prevailed.

doing the “right” thing

After I left the theatre program, I spent hour upon hour in advisors’ offices looking for the fastest and cheapest way out of my degree. I ended up changing my major to Liberal Arts. Online tuition for Liberal Arts was almost half the price of my Theatre tuition, and while it took another two years to finish, I didn’t have to worry so much about what I was spending. When I finally graduated undergrad this last May, I had seemingly set myself up well, having already started a 9-5 job in non-profit outreach a few months before the end of the semester.

My job had everything you’d look for in an entry-level position: kinda shitty (but not horrible) health coverage, decent PTO & sick time, occasional hybrid remote work, the most money I’d ever made, and bosses who swore they were so chill. At first, it seemed like I was working in the U.S. economy version of a utopia.

I was also pretty certain that it was the “correct and responsible path.” Sure, I loved the arts, but the arts didn’t seem to love me, and I needed to pay my bills somehow. I deserved this, didn’t I? My resume had been tailored, with an entirely unrelated degree, to what was essentially a marketing position, by bolstering it with “freelance” work and “internships,” all of which got me exactly where I had aimed to go (We don’t need to talk about why those are in quotations). With theatre fully scrubbed from my resume, I had landed the practical job that was prescribed to me, and I had done it a whole lot easier than most humanities graduates. I just didn’t realize how much it was going to kill me.

40 hours a week were spent responding to emails, cold calling businesses to pitch partnerships, and sitting at market tables outside in 90 degree heat while everyone and their mother avoided my gaze. My team and I would joke about how acting class made me good at talking to strangers, as most of my co-workers absolutely hated the idea. It wasn’t a hard job, but the longer I was there, the more thoughts would creep in about the theatrical stage.

In my first week on the job, I was stumbling across the movie rendition of Tick, Tick… Boom, making myself the female Johnathan Larson in my head. I wouldn’t realize until much later that the start date of my job coincided with the thirtieth anniversary of his passing and the debut of RENT (I love to point out a synchronicity that is potentially a reach). Once again I sobbed at the ending of a piece of theatrical media. I saw myself in the way he had tortured himself to make something of his work, and I wanted to find a way to be that brave again.

I still had not realized the coincidence of the aforementioned dates when, in month two of my job, I, just as coincidentally, saw RENT performed for the first time. I was sitting in the same seats of my college theatre that I’d stared out at during my “big moment” two years prior. I couldn’t help but wonder if this was the musical the head of the department was promising when he’d assured me they’d “utilize my voice,” as it would have been the only other musical in my time there had I finished the program. One of the acting teachers who also seemingly believed very little of my skill ended up in one of the seats next to me during the show. I started to ask myself how many signs I could get before I’d listen.

In month four of my job, I’d go on to see Hadestown, the Broadway Tour. It was my first Broadway show. The musical had been my introduction to musical theatre when I was leaving California, not because I’d ever gotten to see it, but because I could not get the soundtrack out of my head while I was packing for my dorm. I had searched “musical theatre” on Spotify, hoping to create a stronger background in a world I was just reentering as I left for my program, and I clung immediately to Hadestown due to my love for mythology. As I saw it happening live for the first time, I sobbed through the entire second act (are we shocked?). Nothing felt more important to me in that moment than finding my way back to the arts. I was sure I had never felt as motivated as I did right then. I just had no idea where to start.

Finally, in month 5, I emailed Professor W and asked if he would meet with me. He had no idea what I was asking to meet about, and I honestly barely did either, but we scheduled a time anyway. I left work early that day to drive to his office. Once I had made it to the building, I walked myself through it, realizing I remembered very well where his office was. For a year, this building was my second home, and God did I miss what that felt like. In the good moments during rehearsals where I’d made so many friends, and the workshops for different pieces for class that didn’t feel like punishment. I wanted to do it all again, but this time with just a little more backbone. Once I made it to his office, he asked if he could hug me. “Of course!” I replied.

“Take a seat! Take a seat! It’s so good to see you, Jessi!” He exclaimed, as the same acting teacher I had sat near during RENT ate lunch at her desk behind me. I began to ramble on to Professor W about how I missed theatre and never had the time to perform anymore. He, of course, provided resources and encouraged me to take whatever risks I needed to, but one part of the conversation changed for me more than he would ever realize.

“Jessi, when you sang that solo, people were coming up to me asking me who you were. They wanted to know where they could see you perform. I need you to know, I don’t say it lightly when I say you have to keep pursuing this. At the very least, you need to keep singing. You have a gift, and it moves people. You owe it to the world… well, not OWE it; you don’t owe anyone anything, but the world needs to hear your voice.” He said it as if he was reciting an incredibly passionate monologue, urging me to realize something I did not. I asked myself why he had never told me this before. Between the demands of teaching and directing, I imagine it slipped his mind, but I realized very quickly that if he was telling me this, with his however many years of teaching and performing, I should really start thinking about listening.

Back in the land of my reality, my “utopia” of a job quickly fell apart with each of my nudges back towards performance arts. My boss turned from “chill” to ensuring she shot down every original idea as something we could “maybe circle back to later.” Not only that, but she made it her personal mission to patronize and discipline me any way she could. Why? I couldn’t tell you. My co-workers had theories about how she wished she could do my job for her same management pay. I personally could not have cared less about her and her inability to emotionally regulate. She made sure to remind me why I should, though. I was written up before my 90-day mark for “misuse of time” while I had been using practices she herself had taught me. At the point where things were getting pretty horrific between her and me, I was fairly certain one more Teams chat notification and I’d be out on the spot. I started getting nauseous at the idea of having to explain an “ROI” or “engagement strategy” even one more time.

To make things worse, when I’d come home, it was just me in a two-bedroom apartment, listening to the neighbors scream at their kids through paper-thin walls. I’d do whatever I could to get some kind of good sleep. One white noise machine became four within my first month there. I filed an unimaginable number of noise complaints, even having to go as far as calling the non-emergency line one night that their TV was vibrating my bedroom floor until 1 am. Knowing how thin the walls were, I stopped singing in my apartment. I’d practice songs from Wicked, only ever in my car, thinking about what Professor W had said and how I might like to try auditioning again, but my 12-hour days at work would never let me.

At the end of the day, while my landlord was “kind enough” (she was never kind truly) to offer me a no-penalty lease break, I had nowhere to go that was affordable or made sense. I had somehow landed a 2bd/2ba for 1,400 in a small town, with no real other options, when I’d signed this lease. Plus, the adjacent larger town, where the college resided, listed studio apartments that started at nearly 1,500. A path out didn’t even begin to unfold until my best friend, Cierra, and I started talking about moving in together. Even so, her lease didn’t end until November, and we both felt pretty strongly that we wanted to move out of this tiny town and to our state’s big city. Finding a new job in the middle of nowhere just to leave in a few months didn’t make much sense. In the same breath, we had no idea how we would pull the move off to begin with.

So I stayed, gripping my mouse and keyboard with white knuckles every morning, listening to the Tick, Tick… Boom soundtrack at my desk, and then to three kids taking turns screaming with their parents when I got home at night. I was becoming a person I did not recognize. I had this apartment and job I was supposed to love, and my privilege was not going over my head, but I hated every moment of what I had created.

It started with my tolerance diminishing. I didn’t want to be an angry person, but everything in me felt so incredibly wrong all of the time, and while I was good at containing it, things got to me far too easily. My next “symptom” was the return of my panic attacks. I spent lunches crying at my desk and left event tables early when my vision would blur. They were an oddly silent, but deep in my body, kind of panic. Negative emotion at that point had become so numbing to me that I couldn’t hear the siren going off in my chest until I was dizzy and unable to read the words in front of me. Everything triggered a migraine: light, noise, reading, sitting wrong, a gust of wind coming from the wrong direction; it didn’t matter. I started thinking to myself, this is why corporate America employees become so sick as they age. Every single waking moment of your life is not supposed to send enough cortisol through your system to get a soldier through battle. Plus, this was the first time I felt this way since the days that I struggled to leave my bedroom, and I sure as hell wasn’t going backward.

In an effort to do something for myself that might ease my downhill slide, I booked a somewhat spontaneous trip to Washington. It was only for five days, but I would do anything to get nearly a week out of that office. Cierra agreed to be the designated rental car driver, and I took care of the Airbnb costs simply so I could sit back and watch the trees out the window long enough to remember who I was again. Thankfully I did. On day three of our Seattle trip, Cierra and I packed up the rental car and drove down to the second Airbnb in Olympia. We didn’t talk much by the time we reached Tacoma, just watched hundreds of massive evergreen trees pass us by on either side. For the first time in months, I felt my body physically relax. I could’ve melted into my seat right then and there. The feeling washing over me was one of presence. I had no desire to be in any other moment than that one. My vision wasn’t blurring, I didn’t need constant pain medicine to stop me from developing a migraine, things weren’t getting to me the way they were back home, and that was enough information to confirm that I’d really been living all wrong.

So when I got home, I padded my bank account with the last of my student loans, and I put in my notice, with my last day being the day before my 27th birthday and exactly three years since my initial trip to Colorado. At the same time, I applied to three different MA programs, even spending a good amount of my last week working on a writing sample during my downtime. I had no idea if I was a good candidate for any one of the programs I was pursuing, but I wrote and edited those papers down to each character in hopes of starting a new path, closer to the arts. It was far after the priority deadline, and I lived in a small town an hour away from that big city where all three programs resided. Cierra had just started interviewing for a job down in the same city, and if she got it, it would be an extreme pay raise and a promotion for her. In essence, the stakes were high, and we already knew if she landed it, we would figure out a way to go down there together as soon as possible. Her lease still ended in November. Neither of us had any concrete answers as to what our plan would be, but I could not stay to wait for them.

I was desperate to start over, and I knew exactly what medicine had worked, so I booked another trip to Washington. One day after my final day on the job, I was on a plane. I still had no idea where I would live in a month or if I’d get to go to grad school. All I had was a lot of hope, three packed bags, a rental car waiting for me at SeaTac, and 9 nights in an Airbnb far above my means (which was now 0 income and a savings account).

cafes in olympia

For this trip I had decided to stay entirely in Olympia. Cierra and I had spent the last two days of our “mostly Seattle” trip there in a lake house, staring into the woods from a back patio just that a few weeks prior. I missed it. While I was definitely not affording 9 nights in a lake house, I booked a cute secluded house just off I-5. Those of you who know anything about Olympia might be asking, “Why Olympia?" Well, a lot of reasons! Truthfully, Olympia was initially tacked on to the original Seattle trip because I “happened to know” someone who was in the area, and that was really it. I had planned on making part of our trip more “woodsy,” and with no knowledge of the state’s geography, that was good enough for me. I was lucky enough to fall in love with the capital’s charm while I was there, and I’d felt like I hadn’t given it its full story arc. Truthfully, once I’d returned to Colorado, all I wished I was doing was writing in one of those downtown cafes, so that’s what I returned to do.

This is the part where I tell you this “person that I happened to know” also happened to be in the area on none other than an acting job at a local Theatre. I’d actually only ever met “this person” because acting in live theatre was his job, and he’d happened to get booked in my tiny town while I was still immersed in my theatre program all those years ago. (This is not the article where I talk about being motivated to visit a town by a boy I like to kiss, so we shall call him “the person I happened to know” and omit those details. If you want juicy details about my love life, or lack thereof, I have many other articles posted. Thanks, Diva).

“Wow, jessi. It really seems like theatre is maybe following you like it’s trying to reach you about your car’s extended warranty”

Why yes, reader, you are really starting to see my plight. Imagine if I were actually detailing all of the rest of the weird coincidences we don’t have time to discuss. I digress.

When I came back to Olympia, my primary goal on what was my first-ever solo trip was to spend an ungodly amount of time writing and staring out at the Puget Sound. I desired my lifetime movie moment. I swoop into town, make friends with all the locals, and disappear just as fast. I knew in that process I was going to come home a much more “me” version of myself, ready to figure out what was next.

Well, “what’s next” was coming far sooner than I’d expected. First, Cierra got offered the job. “Oh shit,” I said to myself, “so ‘what’s next’ is right now!” Next, Cierra’s apartment miraculously let her out of her lease becuase someone suddenly appeared, begging the complex for her exact floor plan with an ASAP move-in date. Then, July 13th, only four days since I’d left my job, I FaceTimed Cierra from a cafe I was sitting in, 800-some miles away, while she walked through city apartments. There was no time to be picky; we had to sign a lease like yesterday. As she toured, maybe the prettiest apartment I’d ever seen, I looked up from my screen to see “the person I happened to know.”

“Hey, I thought I might find you here,” he said, towering over me. (Don’t read into it; we’re not getting into it, remember?)

“OH! Hi! Sorry, just give me one second.” (So incredibly chill of you, Jessi!)

Hey, God? Are you there? Is this the lifetime movie right now? Is this all actually happening in this exact moment? Gorgeous apartment, cute guy enters cafe saying what could be a line in a movie, artsy town, and a girl waits on her grad school admissions decisions. I had no time to ask myself any questions. I filled out the application for that apartment while the career actor sat across from me, and I tried not to think too much about what could be considered a sign when his castmates walked in and a conversation formed around us about equity contracts and agents.

On day four of nine in Olympia, I received multiple emails. The first email was from the rental company. The subject line read “Congratulations.” We were approved. Really gorgeous apartment, check!

The second email came in while I was lying on my stomach on the Airbnb bed; the email subject once again read “Congratulations” and was sent directly from the Head of English Graduate Admissions. I didn’t need to open it to know what she was going to say, but it read something along the lines of “Welcome to the program…I wanted to tell you myself… you’ll see an update in your portal in the coming days.” I neglected to properly insert the fact, earlier in the story, that this was my third acceptance letter because by this point I’d mostly forgotten the other two. I was really holding out for this one. It was the program that felt genuinely affordable and feasible, and it was, of course, the last update I received.

To recap, while in an entirely different state, running into actors all across town, and indeed making friends with all the locals, I had just found out I had an apartment in a new city, and I’d been accepted into all of the graduate programs that I’d applied to essentially just a week before. Totally normal, right?

On day seven in Olympia, I decided I would go see the show “the person who I happened to know” was performing in. This would be the third time, as we’d seen it on the initial “mostly Seattle” trip, and I’d also seen it once already during this trip. This time though, I was invited to sit in the booth.

Now, to a person regularly immersed in theatre, that’s a normal Saturday night. To me, it was like when you’re a kid, and they invite you to go sit in the cockpit with the pilot and give you one of those “honorary flight crew” stickers to wear on your chest, except I was staring down at a nearly sold-out audience with headphones on, listening to cues for an entire show. There was not a moment of that show that I could stop smiling. I was absolutely losing my mind every time a cue would get called in perfect time or when I could hear the audience applaud from above. It was electric.

“Hey, so how many times do you have to be shown you love theatre before you actually get back to it?”

Reader, I swear I will get there.

I left Olympia in tears (I am a Cancer Sun if you were wondering why I’m always crying), partly becuase I wanted to be a nomadic writer, cafe hopping, and yapping with theatre kids forever, and also partly because I had most definitely gotten out of those ten days what I was needing, and more.

I returned to Colorado unemployed, with a week to move, and acceptance to an English program that I, shocker, later found out would let me concentrate my writing and research in Drama and Performance studies. I saw the Broadway on-tour rendition of Beetlejuice a few days into being in “me and Cierra’s new big city” and stared up in awe at skyscrapers that I get to call my neighbors. It was perfect, but Theatre does have its way of being just as harrowing as it is magical.

my perfectionist return

A week into being here, I signed up for my first audition in 2 years. I reminded myself that the whole point of being here was getting involved with the arts, regardless of the fact that I had a week to prepare and none of my old audition materials memorized anymore. I knew I had to do this.

When I saw my headshot on a page, my name printed underneath it, I felt like I was lying to someone. Surely, I wasn’t an actor. Sure, I had taken 1/3 of a Theatre BA, been immersed in circles of actors, been constantly drawn back to the craft, but I had never figured out how to call myself an actor.

On the other hand, I also knew that if something scared me, that it was a great indicator that I should chase it. I practiced every day, belting high notes from every corner of my room. I even took my 32-bar cut to my vocal coach, who I really couldn’t afford to see anymore on a student loan income but did periodically anyway. I was going to sing this song somewhere other than my room if it killed me. The world could look at me and call me a bad actor the same way the head of the department did, and I was still going to practice.

I noticed the idea of acting in front of someone else felt so deeply etched into me as “dangerous.” I’d watched my friends be praised for how they did it, and I told myself over and over again that I could do it too, but the head of the musical theatre department’s voice echoed in my head every time I tried to move.

Ultimately, when the day came, I entered the audition room, and a song that I had sung front to back dozens of times was doing everything it could to slip out of my hands. I missed words in the second line, recovered, then switched a verse 2 line with its verse 1 counterpart. All the while, I lost focus on the movement that I had practiced. After the 32 bars concluded, I smiled and thanked them, feeling as small as I had two years ago. God, I still wasn’t an actor.

“Can you help me off a theatrical cliff?” was the first text I sent when I got in the car. Marshall immediately picked up the phone and called.

“Talk to me,” they said. Marshall and I rarely spoke outside the group chat unless there was a theatrical emergency. In essence, they were always happy to use their background to help me figure out what I was doing.

After 15 minutes of explaining how I’d stuttered through the audition I’d just walked out of, and Marshall reassuring me it happens, they told me, “I’m going to send you a play to read, a theatre influencer to follow, and you’re going to reach out to me when you start your theatrical writing Masters projects.” Very straight to the point, as they tended to be. “Ok, I will.”

“This shit happens,” they said. “Talent is so objective, and it’s hard for all of us. No matter how long you’re in it”

“Ok, it’s dinner time, I have to go. Love youuuu byeee.” Marshall hung up the phone.

The rest of my drive home was spent trying to self-soothe. I just wanted to call myself an actor. If I could do it once and know that I’m capable of doing it, then I’d be over the hurdle, right? No more would I have to look at my actor friends as if they were somehow worthy of unlocking the secret door and I was not. I’m not sure. I liked to think that it would work that way at least.

I did not get a call back. This was the first of my auditions that I had ever flubbed and also the first in which I didn’t receive a second chance. I would love to say that I took it on the chin, but I likely spent a good 24 hours feeling bad about it. A lot of “Well, where is the door? How do I get in the room without the experience if no one will let me learn?” came out of my mouth to my friends on the phone. What they didn’t quite understand was that it was decades of pent-up desire to feel like a performer exiting my mouth, misdirected at one audition that really didn’t mean anything about me. I knew that; it just didn’t make it suck any less for a day.

I turned my frustration into action pretty quickly. No one was coming to save me, and I needed to find the door, or as Trenton suggested, a hammer to break a hole in the wall instead. I applied for acting class scholarships, cold emailed theatre departments, posted in Facebook groups, and waited.

I’ve lived in this big city for officially 30 days. Olympia was only just a little over a month ago. Most would say it doesn’t happen overnight. The way I even managed to make it here would prove otherwise. Now, I’m not going to burn myself at both ends or run myself off a cliff. I can indeed take it one step at a time, but there is something bigger driving me, and I am determined to be able to call myself an actor. Whether it’s for the girl in the sky-blue bedroom, the one staring at the stage from the wings of theatre tech, or the one who was told she wasn’t one while putting herself in student debt trying to be. I have many versions of myself to work for. They never fail to remind me that all they want is that one spotlight and 300 pairs of eyes looking back at them as many times as fate will allow.

As of today, I’ve been offered a scholarship for acting classes at the same center that hosts our city's Broadway on Tour productions. The same theatre that didn’t call me back is offering me the ability to shadow any tech crew member I’d like, with the ability to be on a paid show once I’m trained. I also randomly managed to book myself a modeling spot in a styled photoshoot. Not to mention, I watched Hamilton for the first time, and I’ve started drafting ideas for how I can write a graduate paper about the show’s cultural impact. How did I manage all that so fast? Being unwilling to give up is what I would wager, and from what I've heard, the importance of “doing the work” is one of the first things you learn in theatre school. I’m still not fully sure what it means to be an actor, but I do think the powers that be are going to do everything they can to make sure I keep trying to find out.

After all that, you might have a bunch of questions I haven’t answered, or maybe the lack of conclusion is just as satisfying to you as it is to me at this point in my life. Regardless, I don’t think “ultimate success” hinges as much on the outcome as it does on your willingness to continue doing what feels the most like you. Maybe one day I’ll perform in big theatres in New York, or maybe I’ll decide I want to teach theatre or do touring stage management. I don’t know. All I know is if my soul is still desiring to know what it means to be an actor, then I will keep taking steps toward showing her, and I think “that would be enough” for that little girl performing in the living room for her parents.

I’m not pregnant

but I still had to drive home tonight from the pharmacy, pregnancy test tossed in the back seat, first wondering why a plastic stick that I’m supposed to pee on costs 14$ but also why my womanhood has to come with this experience. It’s dark, raining, and nobody even knows where I’ve gone off to. It’s just me alone in a car, trying not to think too much before I can get my negative result. Oncoming headlights, reflecting off wet roads, exacerbate my astigmatism while I think about what I told my therapist earlier that morning.

“Ya know, it’s really fine because every time PMOS does this, I know I’m not pregnant, but it’s also like… can I just walk away from sexual experiences, not having to shoulder this weight and stress just becuase my body has decided not to participate this month”

She told me, “I hear what you’re saying, that it’s hard to come to terms with the fact that as a woman with this condition, or maybe a woman in general even, you have to carry this by yourself while on the other hand men don’t, and I think it’s ok for that to feel heavy.” I told her that I hate to focus too much on the woes of womanhood because I consider myself, generally, an optimist, and she reminded me I was allowed to be human. I brushed off the topic and moved on.

The test haphazardly tossed in the backseat is test number four in the last 30 days. For the first three tests that I had taken, I was fairly calm. I told myself that I already knew I wasn’t pregnant, and the period that had not returned since June (it is now late August) was simply a result of my PMOS, as it always had been.

The first exception to my calm line of thinking, up until today, was the drive from my old apartment to the place I just moved into about a month ago.

My car was packed with boxes, and it registered that my period was, at that point, a week late, and I should probably take a test just to be certain. My mind performed the very human task of wandering to “what if,” and I quickly self-soothed, telling myself that I thankfully lived in a state where women had a right to choose. Although the medical procedures required to choose, what I knew I likely would at this point in my life, were fairly common, I also knew I would have to leave them with another thing to add to the pile of intimate trauma that I had already started filing through. I thought about having to tell a man what was going on with my body and then having to ask him if he supported my decisions. I thought of the pill vs the procedure. I entertained a thought telling me to Google other women’s experiences with either, until I realized, “What the hell am I thinking?” I, again, assured myself that if that was something I had to go through, I would be strong enough to deal with it and that I wasn’t pregnant anyway, but I asked myself why I was having to think about this at all.

After I had put a hard stop to all my hypothetical thinking, I arrived at the closest grocery store. The cashier was an older man whom I tried to distract from what was in front of him, but he still spoke to me as if he was handling contraband. I thought to myself, hey, at least I’m at the age where someone might think I have a husband and a desire for kids. Again, though, why was I having to think about this at all? I was extra kind to him as he handed me my receipt, as if I was trying to win him over or subversively convince him that what was happening was not a harrowing moment for me, and when he still didn’t budge, I simply said thank you and left.

Ultimately, and hilariously, the first thing I moved into this apartment was a pregnancy test. When it was negative, I laughed at the idea that this would always be the first thing I had done here, and I moved on.

When my period was still absent a week later, I took another negative test. I had purchased a pack of 3 from the odd cashier the week prior (18 dollars btw), and taking the second one was rather mundane. I don’t actually remember it much. I was going through the motions as if this was a normal part of my wellness routine, and unfortunately, about once a year or so it usually was. My PMOS had historically been kind to me in the way that I only tended to miss one cycle a year; it was just also not as kind in its timing of those missing cycles. I loved being able to go to the doctor and say, “If I’m pregnant, it’s Jesus,” and my period would always choose to take a sabbatical when I could not for certain make that joke.

Granted, I’m abundantly cautious, and I’m that way because of this exactly. There was a time in my life where I took penetrative sex completely off the table becuase I was tired of the month-long stints of weekly tests until I reached “the recommended amount of days since last sexual contact” (21 days minimum) to definitely say I was not pregnant.

I ultimately had to make a choice. Get better at handling those 21 days or never fully let myself enjoy something again, and I chose to learn how to navigate it. A few years ago, when this would happen to me, I would spend a whole lot more time ruminating about the what-if in a way that would ultimately kill my libido entirely for the following months. “It’s just not worth the wondering,” I would tell myself, and honestly, with how bad it got to me, it wasn’t. I still think it takes a lot of built trust with a man, his beliefs surrounding women’s health, and my faith that he wouldn’t further contribute to the trauma involved in the process if it happened, for me to feel safe doing it. But, Jesus Christ, again, why am I having to think about these things?

Test number three was exactly “21 days out from last sexual contact.” When this one was negative, I started to worry a little bit more about why my body was still holding out on me. Is my overall reproductive health ok? Is this happening becuase my hormones are changing with age, or did I just have a long month? I started taking vitamins again, making sure I was eating full meals to balance my insulin, and trying to lower my cortisol by focusing on other things. My weight shifted, losing 6 pounds on the scale in 48 hours. Water weight? Inflammation? I don’t know. I kept on track with reducing my insulin swings either way. I also reached out to my doctor, and she said: “We’ll wait until September, and if it’s still not here, we’ll prescribe some Provera to get you to breakthrough bleed.” Oh, sick! Hormonal medication that totally won’t make me an absolute PMS nightmare for 6 days. I shoved the thought away, calling it a “September problem,” and went through my tracking app looking for the longest I’d ever gone between periods. The answer was 69 days.

Well, today is 69 days again, but still no sign that my body has remembered how to ovulate, which takes us back to the “plastic stick” lying in the backseat.

This drive got in my head more than I would have liked. I used all the same coping skills, but something in my brain said: “Well, this is the longest you’ve ever gone, so who knows.” Something was breaking my “routine,” and I apparently hated that. I parked the car, grabbed the test out of the backseat, and in a weird haze somehow made it to the bathroom with a processing test in my hand. I set it down, telling myself to use the five minutes to do anything but stare at it. When it was negative, I leaned over the sink, sighing, almost rolling my eyes. “Ok time to lay down, diva,” I said to myself out loud in an attempt to regulate myself back to baseline. This was indeed another normal Wednesday, as expected. Thoughts still spun around in my head.

One day, when I have a committed man in my life, I thought, he’s going to have to deal with the 21 days with me. He’ll be around me enough to notice when it’s been a month in between. I won’t even have to say anything, and I hate the idea that my body is going to have to make someone else learn how to self-soothe through it. On one hand, yes, I did hate having to deal with it alone sometimes, sure, but at this point, for me, it was the equivalent of making sure I locked the door at night. I know no one is probably going to randomly walk up to my door and decide to walk in, but hey, you never know, so it’s a part of that routine. I imagined to someone not as familiar, it would feel like a constantly ringing burglar alarm. I hated that. But why did I have to think about this stuff?

Now that I have taken all the pregnancy tests, at all the different time markers recommended by a gynecologist, that one possibly can, (again), I can definitively say I am not pregnant. I can also say, damn, am I tired of wondering if I am. Is it going to change anything about the way I approach things? No. I know where my boundaries and limits are, and I have created them knowing I needed to make friends with what it is my PMOS body does. It doesn’t stop chronic illness from being exhausting. I am still going to be a 27-year-old woman, allowing myself to embrace her sexuality, and I am still going to buy tests and wish men understood half of what it was like to walk around as a woman. At the end of the day, I can’t fix all of society. I can’t even fix the cashier at the store who was weird to me, or the fact that I have to clarify with men whether they are pro-choice or not before I let them touch me. Maybe I could do something for my own body, though, and that’s what I’ve chosen.

I called a PMOS specialty hospital last week just before I started locking in on keeping my blood sugar even. They told me it was a five-month waitlist. I said, “I was diagnosed 6 years ago and still have no concrete treatment plan; what’s another five months?” If September comes and my cycle is still missing, I’ll take the Provera (please do not tell me any horror stories in the comments; I need to not think about it) and I’ll move on. PMOS and women’s health is so wildly under-researched. I think about how I deserved a definitive medical intervention 6 years ago. I have to grieve what that would have given me had I received it and then look toward the future instead. The specialty hospital staffs researchers that assisted in the renaming of the condition. They assure that a comprehensive treatment plan can be made within four appointments. Not all hope is lost. Maybe we are getting somewhere where I won’t have to think about so many of these things.

Society made you feel bad about your fondness for someone or yourself

Every romantic comedy or coming-of-age storyline that you’ve ever watched or read probably did its best to make sure you knew how embarrassing having a crush is. I’m sure even outside of the media you watched, you have been made fun of or shamed for feeling a way that essentially every human has felt at one point. Most of us were taught early on to take our fond emotions to our grave unless we were certain they would be reciprocated. Otherwise, friendships would be ruined. Even worse, the person you felt something for would most definitely gag right in front of you and tell you how grotesque you are, and how they never want to speak to you again. You would simply never recover!

I think sometimes we have to remind ourselves how “Hollywood” this plot device is. The hyperbolic nature of the on-screen crush was designed to be entertaining. Someone interested in someone else, just going about their life knowing their worth and enjoying themselves, isn’t nearly as high stakes. Of course you learned you had to feel bad about it. You grew up having it drilled in your brain from as early as “he’s being mean to you because he likes you.”

I am not exempt from that taught narrative. I am very familiar with the concept of “catching feelings” for someone I know I “probably shouldn’t” and making myself feel bad about it. I used to deny it each time, thinking if I admitted it, things would crumble all at once right in front of me. For starters, I had a pretty horrible time believing anyone could ever think of me as fondly as I did them. I grew up the quiet plus-sized girl. Boys did not talk to me; I did not talk to them. I remember spending hours on hours watching videos of “big girl” influencers trying to find a place that would teach me I was worthy of affection too.

Before I learned how to love my body, I immediately friend-zoned myself in each situation. Every attempt to hit on me was missed not becuase I was naive but because I did anything to rationalize advances as something else in an effort not to be embarrassed. Certainly they were repulsed by me, and I should stay in my lane (incredibly false by the way). I even went as far as meeting someone on a dating app and thinking the intentions were platonic… multiple times. They would ask, “Is this a date?” and I’d respond with “Oh! I mean, it can be.” Don’t ask me to think about how many advances I still, to this day, never realized happened. It was pretty bad.

Beyond ignoring the admiration of others, I would also chronically rationalize my own. I believed if I lied to myself, I couldn’t ruin anything. I thought “I just really enjoy his friendship” or “this is just what basic attraction feels like.” Right. You keep telling yourself that, girl. Maybe you just like him. That’s ok! Maybe you perk up a little when he walks into a room, or maybe you feel a little more dopamine when his mouth is on your neck. You have a crush! Own it. Let it be fun.

To be fair, I am not out here proudly proclaiming “hey I have a crush on you” every time it happens. I’m still a little scared that the person in front of me may not be as open-minded as I am about what that means. Sometimes it also just feels as though it would make no difference, so there’s no need to lay it all out there. The movies love to tell you that confessions of emotions lead to grand romantic plans and gestures where people give up everything for each other. As much as that moves me, and it does, I am not immune to a rom-com; I also think it can be as simple as a conversation.

The conversation might be about why the timing, the feeling, or the place just isn’t quite right. Maybe you’re lucky; the stars have all aligned, and the previous list of things is perfect. There are even scenarios where it doesn’t make sense, and you both decide to try it anyway (Something I have tempted myself with too often). Admittedly, sometimes, I’m having a good time, and I don’t feel the need to have the conversation at all. I can still find myself thinking about what it would, hypothetically, look like in short, quiet moments, but let it go and live by the idea that if it is meant to work out, it will find a way to.

Ok, ok, I can admit it

I have to disclaim that regardless of my coping skills, I am not the most developed woman in the world. I do often say a whole lot, get a little emotional, and try to rationalize why the grand confession would make sense. Not too long before I started writing this, I let myself sit in my “feels” about a man. I had admitted to myself that I was particularly fond of him a couple moons ago; it wasn’t news to me. Regardless, when it happens, It’s one of those moments that, for a second, you brace yourself for the sky to fall as if you’ve just opened a terrible trap door. Nothing horrible happened. It was just me, in an empty room, being honest with myself. In this scenario, things were not likely to unfold naturally, at least not at this juncture. I couldn’t even tell you if he’d ever thought about it like that, really, nor did I overly concern myself with that. What I was focused on in that moment was instead how I was willing to be truthful with myself and sit with it. I didn’t tell him. While it wasn’t a big deal, I wasn’t sure that he wanted to know. I also figured he already did, as I think he knew me well enough to read me. Truly, I wouldn’t be shocked if he may have drawn the conclusion about my lil’ crush, around the same time I did, actually.

I was leaning over him, kissing him like I had 3 days left to live, when he pulled away from me and said, “You’re kissing me like you’re feeling something right now..like you like me or something.” Well damn, give me about five seconds to figure that out before you intuit it. I jest, but I think if I remember correctly, I said “shut up” and went right back to what I was doing. (Really exercising your 5th Amendment right, I guess, girl). I learned a lot about myself in that moment. If there was anything I wanted to do with what I was coming to learn, it was to return to him understanding and acceptance.

I saw it as the kind of situation where maintaining the positive thing was more important, in that moment, than trying to force something. I didn’t feel like a victim of it; nothing about it felt bad or bitter. Why should it? The presence or absence of an outcome was not something that ever overrode my enjoyment of the moment. I felt the need to apologize for a second, as if I had failed in “maintaining my 110% casual-ness,” and I reminded myself how incredibly normal that is. My emotions don’t turn off. I just don’t treat them as if they are a burden, and in turn they ebb and flow kindly and warmly, a blanket of “wow, wasn’t that nice.” I much rather look at how beautiful it is that I got to feel good about it instead of souring what I’m grateful I experienced. I’m just a girl, and my emotions are always going to be a part of how I navigate things. If anything, I think it makes it more fun, maybe. I can be just as human as anyone else with a delusional (or not delusional, who knows) little crush. Now in the movie, I’m supposed to keep my mouth shut about it forever, but if there’s anything that I have learned, it’s that movies are fake and I don’t tend to do things “the way I’m supposed to.”

At the end of the day, I’m ok with making a little bit of a fool of myself if it means I’m alive. I’d like to think if I had indeed said all of this to him, he would’ve understood it and maybe even appreciated it. It is very possible, I just did. I digress.

Reading into it is hurting you

While I’m happy to embrace my emotions, one thing about “crush culture” I have a really hard time understanding is assigning emotions to someone else. Growing up, many of the women in my life played the ring around the rosy of “well he said this, or that, and that must mean he likes me.” It was almost like I was being taught the only way to end up in a relationship was to trick a man into realizing he wanted to keep me. I hated every second of that notion. I have to ask, why are we so dedicated to guessing how a man feels when there is a grown adult in front of us who, too, should know how to say what he is thinking? I have been involved with men that, sure, I can assume by their actions they had something lingering under the surface for me, but It’s not my job to fish it out of them, and I don’t think it would be fair. I think that is the exact thing that will leave you feeling burned. “He said he can’t commit right now, but he kissed me on the forehead,” and hey, I get it- been there, but I trust that if he felt like he had something to tell me, he would. Also, god forbid a man care for me enough to act out a gesture of affection toward me. Is it really fair for me to decide what he meant by it? While that may be controversial, I’m not convinced drawing conclusions is good communicative practice. Granted, I don’t always say things plainly myself. Maybe I should, but again, I really do think those conversations will occur if they’re supposed to. Besides, I’m not exactly a steel trap.

If I am being frank, even when I am not spilling my guts verbatim, I don’t think that I hide it well when I do have any semblance of sweet feelings. The thing is, I don’t really mind if they know. I hope it feels like a little ego boost and never like any kind of pressure to respond to it if they don’t want to. I am not in the business of trying to make a man choose me. That would suggest I am only interested in connecting and feeling when it means I can be kept. I find that connection is a lot more satisfying when you let it be. My fondness is never motivated by some desire to achieve something, only to experience it as long as I’m supposed to. If two consenting adults decide to invest, then they do, and if they don’t, then, hey, that’s life, man. Not everyone I have ever smiled at a text from is going to feel the same way about me, and that means 0% about myself or the way I enjoy my time with them. If someone is straightforward with me about their intentions and what they can provide, and I agree to those terms, that is really that. I can feel how I desire, and so can they as long as the expectations are plainly stated and respected and no one is feeling harmed.

Sure, sometimes expectations and what we’re willing to bring to the table change, but I, more than anything, implore you not to sit around waiting for it. I’ll say it 1000 times: all the best things happen naturally. If the man I am making heart eyes at in any given time of my life doesn’t suddenly confess his feelings for me and turn things into a whirlwind romance, I believe very soundly that love will find me either way. Truthfully, if you are finding yourself ruminating on what his actions might mean, it is either time to ask him or take a step back. You don’t deserve to feel like admiration for you is hard to understand.

Friends to lovers to wait, maybe not

Believe it or not, I used to have a pretty rampant case of anxious attachment (which maybe evolved into disorganized attachment over time. Again, still just a girl). My pattern used to be to develop a feeling, tell myself I “like it too much,” and then start doing a whole lot of running or chasing.

That was until I developed feelings for my best friend. Tale as old as time: two best friends have on-and-off crushes on each other that never overlap, and even when they do, no one says anything.

Everyone around me who knew was treating me one of four ways. They either

1. Believed he was horrible and leading me on

2. Insisted that I was headed down a path of everything going up in flames

3. Were convinced I was just pathetically following him around like he was somehow my keeper

   OR

4. Told me I absolutely had to do something that would lead us to being together and “RIGHT NOW! Hurry, or you’ll regret it forever!”

They would push me to make some grand gesture or to have some “get in or get out” conversation. They asked if I was “in love with him” as if it was either platonic admiration or my undying love and devotion, nothing in between. I think maybe people just really like to have definitive answers, and when they don’t, they create them themselves. If he wasn’t committing to me, then he must be using me, but that wasn’t really fair, was it? That was never the point of our dynamic, nor was anyone being led on. If it wasn’t going to end in romance, then it could only supposedly end in turmoil, but I don’t remember any of them proving to be psychic.

None of these unsolicited opinions helped me feel any more secure in my ability to have feelings. They sure as hell didn’t make me feel like I could speak on them, and they just reaffirmed my belief that having an emotion was the absolute kiss of death. Like we kind of talked about already, so many of our modern forms of media exhibit the trope: either you keep it 110% casual 110% of the time or one of you gets absolutely decimated in the process. I have to say I don’t agree.

I’ll spoil the ending of my story for you now. My best friend and I talked about how we felt eventually. He liked me at one point; I liked him at another. He believed he had told me prior; I sat with my jaw on our kitchen floor (we were roommates when this conversation occurred) when I realized what he had actually said. It was a little messy, admittedly. It should have gone much worse than it did. I had convinced myself I wasn’t good enough for him, and he asked me if I had even considered the reverse scenario where he couldn’t meet my needs the way I needed him to. I was spending so much time critiquing my body or my own “too much-ness” that I failed to even consider if this person was what I wanted and needed in that way to begin with. If he read that line, he would say, “Girl, I was telling you this the whole time,” and I’d laugh because he sure was.

So no, my crush wasn’t embarrassing, and it didn’t destroy a friendship that was willing to create space for me being myself. I was just being a person experiencing something. No, we didn’t decide to pursue anything, and it honestly would’ve been a pretty terrible match if we did. As we learned, our needs did not overlap well. We were not what the other person wanted, and that was ok! All of the days I spent in agony over the idea that if he found out, it would ruin everything were a waste. We ultimately found that our platonic friendship is a whole lot more fulfilling than the one where everything was really weird and gray. Plus, we get along much better with a little more distance placed between us.

When I first told him, he said something to me that changed the way I looked at romantic feelings, maybe forever.

“No Jess, it’s not weird. You’re allowed to feel how you feel, and just because you feel that way doesn’t mean it either escalates or it ends. I don’t look at you any differently.” I learned in a whole lot of “will they won’t they” that it actually didn’t have to be either, and I was still allowed to be human either way. He stood convicted in the fact that it was not his job to do anything about my feelings nor judge them, and vice versa.

I, of course, no longer have any feelings for my best friend. We can talk about that era of our lives and laugh at how insane we were. Just the other day I was, kindly, making fun of myself a little bit for how hard I danced around it like it would’ve been a big deal if I had said something. I said, “…and truthfully, you were just a guy.”

“Yep, I was just a guy,” he said, scrolling, unfazed, through his phone.

Why I’m not afraid to “catch feelings” anymore

From essentially that point on, I moved forward in my intimate life with an invaluable tool: the ability to allow my feelings to flow without trying to shove them down or letting them torture me, all while listening to myself. I had learned what happened when I made them out to be something worse than they were. Plus, it turns out that when you finally know you’re a catch, and you’re willing to be honest about feeling a little warmer in the cheeks, it really takes the edge off of enjoying someone else.

So what is it that keeps me sane in the face of a few feelings and pheromones nowadays?

-I feel at peace about the outcome and my worth

If that man, in my phone, with the sparkly eyes, asked me if I had ever considered trying to make “something more” work, I would tell him “truthfully yes,” but if he never asked at all, I could also go on with my life knowing it simply wasn’t meant to be. That’s not to place the responsibility of initiation on the other person; it’s just to say I am always open and curious, but I am also happy right here where I’m standing.

Not only that, but I adore the hell out of myself. I am the kind of person who can make anyone feel welcome and included. Nothing feels better to me than meeting someone new and ushering them in. I absolutely love people, and I am an undying optimist. I also, on a good day, like to think I can let life roll off my back. Communication and patience are always at my forefront, and I am not quick to react harshly. I will never ask a future partner to prioritize me over their own life when it doesn’t feel good. I don’t think romance should force anyone to stop choosing themself. Beyond the sunshine I try to bring to the table, I am also fiercely determined and resilient. There is never a stagnant or dull day in my presence. Is that conceited? Maybe. I don’t really care because it’s true, and I am not going to sit around waiting for someone else to notice it before I can cherish it myself. I am indeed in love with who I am.

-I trust myself

Another reason I struggle much less than I used to with experiencing other people is that I trust myself. I have had friends caution me about getting too invested in things or getting myself hurt, but I believe earnestly that if at any point the feelings I was having were hurting me more than they were providing me something positive, I know how to step back. I used to hold on to anyone no matter how much it hurt me. Now, I can confidently say if I notice something feeding parts of me I don’t wish to reignite, I will peacefully take the space I need for that time. I have done it, sometimes noticeably, sometimes not. Even men I didn’t particularly have feelings for, but still would’ve liked to get to know better, I have let go of becuase the timing was harming me more than it was empowering me. In essence, I believe I know myself well enough to decide what is good for me.

-My feelings can change

A big fear I used to have surrounding having feelings for someone else was that I would fall for them, they would leave, and I would spend the rest of my days tortured by the one that got away (another movie trope that affected my brain). I am happy to report that feelings can change. If things are meant to fade and dissolve, then they will, and you are not doomed to thinking about that guy until you’re 80 years old.

Maybe when I’m 75 I’ll sit on my porch somewhere and think fondly of all the ways I let myself connect and live, but I don’t think I will sit and regret not begging a man to want me. Poor, 16-year-old Jessi, who had just gotten dumped by her first boyfriend, really thought that she was going to wish he’d return forever. God, I wish she had someone in her corner to tell her that life is full of love and while you will remember them all, they will not haunt you or make the life you’re living feel any less beautiful than it is right now. Plus, eventually one of them will be the right one, and everything will be worth it.

-I’m not ashamed of being human

No matter if you say them out loud or softly to yourself, there should never be shame behind your feelings. I am not sorry that I feel warm when you look at me. God forbid I have something to giggle about for the moment. What’s the point of making it out to be something bad? I wrote in an article once that I will likely never publish, “I hope whoever catches me can make me feel that way: soft, warm, and buzzing like the summer.” What an honor to be admired. If someone makes you feel small for having a built-in, flowery human feeling, then I can guarantee you that you’ve dodged a bullet tenfold. It’s ok to grieve if someone doesn’t receive your vulnerability. It’s ok to be hurt, but I promise you, you will eventually see that there is nothing you really missed.

My secrets

This is one of those articles I have to ask myself if I want to put it on the internet. Ultimately though, I see so much within it that I would’ve died to understand even just a year ago.

I take the risk of never knowing who will read them, and I’m ok with that becuase maybe somebody somewhere needs it. There is a perpetual choice to either hide inside of myself or let people take me or leave me, and I think I will always choose the latter.

So, hey, next time you notice yourself feeling rather passionate, maybe take a second to think “that girl on the internet spilled her guts, maybe embarrassed herself, all to say if I accept my emotions they won’t feel as terrifying, maybe I should try it.” Let me be the big sister I never had for a second when I say it might take practice (even I am always getting things wrong), but I think it is worthwhile nonetheless.

Oh, and remember, he’s just a guy after all.

“You know you do this thing where you can never let things just be things. You have to write about them.” -(My previously mentioned best friend, jestfully, after reading the title of this article)

“I think that’s what art is.” -(me)

“Girl, you NEED to stand the f*ck up”

I can hear it now. I spend another Tuesday night on my best friend’s apartment floor verbalizing far too many “what if” thoughts while he reminds me that none of them even really matter. I’m sucking the fun out of it, cheating myself out of a good time, every time I do this to myself. On one occasion, he referred to me as a “wet blanket,” which felt oddly correct for the poor coping skills I was cycling through at the time.

Whether I like it or not, he’s generally right. One of the many things I appreciate about my best friend is that he will tell me how it is absolutely every time. There have been many times when I have read a rather blunt text from him, essentially telling me to pull it together, and it’s as if it shakes me awake. I go from “but what if..” to “oh yeah, I’m being silly right now.” The clouds clear from my vision, and I do indeed “stand the f*ck up,” realizing the part of me that had been taking the forefront wasn’t really me at all.

Someone else might look at a text like that and wince a little, but I know, in the moment, it’s exactly what I need. Granted, he gets to be incredibly blunt with me because we’re family. Not just anyone could walk through the door and immediately read me to filth. Not even everyone I’m close to could. This is the dynamic that plays out for us, and it works.

Although I appreciate it endlessly, I also remind myself that it is not his job to break me out of my own head, it’s mine. It was also not just him that had been tasked with the need to remind me that I’m safe or to stop cycling thoughts. It had been falling upon far too many people throughout my life, all in different ways. While reassurance was a valid desire, I have come to the realization lately (better late than never) that I have asked for external validation far more than I have asked for it from myself, and, now more than ever, it absolutely has to end.

saying no

My historical outsourcing of security has shown up a lot of places in my life, but particularly in my sex and romantic life. As is very characteristic of me, we’re going to jump right into the juicy part.

I recently asked a man, I had agreed to go on a date with, if it was “ok that I might not be ready to hook up.” I was essentially apologizing for the fact that I might not want to have sex with him and trying to create some buffer in case that made him mad. Firstly, why was I so dead set on preparing for possibilities that had yet to exist? Secondly, let him be mad. He was entitled to absolutely no access to my body, and going out with him did not mean I owed him anything. I was a grown woman capable of simply saying no.

Now, to this man’s credit, at no point did he make me feel pressured. We did not end up hooking up, and we quietly disappeared into the background of each other’s lives for other reasons. That’s exactly it, though. I did all that preliminary apologizing for no reason. All that being said, I want to emphasize that I would never insinuate that reassurance is inherently harmful. It is just that I was constantly watching myself hand the power, in each situation, away. It wasn’t characteristic of the person I wanted to be, nor was it helping me be, in any way, empowered.

Parts of my plight might be attributed to being raised as a woman. I was not necessarily taught that my natural, loud, and bold demeanor was acceptable. For a long time, I struggled quite a bit to bluntly say “no.” For another long time, I couldn’t tell the difference between “I’m just being anxious” and “I simply do not want to touch lips with this person.” I have admittedly kissed at least 5 people in my life that I did not want to, either becuase I panicked, or I didn’t realize my body was telling me no.

This is a great example of what happens when trust is chronically outsourced. At that point, it wasn’t even that I couldn’t trust myself; it was that I couldn’t communicate with myself at all. I was betraying what I wanted and needed becuase I could not decipher my own internal world. As long as I had existed, that part of me belonged to and was controlled by someone else. Not only that, but it wasn’t fair to the people that I let kiss me on the first date when I didn’t want to. I’m sure they didn’t want to make me feel as though I had to do it, and I do feel quite a bit of guilt for not being able to better figure my shit out. When I finally did say no to a kiss that I didn’t want, I felt as though I’d really achieved something. Maybe that’s sad, but for me, not kissing someone I knew confidently I wasn’t ready to, was exhilarating. It meant I had exercised self-reliance enough to be able to read my own internal signals.

saying hell yes

Beyond the touching I clearly didn’t want is the touching I very much did. More than I would like to admit, I have found myself spending time in a bed that I should be allowing myself to enjoy, instead spiraling inside my own head. I used to think it was invisible to anyone but me. It very much was not.

My therapist has tried to reassure me (ironically) up and down that asking for reassurance is ok. For the record, I don’t disagree. She said, “Anyone who has experienced sexual trauma is going to need an extra level of safety to be created for them.” I agree with her. The thing is, the safety, in many of these situations, was there.

The ideal partner for me was a beautiful dichotomy of a big, strong man who can easily overpower me, mixed with a gentle demeanor, which makes it a little surprising when he does. I had no issue trusting that combination. I’m giggling and kicking my feet just a little at the thought. The one I didn’t seem to trust in each situation was me. While there was nothing wrong with my apprehension inherently, I was still handing the power away and creating inhibitions for myself that I didn’t want or need to.

Sex could be fun for me for sure. Unfortunately, it was also drenched in every rule and regimen I had placed on it to keep myself safe. It was like I was fighting some higher power, constantly teetering between “well, this is what would feel good to me” and “this is where my invisible fence pops up to stop me from reaching out for what I want.” My brain was versed in never turning the f*ck off. I’d ask myself, “What if he can tell that I’m too into it… or him?” To answer my own ruminating mid-intimacy thoughts, “Who cares? Let him.”

There was another aspect of the ruminating where my brain traced every risk I was taking. I would snap fully out of moments of pleasure to check if I had just done something that might have consequences. While I am not going to shame myself for it, I can report, confidently, that the girl, underneath you, dissociating about pregnancy risk, is not necessarily the easiest partner to let loose with. I hated the way I had forced partners to bring me back into the room and out of my “staring at the ceiling.” I hated even more the people who made me feel bad about it when it was all I had to work with at the time.

Beyond what I knew was obvious, I can imagine most of my inhibitions were fairly noticeable to any sexual partner. If I could tell that I was perpetually stopping myself just short of my full range of desire, then surely they could tell I was holding back. I would love to ask, “Hey, while I was staring at you, looking you deeply in the eyes, but saying nothing, could you see that I was keeping something behind my teeth? Could you tell I had so much more I wanted to say?” (sometimes lust, sometimes adoration, one of which I would continue to hold onto a little tighter).

Some intimate partners were more than happy to coax me out of my head, and truthfully, it was pretty hot when someone managed to draw me into a version of myself that could just wildly let go. Patience was a pretty massive turn on, and maybe the bare minimum at that. With that being said, I started asking myself why I was adding this extra step and why I needed someone to help me trust myself and allow pleasure to occur. I was constantly feeling stifled and repressed becuase I was rarely allowing myself the space to really feel everything the way I deserved to.

I replay moments both recent and many moons ago. I should’ve just kissed him instead of staring, smirking, and cocking my head. I should’ve told him to put his hands around my wrists instead of thinking about it a lot while he asked me “what [I was] thinking about.” Why the hell was I going through so many interactions, leaving wishing I had asked for what I wanted? I have since learned I’m a more zen human when I just act on a few more impulses (respectfully).

“letting myself” like things

I spent a long time begging myself to let go. I wanted to let myself like things, stop holding my emotions in, and live a little more like water, pouring myself all over the place (not like that, Jesus). Whenever I used to develop a crush, I would start to panic, saying things like “I think I like this too much” or I can’t let myself.” I was convinced that if I allowed myself to feel something, the pipeline was already determined. I would start to act weird about it, push that person away, or urgently admit how I felt, and that was it. Things would get weird, and someone else would walk away. What I found was that the trust I lacked in my ability to feel something was the very thing causing that string of events to repeat.

After many conversations with my friends about this very mindset, I found that trying to bottle your emotions just makes them so much worse. There’s a big difference between accepting that I enjoy something, letting it move through me peacefully, and trying to lasso the cattle of emotions in my body while they thrash violently anyway. When I just allowed myself to have emotions without judging them, assigning them labels, or worrying about what they might lead to, they didn’t really have much power at all. And wouldn’t you know it, sex got a hell of a lot better, connecting with other humans felt easier, and I didn’t feel like I was living tied in bubble wrap. Granted, not every day is a perfectly anxiety-free day, but it wasn’t about eradicating it; it was just about not letting it take over. I still wince a little internally when I feel butterflies, like I need to jump up and catch them all, but I have gotten much better at just letting them live there. Talking about them is a different issue we’ll have to untangle later.

asking God

Unfortunately, my asks for reassurance did not stop at “hey, is it ok if we don’t hook up on the first date?” or “am I allowed to like this?” I also had tarot cards.

Ok, so maybe it’s a little more nuanced than that. For context, I grew up in a Lutheran school. While other kids were learning how to do math, I was being taught how to please God. God had a whole lot of rules to follow, by the way.

My parents were never all that religious. We were only really attending becuase our neighbors had kids enrolled who we were friends with, but I had very quickly gotten on board with what I was being taught at school. I prayed every night, begging God for forgiveness for whatever human thing I had done and asking him to keep everyone I loved safe. I was scared that if I angered him, he might punish me. My third-grade teachers were very clear on how Eve had brought on pain for all women after her. I did not want to face that same rath.

By the time I was 16, I had my first tarot deck. I was a good five years separated from Christian school, and while I still believed in God, I did not let it stop me from also believing I had the power to talk with some sort of spirit that I was fairly sure he’d created. I still prayed for my family’s safety, but in the same breath, I looked out for angel numbers on the car clock when my dad would pick me up from school.

Eventually, I stopped subscribing to Christian ideology. I still hesitate to say I don’t believe in God, as something in me still believes I would be struck down, but it’s been a long time since I’ve prayed to anyone but “spirit.” The horrible thing about my Christian guilt is that it didn’t die when I started doing spellwork; it just transferred.

Instead of asking God for forgiveness, I started asking the spirits for permission. I was scolded by my friends quite a few times for speaking the phrase “well, ‘THEY’ (in reference to some universal force) won’t let me!” Even my most witchy friends would remind me that I am the one in control of my life, and no one and nothing else gets to make those choices for me.

I wholeheartedly believed that if I mistepped something was going to punish me or teach me a lesson. When I believed in God, I refused to say “oh my god”, “god damn”, or anything of the sort. If for some reason I did on accident, you would find me grabbing the cross hanging from my rear view or crossing myself as if I were Catholic (I wasn’t). Post my transition into full spirituality, I would get weird about things like Karma. One summer, I was determined to have more random, casual intimate encounters, and my first attempt and then the next both got me sick. Surely that meant I wasn’t listening to something. I failed to consider that there might just be a bug going around.

I was once again, chronically, relying on something other than myself for the reassurance I really didn’t need, and it was killing me.

Codependency isn’t cute

When it wasn’t a man or God (who is also supposedly a man, but we can unpack that later), it was my friends. I struggled immensely to make a decision that wasn’t co-signed.

It was such an incredibly odd oxymoron. I labeled myself “headstrong” as I was constantly asking if what I wanted was ok to want. Most of the time, the answer wasn’t much more than “I think you should do what feels good to you,” and I would stand there frozen and perplexed as if I had fully given up the ability to gauge my own emotions.

My friends were just people, and they were people who had absolutely no expertise on my internal world. I was the only one who knew what my feelings were. Even so, I would find ways to source my comfort from a lot of “what would you do if you were me.” It’s exhausting to be that friend, and I’m sure it’s exhausting to watch that friend struggle just the same.

It’s up to me

I try to be kind to myself in how long it’s taken me to figure out that every time I outsourced my safety, I was just harming myself. As my therapist would indeed say, I was “working with the tools that [I] had.”

It really started to get to me when I realized I had been with men whom I knew very little to nothing about their preferences and desires. I had been too busy asking them to save me from my thoughts. It occurred to me that when I allowed anyone to hold me, it must have felt like they were attempting not to drop glass. I hated the idea that I had put so much emphasis on my fear instead of being present in comfortable closeness. I also hated the idea that I only ever allowed them to see curated versions of me. How can you adore something you do not even know?

I was perplexed for a long time as to why I had experienced such a long string of abandonments. Men who were infatuated with me right up until I reciprocated their feelings and they would run. I now know why. The person they fell in love with was bold, unapologetic, and about herself. The person who fell in love with them was a terrified Rapunzel in a tower who suddenly couldn’t help herself from asking to be saved. I was perpetually losing myself, and it was not hard to notice.

I’m 27 years old, a grown woman who somehow just kinda woke up one day and said, “I am done doing this,” and then I was. When it comes down to it, regardless of what part of my life, it is up to me, and personally, I am tired of holding back.

I happen to be a person with remarkably large emotions, tending to attach sentimental value to just about anything I can. I’ll admit that I can romanticize most anything, and I often let my emotions show on my sleeve quite loudly.

(Minus when I’m into someone, I guess. That, I seem to think I’m doing loudly just to find out the other person is none the wiser. Eye contact is not sufficient flirting, so I’ve found. We’ll work on that.)

I will be the first to admit that I am the kind of person who you’ll either decide is “too much” or “charmingly charismatic” (Not my words). Some call it being polarizing; I wouldn’t really know any different.

Beyond just being potentially “a lot,” I am the kind of person to repeat the same story for a fifth or even sixth time. I have a very hard time staying on topic and will need to be veered back on track. Sometimes I take far too long to get to a point becuase I just have so many ideas I want to share. Not to mention, I get very excited about the little things, and I can’t help but smile until my face hurts when “whimsy” (that feeling of awe and wonder) takes over me. Regardless of every odd quirk I am or am not aware of, the point is, I’m made up of a lot of things.

I used to resent many of these things about myself. I would often try to talk less or shame myself for saying something I had clearly already said. I hated the idea that maybe I “liked things too much,” so I attempted to shove myself in a box. I existed in a world where the only way to be palatable was to be anything but who I actually was. I have bad news for those of you who were hoping to try this very tactic. It doesn’t actually work.

That boy that you think you can fool into believing you’re “x,y, and z” is going to find out who you actually are, and he probably won’t even be too bothered by the real you, but he sure as hell will hate the fact that you lied instead of embodying it. Your self-hatred that you think you are hiding will show its teeth and scare away anyone simply trying to witness you for the love of it. The parts of you that you hide from yourself are going to spill out of you, no matter how many times you shove them back. You have no choice but to learn how to love them.

I feel as though it’s fairly common to hear something along the lines of “what you dislike about someone else is a reflection of what you dislike about yourself.” I can confidently say anyone reading this has heard that sentiment more than once. I didn’t exactly buy it until I started learning to love myself as a whole instead of cherry-picking my best fragmented pieces.

Learning to love myself unconditionally gave me more than just self-fulfillment or some checked-off box on the path to non-linear healing. It provided me with a new level of gentleness that I didn’t know I had access to.

I went from being concerned with desperately trying to please to a primary objective of making others feel safe to be themselves. I shifted from spending entire conversations staring at my proverbial reflection to sitting in the present, desiring to simply understand the person across from me. Not only did it make for better relationships, but it also made for a more grounded me.

I have much more space to admire those around me when I am not preoccupied with diminishing myself. The barista at my favorite cafe is a complex human with a life of her own, and I absolutely love learning about all her travels. The elderly woman who comes to my job just with the hopes of a chat has so much life to share, and I hope she never stops sharing her stories. Even the man who works the corner store, who isn't always the most friendly, has a family that he goes home to, laughs with, and loves (I hope).

These people are no longer vehicles for reflecting my insecurities (becuase God, what a waste of life). They are all one million stories, just hoping to be told.

Seeing myself clearly has taught me how to be more kind, more open, more loving, and even more of an unashamed extrovert. It has given me a deep adoration for people and a wild curiosity to get to know so many more of them.

I suppose some would call what I am so heavily experiencing, “Sonder.”

Maybe my love and forgiveness for my own existence has simply given me a form of Sonder that desires to connect and celebrate every unique, flawed, and lovable human that I pass on the street. Maybe I’m just kind of weird, and maybe I write “maybe” far too much. I don’t think it matters much either way.

Have you ever felt a feeling so big that it begs to overtake you? Suppose you’ve fallen in love so deeply that it made you sick in all the best ways. The butterflies took residence in your stomach whether you liked it or not. That’s how most of my positive emotions feel, utterly large and completely fulfilling. That includes, of course, my desire to hear the stories of others and hope that they can also feel a little bit of that magic around them.

Over this last week, I have made private and unpublished essentially all of my social media.

I should preface, this is coming from someone who has considered themself an unofficial “cracking the algorithm” specialist on and off for the last 7 years. Social media made marketing a part of my career, gave me knowledge that ultimately landed me jobs, and helped me learn that confidence was my most marketable skill in any kind of career progression. I considered how the algorithm would receive things far more than I would like to admit, often abandoning art to pursue what was trending. Over the 7 years that I learned from the internet, I spent eras fully immersed in building a platform and other (more common) eras simply just posting to post. After a while, it started to become a slippery slope.

Some of that time, I used social media to run a business, posting motivational content hoping to inspire others, but often dealing with excessive bullying more than the reward of changing someone’s life. That motivational content led to reading tarot as a side job, which I ultimately also left due to the fact that I was doing readings about ex-boyfriends far more than readings surrounding ways to love oneself. Every time I showed up, I felt like I left more empty than when I had arrived, and then I did it again.

Now, I think what has led me to this decision overall is complex, but ultimately, when the camel’s back broke, I asked myself. Is this the artist that I want to be? Is posting details of my life, behind a character and attention-grabbing limit, actually furthering my goals as an artist at all? Wouldn’t I be better off booking actual gigs, connecting with people 1-on-1, or performing somewhere outside of the confines of the internet?

It would have been one thing if I were posting my art all of the time, and maybe one day I will, but I never really did. I posted either what I knew would gain traction or what was easy, to keep people engaged. Most of my followers did not even know I was a songwriter, often surprised when I’d post an old song. So if I had started this journey with the hopes of making art my career, why was it facilitating nothing of the sort?

Not to mention, when the facade started to crack, I looked at my analytics, quickly realizing how heavily they had skewed from my actual target audience. I said to myself, “Maybe this simply is not what I need right now.” In fact, I had only started this way during the pandemic and its aftershock. When I began, there was no other creative outlet that felt like it allowed me to reach anyone at all. Maybe I had outgrown this focus a long time ago.

I think I may have realized, at least for the time being, that social media was simply acting as a fix.

• I could feel important without giving myself the affirmation I really needed.

• I could feel like I was making an impact without any of the actual joy of a real human connection.

• Worst of all, collecting interactions felt like making progress without any art actually being made.

At the beginning of it all, giving up the accounts I had built for years felt impossible and devastating, but I think now more than ever, I look forward to starting over one day. I ask myself if it is simply time for me to fully rebrand and allow myself to change, letting go of how I thought I would find success and instead drafting a new way.

At first, I worried my choice to step back would mean my career in the arts would be doomed, but I looked around myself, noticing something important. Most of my friends who are artists are not going viral or amassing thousands of followers, yet they live the artist life more than I ever have while posting OOTDs from my bedroom. Some of them barely used social media at all, reserving their contributions for the behind-the-scenes work or the work that held up without a digital media campaign. Granted, not that there’s anything wrong with it if internet recognition is what I wanted, but I wasn’t sure that it was. I think it was more likely a way to exit my real life before I had found ways to take control of it.

Trying to be the next viral internet sensation had taken far more from me as an artist than it had given me, and it was time to pay attention to that. All 7 years had been underpinned by what I should be doing or who I should be pleasing. While at first it felt empowering, I think I may not have noticed how much of an obligation it had actually become.

I watched intently out the window of the 747, waiting for Pacific Northwest trees to come into view. I had been talking about Seattle since I was a kid. My dad often warned me of the weather and the volcano that was supposedly ready to erupt and “wipe out the town” any minute. I instead knew her by her name, Rainier.

While I was anxiously waiting for the cue that we were near our landing, I saw her. She sat so calmly on the horizon. Her snowy peak grew closer and closer until suddenly I sat, tens of thousands of feet in the air, right above her. She had every chance to hurt me right then and there, but she stood quietly. Nothing about her was menacing like I had been told. I was maybe embarrassed to say that I had the thought, but it felt like she was my friend. I thought it likely wasn’t her fault that she was so full of the potential to spill out everywhere. I was messy too. Many people feared my intensity.

Many tears made their way down my face. I tried to wipe them away so I didn’t waste a single second viewing her through blurry eyes. I wanted to know her, to really know her. To see every ridge and valley in her surface just as I hope someone might admire me someday. Something about her made me feel safe.

Safety used to be a hard emotion for me to sustain. For a very long time I struggled to feel safe in my body, my relationships, my town, and my dreams. The feeling that I rarely knew how to allow myself but always deserved. I was chasing it.

My short trip to the PNW did a little bit more than inspire me or show me something I may want to pursue one day. It showed me that somewhere along this road I have been walking I have figured out how to feel safe before I had even realized it.

3 years ago I was sitting in my childhood bedroom anticipating my first flight in four years, only the third round-trip of my entire life, and the first one I had taken since I had developed a panic disorder. At the time I was gripping onto the experience with white knuckles, just trying not to grip so hard that I broke something.

I over-prepared. I packed 4 different methods of motion sickness relief (even though I had never experienced motion sickness on a plane). I wore a lanyard to indicate I was an anxious flyer, and I rehearsed my path through the airport a million times. I, in essence, did not trust myself nor the world I navigated. Traveling was simply always going to be an ordeal for me, I thought.

This time, while I was flying over Rainier, I realized my motion sickness glasses were still in my bag. I had forgotten all about my lanyard. I got to the airport in such crunch time that I walked directly on the plane with not an ounce of stress in my body. None of it bothered me. Why? Because I was no longer that version of myself.

Who I was, for a long time, was hiding under my fear. My fear of liking things and losing them, going somewhere and getting lost, and losing control of my body. I failed to realize that I always felt lost and I always made choices that aligned more with certainty than with me becuase who I was was not accessible to me under every protective layer of armor I was wearing.

I used to fall in love with boys in ways that shattered me just about every time they showed me an ounce of decency, so I stopped letting them in, often keeping them an arm’s length away. I used to hyperventilate in the grocery store becuase I was worried I might faint (although I never had). I even used to lock myself in my room thinking that if I just stayed still nothing could hurt me again. These things once defined my character. They were who I thought I was and what I must be destined to live in. I did not trust my dreams and I sure as hell did not trust myself.

As I stared down at Ms. Rainier, I thought of who I was just those few years ago. I thought about what the world would look like for that version of me if I could just go back and tell her what I was seeing right then.

I wished I could tell her she would come to look forward to the airport and the plane ride. She would wish she took more of them, actually. She could be fond of people and not have it take something from her. The grocery store just felt like a grocery store, and she’d stroll mindlessly down each aisle. I’d explain to her that a lot of what she’s bracing for is in her head and she unfortunately wouldn’t know how to believe me.

Something about my time in Washington was a final puzzle piece in that way. Even up until a few months ago, I would’ve told you that I want to avoid road trips as I hate driving or traveling by car. Now I see no limits. I would’ve said that I struggle to look at myself naked (literally or metaphorically) in the mirror and know who I was looking at.

I watched myself move through that city with so much peace inside me. I let myself be “naked,” and showed myself once again that nothing is actually standing in my way but me. Looking at myself in the mirror, as I write this, I can clearly see I came home an even more grounded person than I left. I think I can finally say I know what it is that I need out of this life.

To say Seattle and Olympia were healing for me would be a gross understatement. Seattle and Olympia were waiting for me. Waiting for me to show up and shake hands with a girl in the reflection of the Puget Sound and Lake Saint Clair.

That girl wants to travel, hear people's stories, and write about them. She wants… well needs really, to make art and love people for who they are. Her desires rely heavily on letting things unfold while also putting in the work. She is brave, kind, literary, gentle, romantic, optimistic, educated, passionate, and wholeheartedly every part of her that she lost to fear. I love the hell out of her.

Rainier may just be a volcano in Washington. She may always be threatening to erupt. The thing is, I am not afraid of her in the same way that I cannot control her.

My life thus far has been predicated by the control I thought I had when I would

-over-prepare

-shove my emotions down until I was certain they were welcomed or reciprocated

-create scripts in my head

-alter my life and my appearance to follow the expected path

-keep anything I might feel a desire for at arms distance so it cannot decide to hurt me first

Regardless of how many times I played through these rituals, or tried to regain my grip on the reins, the outcome never changed. I still fell down, and I still got back up, somehow not realizing that I had been handling it as it came, flawlessly, the whole time.

I am no less than sobbing as I put this on paper.

Rainier is in Washington with a few people and places I miss very dearly. I am here in Colorado paving my way back to myself and everything I always feel like I am missing.

This is always what was supposed to happen. I believe we feel drawn to the people, places, and things that are supposed to bring us home to ourselves. My love for the PNW, far before I saw it, was no accident. I knew where I was waiting.

I say this with all the weight it deserves.

It is so incredibly nice to meet me.

I love you.

Warmly, Yourself

“This is what it is to love an artist: The moon is always rising above your house. The houses of your neighbors look dull and lacking in moonlight. But he is always going away from you. Inside his head there is always something more beautiful.”
― Sarah Ruhl, Eurydice

Author’s Note: Hi friends. In this article, I start off by talking about some of my romantic history and how it led me to the priorities I now have. This includes mentions of some heavy topics. If you need to skip these first few sections due to sensitive content, you can skip to the “Single for Five Years?” header! TWs below.

The Preface (“Why are my standards so high?")

TW: domestic abuse, SA

-Get a Job

Five and a half years ago, I left a relationship with a man I had been with for four years and lived with for three and a half. We met when I was 17, and he was 16. I was just graduating high school when he moved into my childhood bedroom with me, and we had barely been dating for 5 months. Insane, I know.

My parents (who were far too chill about it) agreed to move him in, feed him, pay his phone bill, and take him to school every day when his parents essentially kicked him out (the reasoning not related nor important to the story).

I clung on to the relationship for a long time, not knowing much better. We generally broke up or came close to it at least once a year, as he had, let’s just say…issues.

Every time I just about kicked him out, he would ultimately come back begging, and I would cave out of the fear of the only adult life I knew imploding. I did not know how to leave.

That was until 2020 rolled around. Living 100% of your waking life in one room with a man who spends more time with his Discord chat than the woman he’s been with for 3 years will really teach you things.

During the throes of the pandemic, we existed primarily by sitting on separate devices in the same room. I would try to record tracks for various songs while he screamed at his computer, constantly having to start over again. I would repeat this cycle until I ultimately had to drive him to his fast food job. He hated leaving the Discord call to go to work. I loved when he was gone so I could actually finish a song.

-Owning My Body (TW: SA)

When work wasn’t forcing him to log off, the only other time he would leave the Discord call was when he wanted to touch me. It unfortunately did not matter much whether I was on board or not. While he would take “no” for an answer, he would not take it kindly. Often offering to pay me, asking if I thought he was ugly, etc, and I learned it was much easier just to do what he wanted me to.

This had been the narrative since the beginning. I would tell him I wasn’t comfortable and he would somehow manage to get what he wanted anyway. Before our first date, I had reiterated to him, “No funny business.” I bought two cans of pepper spray, leaving one in the backseat of my car while the other was attached to my keys. He had seen them both and made jokes about it.

Unfortunately, what I had said didn’t matter to him, nor did either can of pepper spray. I spent the majority of the date in the back of my 1996 Nissan Sentra staring out the front windshield, frozen while he continued to push for what he wanted. He didn’t listen when I was 17 or when I was 21.

You could ask,

“Why did you put up with it?”

I would tell you that until it was far too late, I had no idea what was happening to me was wrong. I thought, “I’m too uptight or nervous, and there’s something wrong with me for how I don’t feel good about this. Wasn’t I supposed to feel good about it?”

I told a doctor at one point about how I really didn’t enjoy “it,” and she told me,

“Well, that’s just how it is for women with PCOS. It’s usually painful” (PCOS being a diagnosis I didn’t even officially have yet). I resigned to the fact that I just didn’t enjoy sex and I never would. I thought it was supposed to be passionate and meaningful. I was supposed to want it. It eroded away at me instead.

What I did not realize at the time is I just didn’t enjoy him. I hated being pushed to do what I didn’t want to do. I sure as hell didn’t enjoy being shamed by my partner for the way my body looked or pressured to be more into it, do things faster, praise him more, etc and so on. For four years, my body did not belong to me. It supposedly belonged to PCOS (now PMOS) and my partner, if you could call him that.

At the end of our relationship, I told him how I felt about the ways he pushed and violated my boundaries. I explained to him that what happened on our first date, and many times thereafter, was never truly consensual and that his persuasion didn’t indicate my consent. He simply told me, “If I was so horrible to you, you should leave me.” Yeah, I should.

I remember most times that he would mute the Discord chat to come find me; I would find myself dissociating through it until I finally rolled over to my side of the bed, making myself as small as possible and silently letting the tears roll. Every time, as if he was following cues, he exhaled and slumped back over to his computer chair, no longer needing anything from me. That was simply how it was.

So yeah, I was afraid I would never feel passionate about someone, and the only place I knew how to access those feelings was my art. Art that he hated me being so preoccupied with, as it often just got in his way.

-Living with a Stranger

In the first summer of the pandemic, I turned 21. For my birthday, he had bought me one of those “I love this (fill in the blank) about you” books. I watched him fill it out at the party before he wrapped it while he sat in front of me. When I finally opened it, not only did he fully miss pages, but the pages that were filled said things like:

“I wish I could lie to my parents as well as you do.”

“You don’t even have to try to be pretty.”

“My dream vacation with you would be disneyland.”

Every single answer was either oddly critical, empty, or simply not at all representative of me. If he knew me at all, he would know:

• I only lied to my parents to cover his tracks.

• I never felt worse about myself than when he was looking at me.

• I had been to Disneyland at least five times (once with him) in my life, as many kids who grow up in California do, and I actually dreamed of the Oregon coast, England, New York City, or Paris.

He didn’t know any of this because he never asked. Any of the rest of his answers are missing from my head because my sister and I burned the book in her backyard, as somewhat of a cleansing ritual, five years ago.

He had issues with giving me gifts, so there wasn’t all that much to burn.

One year for Christmas he bought me a golden ball attached to a piece of wood. It made no sense to me, but it seemed like it was just one of those modern art home decor things. I pretended to like it with a “Awwwww… so pretty.” “What… is it?” He explained what I already assumed, that it was from the Target home section. The knife that came with it was when he told me, “I got it because I thought it was stupid, which means you’d probably like it.”

Right

(I should probably note he also used my money to buy it…)

I would always tell him it could be as simple as a handwritten note and flowers. I gave him the handbook on who I was, and he tossed it. He would instead point out how flowers were “stupid” because they were just going to die.

I thought about the petals I had pressed and kept tucked in a keepsake box from the first and only bouquet he’d bought me, but I didn’t bring it up. I would sift through that box time and time again looking for the spark I was supposed to feel. It was never there.

Before things ended indefinitely, he would buy me a few bouquets as apologies, and their petals wilted with his half-hearted guilt before I could manage to dry and display them.

Sarah

TW: domestic abuse, SA

The one person keeping me sane through it all was my sister.

Sarah was a visual artist. She would spend the pandemic in her room with me, drawing, painting, and hanging prints from local artists on every wall. We would learn dances together and paint in the park. Sarah had the artist’s spark to match my own wrapped into a box of platonic admiration. We were always picking each other up in that way.

Sarah bought me flowers for my birthday. Multiple times.

That same Christmas, my, at the time, boyfriend gifted me the confusing golden ball; she had bought me one of the cutest little sets of bath bombs I’d ever seen. They were purple and gold (my favorite colors at the time) and presented themselves in gorgeous geometric shapes. It took me forever to use them because they were so pretty, and I wanted to stare at them forever. Best of all, that Christmas, Sarah and I had only just met.

My sister (who is actually my sister-in-law) sat down with me one night, mid-pandemic time, on her bed, chatting away about boy bands, art, and all the other whimsical things we loved. We listened to our favorite songs, and I told her all about how I wished I could be a singer, move to a big city one day, and chase my dreams. She told me I should, and I could. Sarah knew how to get me to use my spark to light fires, make plans, and think of myself as someone who could do so much more.

We both sat in those clouds for a moment before I realized. Where would my boyfriend be? Who would be paying his bills? Surely he couldn’t and wouldn’t come with me, and my parents wouldn’t house him if I wasn’t there. (Their insanity had limits, I guess).

I remember thinking that if I just went to New York by myself for a few months, it would be easier to leave him while I was gone, as he couldn’t come find me to beg or bargain. I didn’t say that out loud, and we quickly moved on from the topic.

Sarah and my brother had been together for two years at that point (8 years, happily, as I’m writing this). I wanted to ask her what it was like to feel so free in her relationship. The example she and my brother set started to poke holes in my perception of what normal really meant. I wanted to ask her, so I did.

Like the opening of a floodgate, I watched all of what had been happening to me pour out of my mouth and onto the daybed in which we sat across from each other. In the water were the stories about the money he had offered me to touch him, the names he had called me for disagreeing with him, and the homophobic things he had spewed online. With every addition, Sarah’s face progressively fell. Although she was doing her best to hold it in, so as not to scare me, she was horrified. The look in her eyes was one of “Where do I even start wading in all this water?”

All I remember was the weight in the way she told me,

“Jessi, that’s not ok.”

If she was scared for me, I thought maybe I should be, too.

The following weeks in the house with him were odd, restrained. I asked him to give me space, to stop putting his hands on me. It made me sick. He grew more and more angry as I denied him.

One particular night, I had gone out to my car in the garage to talk to Sarah on the phone in secret. She sat with me through every moment of the “how the hell do I get out of this” feelings.

He had followed me out to the garage without me knowing. When he caught me, he was upset, suddenly ranting about how I was abandoning him and making him feel insecure, even though he had heard nothing of my conversation with her. I hung up the phone with Sarah, told her I would call her back, and followed him up to our room.

We sat on the king-size bed we’d purchased together just a few months prior so we could sleep fully isolated on opposite sides (a warning, for sure). It took up the majority of the space in our (my) room the same way the animosity between us had the last few years. I looked at him and heard something inside of me click into place.

“I think you need to move out,”

I said deadpan. I don’t remember the conversation. I’m not sure I allowed much of one to occur.

I saw him one more time after he left and then never again. I did not grieve, did not miss it, and wasn’t upset.

He sent a text along the lines of “You scare me, and I’m happier without you.” I thought to myself, “You took the words right out of my mouth,” and instead said, “It seems like you aren’t ready to be in a relationship, but I wish you the best.”

I was free. All at once, I realized I could live anywhere I wanted, be anyone I wanted to be, and maybe actually find out what it was like to live a life underscored by what and who I am passionate about.

I’d learn later on, after running into a girl he ended up dating right after me (who shared my same name), that he did similar things to her while also ranting about how I never loved him.

I will give it to him. He was right about that.

Single for 5 years?

I remember celebrating my one-year anniversary of “freedom.” I was 22 years old. I had started making my own music, ran an online business for a while, and started asking myself what I really cared about. An apprehensive bit of my time was spent ideating a man in my future who would be gentle with me, foster my passions, and ask me important questions. I daydreamed, maybe a little too much, about what it would be like to feel the infamous “spark.”

At one point, my sister and I coined a nickname for this unidentified man. “The Tea Man.” The sentiment was that whoever this was would sit with me when I was having a hard day and hand me a warm mug filled with some variety of tea. A small gesture, but he would have done it because he knew, although I loved tea, I never thought to make it myself, even though it always made me feel better. Sarah always enabled this line of thinking because she, more than I, realized at that point that the standards I had set were absolutely on the floor and we were going to have to start somewhere.

By the second anniversary, I had committed to going back to school. I spent that December dreaming again of New York City. I was convinced I would end up with an English degree, and I would use it to spend days writing in NYC cafes. (I was pretty close regarding the degree choice but would end up with a general liberal arts degree instead).

Year three was particularly special, as although I hadn’t yet moved to NYC, I had left and moved halfway across the country. In my new “small town Colorado charm” existence, I spent my time performing in theatre, making new friends, releasing more songs, reclaiming ownership over my body, and excelling in English writing classes. Every year, I got a little closer to myself, at this point dedicating myself to being on my own for at least as long as I had been with him.

One year later, I reached that goal. I had finally been single for as long as I had been trapped. The scales were balanced. While I still didn’t quite feel ready to be there for someone in that way, I did feel the satisfaction of all of the time I had spent creating the life I now had. My life revolved around passion as a concept. My passion for my career, school, and the art I created all made me a version of myself I actually recognized. I still spent most of my time thinking about big cities and being an artist. I took small steps all of the time to immerse myself in more of the things that would get me there while also leaving space for my continued healing.

This was also the year where I found out that when I was able to be intimate with someone that I felt safe with and get out of my head, sex was actually just as good as everyone says it is. I was allowed to take my time, ask for what I needed, and not be ashamed of being a human person with a body. Between my relationship and the religious trauma I had amassed, it took me a while to get to this point. That was ok.

The year five marker was as long as it took for me to be open to the idea of a relationship again. I had started dating more frequently within year four, but I rarely had the time to be consistent. In the December that marked the 5th anniversary, I felt myself evolve from cringing at the idea of someone doing something kind for me in a romantic context, and I started yearning for it. Me…a chronically single and happy-about-it kind of girl, had started yearning?

I cannot overstate how little I had yearned for a monogamous relationship leading up to then. Sure, there were the conversations about “tea man” and a few short crushes, but deep down I think I knew most of them wouldn’t be sticking around, and I was ok with that.

Something in the incoming year five altered that part of my brain chemistry. Maybe I had gotten to the point in my healing where I wasn’t blocking those feelings off anymore. I had turned on the hose, and I was watering everything.

I was no longer capable of half-assing it. Sure, I could do “casual,” but truly, a lot of the time, it was really just, “I do indeed have a lil’ crush on you and would do something about it if it made sense, but I am being an adult and tempering my expectations because I want to let myself feel, regardless of the outcome.” I obviously wasn’t going to say all that, though. No need to complicate things or force what wasn’t natural. (I would rather die than try to convince a man to want me, actually.)

Sometimes I wished I could just be interested in whoever and do the whole “hoe phase” thing that I thought I would adopt eventually. It would make it easier, wouldn’t it? That’s alright though; what would I have to write about if I did it the normal way? That’s what I’ll tell myself.

I was proud of myself for the fact that I was capable of feeling something and not letting it drive any part of my life. That felt like living. After spending five years suppressing any semblance of a feeling, I enjoyed letting myself sit in them all of a sudden. I allowed a little healthy yearning into my life instead of resisting it, and really, it made me a much more grounded human being.

Don’t get me wrong. Sometimes I still forget to yearn. I get consumed by ideas for articles, dreams about my next move or degree, and mapping out my success, and I forget that there are other things I desire. I don’t know what else to say other than I do believe if something is supposed to stick, it will, and I won’t have to search for it that hard.

What’s so hard about mixing ambition and dating?

So, if I’m so ready, what’s the issue? I don’t want to exactly identify it as a problem because I think it’s, at its face, a wonderful thing. I also don’t think it’s fully insurmountable either.

• I’m a little bit scared of my yearning and my dream clashing

What if I end up with a man and he doesn’t share my dream of a NYC brownstone? What if my desire to spend a few months in a bunch of different cities, so I can really experience them, makes him feel like I’m leaving him behind? Worst of all, what if he makes me choose him or my plan?

I hate to say the choice, while impossibly hard, is clear to me. Asking me to abandon my passion is asking me to abandon myself. I won’t do it a second time.

• Being obsessed with the artist life is lonely in the wrong company

When I am passionate about a goal or trajectory, I do not care how long it takes. I will stop at nothing to get it. I need him to understand what it feels like to pour yourself into the work. He has to get why the artistic journey is an insatiable one and why I am always bleeding for it.

If I am raving on the way home from a show about how beautiful the score was and he is simply nodding at the street lines in front of him, I will feel more alone than I did when I was by myself. What lights him up? What absolutely sets him on fire? How does it consistently push him to be better, learn more, and build something?

I need that commonality, or I will starve. I have learned this the hard way. I can barely kiss a man anymore who wasn’t made with a little bit of that spark.

• I never want to lose myself like that again

Never again in my life do I want to get so lost in the depths of a romantic relationship that I forget who I am when I’m alone. I wouldn’t want it for anyone I was with, either.

You are your first priority, and I am mine. I pray that neither of us ever let go of our own individual sparks for the one that we share.

Spend the summer in France without me for a job. I will see you in August, and I want to hear all about it. Let’s sit in this studio, focusing on our own projects in tandem so we can get this work done together. Whatever it takes. Be you so I can be me too.

• Is the insatiable artist just someone who sacrifices connection?

I ask myself. How many times will I have no choice but to sacrifice connection on a smaller scale to prioritize connecting on a larger one?

I’ve probably spent hours writing and editing this article by now. I haven’t picked up my phone the entire time, as interruptions would ruin my flow. I might miss things. I might not respond on a dime. How do I balance the time that I need for myself and making someone feel seen? What’s fair?

• I will ultimately choose an artist

This is the best or worst thing, and I may never decide. I have never dated (or talked to for an extended time) a man who wasn’t an artist of some kind. At first, it was an accident, and then once it had happened enough times, it couldn't really be an accident anymore, could it?

My first crush played saxophone. My first boyfriend played the trumpet. The ex we talked about earlier played piano, tuba, trombone, some other things, and made musical scores (he just didn’t have all that much ambition about him). After him was a situationship with a music producer, another music producer, a graphic designer, another graphic designer, etc and so on (“etc and so on” being my way of nervously not disclosing people who may or may not read this).

It’s like I am an artist magnet or something. I admittedly like it that way. My harrowing tale has taught me I need to feel that want, desire, and insatiability. I am only half of myself without that, and I have learned more than anything that the common ground of creative ambition is the place I fit the best.

That being said, there are three outcomes. Either:

1. They’re an artist, but not a career artist.

I struggled with this dynamic. Most of my earliest relationships were with boys not all that interested in building a career out of art. The boyfriend who played the trumpet wanted to be a pediatrician, and the other one works in IT. My first crush became a neuroscientist, from what I've heard.

Ultimately, it is harder for me to connect. The older I got, the less I attracted a man who is casual about his art. I could maybe blame that on my increasing commitment to my own, but I’m overall not sure.

I don’t want to sound pretentious. Obviously, there is nothing wrong with a very normal career. I, too, have a day job. There was always just a little less understanding of my insanity around chasing my own goals. It was lonely in that way.

2. Two career artists who are constantly going away from each other

Scenario two includes all the common ground, understanding for each other’s work, and cheering on of each other's success. It just also includes two very successful people doing what they love so well that they are constantly somewhere else mentally or physically. I am not one to say it never works (we’ll talk about it in point three). I have to believe that there are ways that it can, because if I did not, I would be a little doomed to everyone I’m just not as compatible with. It just presents some very unique challenges.

These are the people I get along with the best. They understand me well, and we share common ground. The conversations are stimulating, and the sensation that I am talking to someone who actually gets what I am constantly trying to explain to everyone else is quite comforting.

3. They are a career artist, and thankfully so am I

I like to think of this as the best-case scenario and what I am generally aiming for. All of the wonderful parts of the above point, with fewer caveats.

Given my goals, there is a reality that I am going to spend prolonged periods of my life traveling, working a piece to death, and focusing on what I am passionate about very hard. I like to think that maybe the only other person who could have the tolerance for it is someone doing it themself. I also like to think that maybe in the right scenario, things could overlap.

“You need to write? Me too. Let’s go grab coffee.”

“You have a job cross country? Well, I’m a freelancer right now and have nothing tying me down. Let’s go.”

Maybe this is utterly unrealistic. Maybe I lean far too heavily sometimes into my “I can conquer anything” mentality. Obviously, there are limits and lines. If the effort is not made, it simply doesn’t work, and as I said before, I am not in the business of forcing anything. Every art piece I ever made that was forced felt utterly empty, and to me, connection is art in its own way.

Again, it’s not that I can’t develop meaningful relationships with men who don’t make art and ambition a major part of their life; it’s just that I know myself, and ultimately, I feel pretty strongly this is where I will end up.

It’s all just hard to find (the summary)

It’s simply difficult to find someone who matches this wavelength. I often find myself feeling misunderstood by people who are simply content with their day job, as my brain is constantly looking for something to innovate. I rarely stay at a job longer than a year and am far more invested in ways I can grow for myself than for a company. Some see it as unreliable. I see it as brave.

It’s not a negative thing to be happy with the simple things. If anything, we as artists could probably use much more of that. It is just that if you don’t see the world even a little bit through my lens, I am not sure how to help you understand why I am so insane about it.

I have been told I am “a lot.” It’s true. I have spent years trying to bottle it up, yet I have never felt freer than when I’ve let it pour itself all over every room I occupy. It is hard to find someone who finds it endearing instead of overwhelming. The reality now is I can’t deny myself my passion for a second more of my existence. That is simply how it has to be.

I don’t find myself searching or pining. I could really be single another five years for all I care. Nothing, and I mean nothing, is as lonely as being with someone who is not for you. I cannot emphasize that enough, so if my ambition and delusional artistry need my whole lifetime to find someone who matches my energy, I will give them that.

At the end of the day, I’m not willing to sacrifice my intensity because I know I wouldn’t ask it of anyone else.

I found myself in my artistry. Maybe one day, I’ll find someone else in it too.

Bumble Bff

I met Cierra a little over a year ago, swiping through an app made for finding new friends. When I tell people how many of my friends I met on the internet and how oddly successful I’ve been in doing so, there is a general skepticism. Sometimes they’ve tried the same apps and told me they don’t work. Other times, they just marvel at how I manage to do it so easily.

Depending on the situation, I either have a bunch of advice or absolutely none.

Having issues turning matches on apps into dates (friend dates or romantic)?

Try voice memos. I’m so serious. Being willing to be confidently and unabashedly myself and using my actual voice/tone to get to know someone leads to significantly better connections. If I don’t vibe with the conversation via voice memo, the same usually applies in person. If we can yap back and forth, make each other laugh, and find ways to riff off each other, even when not in real time, it is usually just as fun in person.

Anyway, that’s how I got to meet Cierra. I didn’t open with a voice memo with Cierra as I did for many other friends. I must have been somewhere where I couldn’t in the moment, but I did indeed jump into them not too long after the fact.

Starry Night

Cierra and I met at a coffee shop the first time we hung out.

Later on, I would make a joke about how everyone I’d ever invited to that coffee shop tended to stick around in my existence. The shop was named after a Van Gogh painting and had “What is done in love is done well” pasted on the wall in big letters. I felt an oddly strong pull to the coffee shop when I was looking up the local spots before moving here. I like to think it’s becuase I somehow knew I would meet some of my favorite people there.

Sitting at a small, circular table in the back, right next to the counter, I waited for her to arrive. It was quite busy, but I figured we could always go walk around if we had to. The memory about what happened when she arrived, or how we greeted each other when she sat down, is fuzzy. I do hilariously remember thinking how much cooler she seemed than me as soon as she got there.

It took us maybe a matter of ten minutes before she was giving me juicy details about her last situationship, and I was going into detail about my spirituality. We sat across from each other yapping for four straight hours, only finally leaving becuase I had committed to perform at an open mic down the street later that night.

On her walk home, she sent me another voice memo, assuring me she had a great time and wanted to hang out again. So we did, and then we did again, and again. We never meant to become best friends. The intention wasn’t to talk every day or have a dedicated day of the week for each other. It just kind of shook out that way, and that was the best part.

Cierra had moved to Colorado from Oklahoma, maybe 6 months before we met. I had moved here, from California, a year and a half prior to meeting her. The both of us grew up in polar opposite environments, but had the same tenacity to pick up everything and leave it all behind. Neither of us had any family nor any large groups of friends here. We may not have even realized that we needed each other the way we did.

On our third or fourth hangout, Cierra and I joked that “when you know you know.” Not too long after that, I introduced her to some of my other friends, changed her contact to “emergency override” so the phone would ring whenever she called, and that girl was locked in.

Over the span of the next year, she’d show me Colorado cities I’d never seen. She would hold my hand through some of the most harrowing moments of my time here. I would point out to her many times how many incredible things she had done to change her life and get here, and secretly hope she might start her own substack about it.

More than anything, I would never stop pointing out how we did indeed know when we knew, and how maybe that was simply something we should live by.

Everything Can Change Over Lunch

The two of us were sitting at lunch the other day at a restaurant that I have somehow never been to. The neighboring towns we live in are small. Claustrophobically small. If there is something here I haven’t heard of, it must be a bit of a miracle.

We sat at a booth-style wooden table. She was residing over her nachos while I picked apart a chicken pot pie, and comfortable silence blanketed the table for a moment. When we dived back into our usual yap, we talked about our upcoming Seattle trip, my job that I hate, old friends she had in college, etc. Until, really out of nowhere, I started rambling on about my desires to move to “the big city,” (which, for the sake of this story, I will simply refer to it as that to leave it non-descript).

Cierra and I had been discussing “the big city” from the confines of our “red town” for essentially as long as we knew each other, and I’d been considering it even further before that. There was always a mixture of optimism and an undertone that sounded a lot like “I’m not sure how either of us could afford it.”

I would always bring up how higher population density would mean a better dating scene for me, at least a little better. Our friends (that we collected over the year of knowing each other) went so far as to make it a running joke. While playing a “fill in the blank” style game, the question “Where’s Jessi’s soulmate?” was asked, and one of them hilariously responded, “I don’t know. Maybe somewhere with more than twelve f*cking people.” I’ve never heard anything more correct.

The pros of leaving and trying on the city far outweighed the cons, but Cierra and I both live alone, paying somewhere around 2,800 in rent combined, and that’s up in the middle of nowhere.

“I’d have to get on Facebook Marketplace and find a roommate,” I said. “I’m just nervous about trying to live with a stranger again.”

Cierra mumbled, “Yeahhhh, I’ve been thinking the same thing.”

If my ears could have physically perked up, they would have. Cierra had claimed many times since I’d known her that she would never entertain living with someone again, that she much preferred being on her own. In other words, this was news to me.

The conversation tepidly drifted. I made a joke, about us finding a few more people and living together in a big house, to test the water. She insisted becuase of Meli (her not-so-people-friendly dog who actually kinda loves me now), she really didn’t want it to be strangers again. I hesitated to ask anything too directly, but next thing you know, an hour had passed, and over two empty plates we asked: “Did we just decide to move to “the big city” together?”

We sure did.

A good half hour of the conversation was us laying everything out on that wooden table.

“When we inevitably piss each other off, how do we handle it?”

“I can be better about the way I do the dishes.”

“I forget to rotate my laundry all the time, too. I would just move it for you.”

“If I bring anyone over, I will obviously make sure they don’t touch Meli.”

Then, after it all, we both landed on a confident “I don’t see why not.”

Something that never would have happened if I hadn’t found her while swiping through an app or if I hadn’t been brave enough to start a chain of voice memos back and forth.

I felt an amount of weight drop off my shoulders. I finally had an avenue to escape my shitty job, the apartment with the horribly noisy neighbors, and the “twelve f*cking people” that lived here. I was going to be 27, living in a city full of cocktail bars, drag shows, book clubs, universities, libraries, book stores, and more, with my best friend and her chihuahua. I think people write these narratives into fiction books.

Sure, I have to spend the next 7 months enduring the things I don’t love, saving money for the deposit, and applying to grad programs. I’ll be consumed, just the same, by looking for new jobs and the apartment (or house if we’re lucky) we’ll live in together, knowing the goal makes the air feel a little less dense and unbearable.

I’m finding myself thinking about how living in a city will help me prepare myself to move to New York City one day, and how my rent is about to be so much cheaper that I could probably work the part-time barista job I secretly dreamed of. It just feels right.

I continue to think we were really onto something on that third, fourth, or fifth hangout (I can never quite remember). When you know, you know, and honestly, that’s the most beautiful part of knowing Cierra.

I have been growing out of my life quite a bit lately.

I have grown so far out of this life, in fact, that every ounce of my body aches from how poorly I fit into this space. My legs are curled up to my chest, and my lungs struggle immensely to expand to their full capacity. Every dark corner of my entrapment taunts me as the barriers hang just over my eyes. No part of me is untouched by what I am restricted by.

I think to myself, I want nothing more than to remember what it feels like to exhale. I reminisce on fresh air, the forest, the feeling of getting off a plane somewhere new, and a slow morning waking up whenever my body asks me to.

There are many people in my life who try to tell me that life is about making compromises. They explain to me how every job sucks and how we must simply trudge through our existence until we don’t have to anymore. There is an urgency in the way that they explain, as if they were hired to market this lifestyle to me. It always seemed very important to them that I believe them.

I don’t.

I was talking to my father the other night when he echoed a lot of this same sentiment to me. I told him, “I’m sorry, Dad, but I just can’t live that way.”

He made some kind of a humming sound as a form of “oh well” and told me, “Well, you’ve always gotten interesting jobs.” What he meant by that is “If you want to keep jumping until you figure it out, it seems like you might have better luck than I did.”

To me, it doesn’t feel like a choice. There is no “grin and bear it” option. I’m convinced that if I tried to resign myself to that outcome, my cells themselves would spontaneously decide I no longer exist. That just isn’t a viable path.

I know what I want, or maybe what I need rather. It looks a lot like…

• Traveling the World

I have always had this dream that I might end up in a line of work that would allow me to float around our planet a little bit. I desperately want to try every city on for size. I’d spend three months in New York City assimilating with the locals, two months in Chicago, four in San Francisco. Every place I’d go, I would immerse myself in what it meant to really live there before I moved on to the next. In between, I would return to my home base, wherever it is all my friends are, and make up for all the time I missed. Someday, I would even take my travels global, maybe finally applying for my passport.

• Furthering my Education

Something about me is very dedicated to having all the fancy degrees. I have dreams of diving headfirst into my work, covering myself in the knowledge that I so desperately seek. I wanted learning to feel like it belonged to me again. No more means to an end or pursuing the title just to get the job, just to suffer. First, it would be a Master’s degree, and then even a Ph.D. My pursuit would be relentless, and I would be an expert. They would have no choice but to respect the choices I had made, and if they didn’t, I simply wouldn’t care.

• Making Art & Performing

This is less of a dream or bucket list item and more of an ever-moving act. I am constantly thinking of, consuming, and living what it means to be an artist. I swear I must have been an artist the minute I exited the womb, as I cannot remember any other version of myself. In my head, 5 years from now, I’ve released albums, published books, performed in theatrical shows, danced, read a million books, and sang on as many stages as I could find. I feel the most myself when I am actively creating. No one can take that from me.

• Slowing Down

One of the biggest things I was hoping a 9-5 might bring me was a sense of routine and steadiness. Mine has not given me that luxury. I have sat myself down so many times thinking this will finally be when I can lower my ever-rising cortisol and focus on learning how to cook, going to the gym, creating a morning routine, or just being a bit kinder to myself. There is a very simple desire in me to just be able to breathe a little bit easier and to exist a little deeper inside of my own skin.

• Connecting

Something you will learn about me is I love nothing more than community. I hang on to people I enjoy, sometimes to my detriment, but usually just out of love. Speaking to my desire to travel, I have always wished that I might be able to meet people all over the place and tell the world their stories. There is nothing more special to me than that feeling you get when you’re making a new friend. The little light in your chest that flickers when someone feels safe enough to build a little closeness, and you can see it. Maybe it’s in a story about their childhood, a simple unclenching of the jaw, or a no longer forced “we just met and I don’t know how to talk to you” politeness. I love that feeling. I am not even sure if other people notice it, but I sink into the natural unfoldings of deciding “I adore you and want to keep you around.” There is also a very special place in my heart for meeting people and connecting them together. My friends are your friends. Take a breath and a seat. I want you to feel included, human, and yourself.

• Making Change

My entire life, I have had this grand notion that I am here to inspire and motivate others to be themselves. Sometimes that manifests in me holding a professor accountable for violating a peer's disability accommodations (something I’m particularly passionate about) or giving really long-winded pep talks to women on the internet who feel “too much” or “not enough.” Whatever it is I’m doing to encourage self-advocacy, I am always doing it somehow. I have your classic, neurodivergent, elevated sense of justice. I will never be able to stand unfair authority or “this is just how it is.” I will go to my grave arguing that things need to be different, and I will never stop believing that they can be. I told a co-worker today that I am “a nightmare.” If someone is wronging someone else, I will indeed fight for what I know I should. I explained that it tends to make the life of the person in power really annoying for a minute. She said to me, “You probably get a whole lot more out of life for things people might have just given up on. That’s how people walk all over me, honestly.” I smirked to myself and thought of every time I was called “difficult” for the same things. This is simply who I am.

At the end of the day, if my dreams mean 70k in student debt, changing jobs 300 times, or aggressively irritating the “just stick it out” people, I will still achieve them. I don’t feel as though I have a choice.

If I stay here in the coffin-sized box, I will suffocate. Everyone who has ever told me “this is just the way the world works” will be oh so comfortable, as I’m never there to rock their boat, and I will live the rest of my life half alive, only utilizing half the space in my lungs. That is simply not how it can be.

Everyone who needed me to come break them out of their box will suffocate with me, and who knows who my undying, unrelentless, borderline obnoxious audacity would save.

So, if you find yourself an ambassador of the status quo, consider me your number one enemy and expect to never stop hearing me in your head. If it is something I’m great at, it’s never shutting up.

I can’t

Three months ago, I moved into my first solo apartment. I wouldn’t have chosen the tiny town it’s in, the property management’s inability to communicate, or the neighbors downstairs who blast their TV until 12 am, but the rent was damn good.

On the outside, it’s the perfect two-bedroom apartment with everything a girl could need. Living in it, on the other hand, has felt kinda like trying to swallow the final bites of your mom’s burnt pot roast, hoping you won’t hurt her feelings.

In essence, I’m choking most of the time.

I choke on the idea that this is something I should, on paper, love, and when I look around me, all I see is what it’s put me through. I knew I was going to struggle with living alone. I am your classic extrovert. The older I get, the more I find myself recharging on a Friday night out or a three-hour yap session.

I was not exactly built to sit in this much silence. Don’t get me wrong, in last weekend’s silence, I spent an entire day finishing Where The Crawdads Sing, absolutely sailing through its pages, riding the tide the same way Kya did, and having the time of my life.

Still, I was missing the balance of having my family around me. All of my friends had entered fresh relationships around the time I got here. Everyone always says it won’t mean that anything changes. That simply is never true. They tell you you should make more friends, yet adding people to your life doesn't really make up for the grief of what it feels like you’ve lost. (FYI: I don’t blame them ever, just miss them some days)

It didn’t help that I was struggling with the idea that they had both been in multiple relationships over the five years I had been on my own. I will generally tell you I did that by choice. Most of the time, I think it’s true. The other 20%, though, was just me keeping myself from my desires for more. I felt nothing but joy for my friends, but in the same breath, it shone a light on what I had been doing to myself, a light I wasn’t expecting to burn so much.

Regardless, I never desired to be the stick-in-the-mud. Being a fifth wheel has brought me some of the best times I've ever had. On one of our “family dinner” days, where all five of us collect, I got a little too tipsy. All I could think about, in my way too inebriated for one cocktail state, was how I hoped they liked having me around, even though I often made a joke out of how I was showing up by myself.

Regardless of how much time my apartment or my circumstances made me spend alone, I found ways to make peace with it. I did my best to connect with myself. I was desperate to connect with myself, actually. When I moved in, I was so confident that, past my fears of bumps in the night, I would end up loving everything about the life I had just adopted. I would find the energy to stop filling my body with cortisol. I’d start going to the gym again, cooking for myself, and sleeping better.

Then I had to put in 5 maintenance requests and 4 noise complaints back-to-back. Calls to corporate and texts to friends who work for other properties under the same management company were using up most of my phone service. I recently emailed the district manager, telling him I felt like I was “living in hell” with how little sleep my neighbors were ensuring I got.

In response, he told me he would let me out of my contract. Was it supposed to be that easy? I guess dozens of videos of bass booming through the floor sent to my leasing office weren't exactly easy, but still. I was offered a unit transfer at the same monthly rent or a lease break with no fees.

Simple choice, right? Somehow no. I have no idea what I want to do becuase what if the apartment isn’t even the source of my misery?

Three months ago, I also started working in the non-profit marketing sphere. While I very much chose my job title, I wouldn’t have chosen the way the workplace culture has drowned me out, or how I feel when I pull into the parking lot some mornings. I spent many lunch breaks crying at my desk before I simply started numbing what I could not control.

I applied to other jobs. Nothing really stuck. I asked myself many questions.

“Am I just too neurodivergent for a full-time job?”

“Am I exhausted because this isn’t what I really wanted?”

“Would I be happier doing something in the arts, being a barista, or simply working anywhere else?”

I go into the office every day, trying simply to make the best of it. I focus on the fun dynamics with my coworkers and the goals I have set for myself. I realign myself with the mission and look for inspiration. I try my best to pat myself on the back. Sometimes I go home only half of myself, and I ask, what if the job isn’t even the source of my misery?

Life lately has felt like teeth-grinding, digging my heels in the dirt, and grasping the ladder rung while I hang from it. Some days I’m great. Most days, I’m simply quiet, trying to look inside of myself for what it is that really needs to change.

If I break my lease, move to the big city, and find a new job, would it be worth it?

What if I just did a simple in-complex unit transfer and found a local retail management job?

Maybe I am just not trying hard enough to be happy. Should I just stay put and twist my perspective, hoping not to break it with all the bending?

I could leave, move in with some girl off a Facebook marketplace ad, and go to grad school. Would that make me happy?

I have no idea.

I told my best friend that usually in the face of confusion, I can really soul-search and find that little voice in me, the one that knows all. It will tell me exactly what I need to do, and it will be convicted in it. Lately, I can’t hear anything. He told me that meant I wasn’t in my body and I needed to find a way to connect to myself.

I search for how I feel about any of the options in front of me, and that room within me is empty. I listen to the echo of my own endless questions, and nothing responds. There is part of me that wants to start all over again, and there is part of me that just wants to rest. Neither part is louder than the other. I can’t find a right answer or even an ache to pave my path. I have no idea where I am or where I went.

I have two weeks to make a decision about my apartment. So far, talking about it hasn’t made it better. My compass is still missing.

The jobs aren't returning my calls, and I am too emotionally exhausted most days to even imagine building my social circle.

I am writing, and I note that my inspiration to say something is still there.

I sometimes just wish someone would appear in front of me and tell me what I really want. I don’t usually have this much trouble deciding myself.

I have no ribbon to tie things into a moral or to sweeten the bitterness of what you’ve just read.

I hope I can give that to you soon. I just am not sure where it is myself.

“I had actively participated in every moment in the creation of this life. So why didn’t I see myself in any of it?”

It’s almost 10 pm, on a Monday night, in my tiny Colorado town. I just walked in the door, no more than 20 minutes ago. Work kept me late, as it tends to do at least once a month until this ungodly hour. I’m often working late, just not always this late.

To make it worse, when I’m clocked in until 9 pm, it tends to be sitting in a lecture in which my only option is to stare at the front of the room and white-knuckle the table in front of me. The overhead lights, which I hate more than anything, buzz in a way that only I seem to hear, driving me insane. Everything in the room is so white that it’s blinding, and every muscle in my body aches to move as if I had been sitting still for a decade. Sometimes it seems like I actually have been.

I get tired of the sitting silently. I get tired of the talking. I’m so tired of talking.

Outside of that lecture room, where I can only sit and listen, I talk a lot.

I talk about how much my job can chew away at me or how I want something else, something more. Sometimes I talk about the plans I’ve made, the confidence I have that I’m going to really make something of myself. Regardless of what it is, I really love to talk.

Then time passes. All my talking is forgotten. Even I struggle to remember what I promised myself, and everything around me looks the same. I spend a little time punishing myself, dragging through everything, and hoping something might be coming to save me.

I watch out the window, out onto the rocky mountain edge. Both nothing and everything is there. Past the mountains, farther west, is my hometown and my childhood bedroom. A reminder that one time I said something and I sure as hell meant it. I did more than mean it. I did more.

I did.

I think that’s what bothered me. Under all my talking was a will. A strong one. One that had been dampened by every idea I had conjured up about myself or being “right.”

Something that the Rocky Mountains tell me, in the midst of my staring and wishing, is that I should simply be messy. They themselves were only interesting because they were jagged, imperfect, and constantly forcing themselves through the earth. They were admired for their loud imperfection. They were, in a way, alive. Alive in a way I only dreamed of being before I had met them.

So what's the point of it all? What is it I am even here saying to you now?

Well, a body in motion stays in motion, and every night my body aches in stiffness and stillness. Why? Because I talk a whole lot more than I do. I plan a whole lot more than I move. I think it might prepare me, might make it perfect, but what single part of nature is perfect?

Go out, find it, and let me know.

I’ve spent the majority of my life, until now, working up to exactly where I am. Living in fear that I would simply never be able to handle a full-time job or successfully pay the rent was essentially a part of my personality. My parents emphasized very heavily growing up that I would need to scramble to create stability and start a retirement fund as soon as possible, as if this was the pinnacle of all human effort and existence (Joke’s on them, I still haven’t paid into a 401k).

My dad specifically loved to emphasize that I would lose my parents’ insurance coverage at 26. It was a daunting and always rapidly approaching deadline. I convinced myself I had until my 26th birthday to make my life happen, or I was simply doomed.

Neither of my parents has exceeded an associate’s degree or ever dived into chasing a dream. They settled. My mother spent my earliest years sleeping curled up next to a Grey Goose bottle while my father searched the internet for properties he had no intention of purchasing. They maintained jobs for 20+ years for the pay and drove the same commute every day. No hobbies, outside of my dad’s 10 pm TV karaoke sessions (that maybe made up for his refusal to commit to a community choir). A handful of friends lingered from their 20s, and their collective wallet was lined with plenty of money, and somehow, also plenty of debt.

Throughout my childhood, the air on our half-acre, California property grew heavier with the overgrown grass that swallowed the backyard playground and its sun-bleached slide. The desire to maintain the image had long passed. Nothing was enough because nothing was truly what they wanted. It was what they believed they should’ve wanted or maybe the best they thought they’d have. The only feeling I harbor when reminiscing on their autopilot lives is sympathy. I wish they could have wanted something enough to chase it.

What they feared became the ingrained keys to my safety and success. I was raised not to trust myself, to prepare for what I would not be able to surmount, so I wouldn’t get stuck. Here I am, 26 years old, with the health insurance and the apartment. Many years before my parents had them, might I add. Yet something very important is missing.

Me.

My mother texts me once a day now to ask for advice. She asks for recommendations on health routines, self-help books, and “ooos” and “awees” at how “strong” I always was. She apologizes for how she tried to control a much younger version of me out of fear that I was smarter than her. She apologizes so often, in so many different ways, that I am not sure she fully knows quite which iteration she really means.

My father told me on one of his first trips out to visit me at college that I had exceeded him in every way possible. He admitted to me that he never would have felt safe enough to move away from home and go to college becuase he felt he had no backup plan if things went south.

Backup plan…

“Dad", I thought, “I have spent the last 8 years facilitating my backup plan.”

The bachelor's degree in communications, the resume workshops, and the energy I poured into giving up my joy for the rent.

What he witnessed was my backup plan. It was all the things I was supposed to achieve before 26… like he’d told me, but it seemed like maybe he was just afraid for things to be any other way. I had taken a risk in his eyes, something he didn’t know how to teach me.

My parents witnessed me, at 9 years old, singing in voice lesson recitals, writing stories about made-up adventures, performing on the raised entryway like it was a stage, and filming myself simply talking to a camera. They witnessed me at 13 years old, fighting against anything that felt unjust and boldly claiming that I would not have to follow the traditional path. Exasperated, they pushed me to comply or come up with my plan. I continued to refuse. Things were simply going to work out for me. I was sure.

I couldn’t tell you when I stopped feeling that way. Tween me was really onto something. She had the gradiosity required to be the kind of artist who would simply never stop chasing her “big break.”

She was that “me” I felt I’d lost.

After enough exhaustion from authority figures regarding my desires to be different, I started to feel as though something must be wrong with the way that I was. Why was everyone so upset with how much space my ideas took up or my refusal to relinquish them?

Every few years, I wake up and realize how far I’ve deviated from what I wanted. Up until now, the desire to chase safety has still been winning. I had yet to taste the life I was told would protect me, so I kept marching down the path, and, unfortunately, I made it exactly where I had been aiming to go.

It’s as if I had been following the “prophecy,” an X on a map to a promise of something grand, but when I showed up, I found the place abandoned.

At the risk of cheapening the metaphor, I felt like Elphie when she uncovers the Wizard’s scheme or Andy Sachs when she realizes she was spending all her time trying to be good enough for a cutthroat fashion career she never even wanted. Not to mention every other strong female lead that I idolized a little too much for following her heart over her head.

I felt like a lot of things. More than anything, I felt like I had to finally take the reins.

I can’t exactly tell you what the next step is. I spend a lot of time thinking about diving back into a master’s program or building my own business. I, of course, never stop ideating songs and opportunities to perform. The world is once again mine to explore, as I’ve realized, it always should be.

When it comes down to it, nothing will wake you up more than achieving the backup plan before ever really diving into what you really care about.

The good news is

I’m just 26.

“All-American” Halftime Show

8:00 pm, Sunday night, the Super Bowl.

Cierra, my best friend, and I were driving back to my apartment as she explained to me the “All-American Halftime Show.” She told me all about how groups of conservative MAGA heads were turning off the Super Bowl during Bad Bunny’s performance to move over to a halftime show designed specifically to combat his. Our conversation spiraled into how sad it must be to be a man like that or to be a woman brainwashed by a man like that. I told her, “I would live my life never being touched by a man ever again, far before I would ever exist in that world,” regarding the incessant and ignorant ideas of the conservative party. She fervently agreed.

I briefly reminded her of a man who had tried to speak to me about immigration laws earlier that week. His profile (on the dating app he unfortunately found me on) had proclaimed his conservative and Christian beliefs. Both of which I unfortunately had missed before he had the chance to speak to me. I recounted how I had told him that surely, if he believes in Jesus (which I do not, at least not anymore, but that was beside the point), he should agree that innocent people do not deserve to die at the hands of ICE. He did not claim any agreement; instead, he shifted the conversation to abortion politics as I blocked him, exhausted with speaking to a brick wall.

Cierra and I circled back once again to how we simply could not imagine someone getting up to change the channel because Bad Bunny, an American, might I add, was getting in the way of their “All American” experience, or that they were simply so offended by his urging of love and his public detestation of violent deportation officials.

Benito Ocasio Backlash

Bad Bunny, otherwise known as Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio, began his Grammy acceptance speech last week with “Before I say thanks to God. I’m going to say Ice out…We’re not savage, we’re not animals. We’re not aliens. We are humans, and we are Americans.” He was met by a roar of applause in the room and a plethora of outrage online.

Benito is the first Latino male to perform at the Super Bowl and also the event’s first halftime show performed entirely in Spanish. This comes at a time in our political climate where Spanish is being used as a method of identification for ICE to locate and enact immense harm on those who speak it. So much so that Benito elected to exclude the fifty states from his recent tour in fear of inciting ICE raids upon his fan base. This is only one of the many traits ICE is using to injure and murder innocent human beings at the orders of their ruler and king. I’m sorry, I must have meant to say “president.”

As I’m writing this, Donald has decided to state that

“Nobody understands a word this guy is saying, and the dancing is disgusting, especially for young children that are watching from throughout the U.S., and all over the World. This “Show” is just a “slap in the face” to our Country”

Now, allow us to break this down.

Firstly, according to Census.gov, “Spanish was the most common non-English language spoken in U.S. homes (62%) in 2019 – 12 times greater than the next four most common languages.” Not to mention Puerto Rico itself is a part of the U.S., meaning every citizen of Puerto Rico, a Spanish-speaking, unincorporated territory of the United States, is also included in the words “our Country.” I am led to believe plenty of viewers understood him just fine.

Now, which part of Benito’s performance was a “slap in the face?” Was it his declaration that we should love each other, or was it when he said “God Bless America” on live television in front of millions of people? Or maybe it was his waving of the Puerto Rican flag, which I will again remind you, falls under the citizenship of the United States.

And “the children,” as he so states, what about them, Donald? What about the children being used as bait for their families, being abused in detention centers? Do we believe they find themselves concerned with Bad Bunny and his dancing? I’d presume not.

I ask rhetorically that he please enlighten me. Nothing in me understands how anyone could read the words of this decrepit, so-called politician and believe he has any idea what he is saying.

Now, with a breath, allow me to digress from my validly incited rage and return us to a world of factual reporting for a moment.

ICE Out

As I stated, Benito’s performance is underpinned by a time in which violence and harm at the hands of ICE agents has only cascaded.

A Guardian article titled Eight people have died in dealings with ICE so far in 2026 tells us, “The killings of the 37-year-old Minneapolis residents Alex Pretti and Renee Nicole Good by federal agents have sparked protests and outrage throughout the nation. Pretti and Good are just two people out of at least eight who have either been killed by federal agents or who have died while in Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) custody in 2026 so far.

The high-profile fatal shootings follow the deaths of at least 32 people in ICE custody in 2025 – the highest number since 2004.”

This violence has been forged and fostered by the promise of President Donald J. Trump to ensure that “violent illegal immigrants” are deported in mass numbers. The president makes repetitive statements, including “You have large numbers of terrorists coming in like we’ve never seen.” Interestingly, the data shows otherwise. What we are instead being presented is a dramatic rise in the detention of those with no former criminal background whatsoever.

I will leave you this graph, but you may explore more of these statistics yourself here.

Needless to say, the senseless violence instigated by the President of the United States has no true place and is rooted in nothing other than misplaced hatred. I struggle to see how this is not abundantly clear.

The Only Thing More Powerful Than Hate is Love

Benito Ocasio has angered many ignorant people this week. He has also shown immense courage in the face of threats and harassment. Beyond that, he has made history with his performance at this year’s Super Bowl, and he has done it in a time where that history desperately needs making. He should be incredibly proud.

History-making is not often seen in the moment it is happening, but I believe Benito understands the impact of his statement, “The Only Thing More Powerful Than Hate is Love.” In the face of unending vitriol, all Ocasio has tried to remind us is to fight with love in our hearts. While this may be harder than ever as we overflow with anger at the state of our country, it says so incredibly much.

Our president may hide in his office, tweeting out nonsense if he desires, but it is only further emphasized as nonsense when he is yelling at a man for speaking one of the country’s most used languages and blessing America. I believe that Benito understands exactly this, as he has chosen this approach carefully, and he’s doing a damn good job.

My conclusion is this: I cannot seem to wrap my head around chosen ignorance. Nor will I ever be able to understand the condemnation of loving thy neighbor by the same people who preach it as their gospel. I ask myself how many more people have to die for them to decide that critical analysis of one’s beliefs is important, and if one day they might pray to their God to ask him for forgiveness for the bloodshed their ignorance has produced.

Most of all, I naively hope we may all live to see them shake at the realization of their blood-stained fingers. Maybe then they will not wear red so proudly.

I used to be afraid of heights. When I was little, I would climb up a playground ladder just to call for my dad when I realized how high I had gotten. I hated a public pool diving board, and I was terrified of planes. An ascent meant a possible descent that I was not willing to risk. I struggled to trust that the choices I was making would prevent me from falling, and I feared what the consequences would be if I did.

I would elaborate, but it seems silly.

I’ve already spent the last five hours writing a memoir-style article about how I’ve spent my entire life dreaming of what I have now, and somewhere in those five hours, I realized I didn’t need to say all of that to you. I didn’t need to divulge every moment of my entire childhood to quantify the hole in my chest constantly filling itself with hope, grief, and fear all at once. Only for it to then empty and start all over again while I willed myself to do something.

Proof was not required for it to be meaningful. History was not necessary for you to know I too existed boldly and profoundly before I existed in front of you. You do not need to know what it took to get me to be willing to jump, just that I am.

I think sometimes I wish I could truly explain to someone what it was like to move through the experiences that shaped me. I want someone to understand how earth-shattering it is that I am setting up renters’ insurance for a two-bedroom apartment that is entirely mine. I want them to know that the fact that I am not absolutely panicking at the idea is the result of years of practiced, failed, and succeeded self-trust.

Maybe I could. I could finish the memoir article and present it to you, laid out on a platter, as edibly as possible. I fear you still won’t hear the birds in the backyard I grew up in. You won’t smell the West Coast ocean breeze or understand how the generally unpleasant stench of fish and seaweed meant so much to me.

I want to somehow explain how even the most memorable version of my childhood bedroom was just a well-decorated purgatory that I wanted, no, needed, to escape. That, on March 1st, when I stand in the empty living room of that two-bedroom apartment, the keys in my hand, something inside of me will know that I will never be the same again. I will never stop ruminating on how the space I then occupy is the same size as the home my parents bought at thirty years old, and how I am nearly the age they were when I was born.

I sense that I’m on a cliff’s edge. I should be anxious, but a layer of padded ocean sways and smiles below me, ready to float me back to shore when I have landed. I have come to love what it feels like to jump, so I will dive headfirst with little thought. The second empty bedroom will seemingly, almost magically, transform itself into a studio space that I used to tell the backyard birds about. I will stare out the window in the morning before I go to work, the record player will spin Fleetwood Mac, I will book flights to places I have never been, and I will have nothing but air to breathe.

No purgatory, middle-class bedroom painted blue by my mother before she fell in love with a wine bottle. Not an ounce of dread will keep me from spending time on the couch as if the common space is violent to me. This may not be the first time I’ve had that amount of freedom, per se, but this is the first time it is only mine. It is the destination I had crafted up a decade ago as a pipe dream I never meant to realize.

It feels like I stumbled into this role of “established, responsible, grounded adult.” I know very well that’s not the case. Where I’m standing on this metaphorical cliff’s edge has been predicated on years of pulling myself back up, climbing, and refusing to look down. I actually make art now, and it doesn’t just sit in an archive. I allow myself to have feelings and sit with them. If anything, I anticipate that I will finally find incredible ease in silence.

There are no words that I can write here that will explain what it feels like to feel stuck inside yourself and to suddenly not be. I can’t make you understand the ache or the oxygen that entered my lungs, and the first time I felt it.

What I can say is I am ready for the rest of my life and to feel the ease of the ocean on my skin. I will sway with it back and forth as I trust it to carry me. It will remind me that I know how to jump.

So I will

The Ache

Last semester, I took a Creative Non-Fiction writing class. I was starting to feel like I was losing touch with the thing that got me through most of my high school years (that being dumping all my thoughts onto a page), and I wanted to find it again. I wish I could have told you that I learned anything, but I mostly just fell very tired of critiquing paper after paper of my classmates’ work. All I really cared about was knowing that, if I was going to be writing, I was doing it “right.” I’ve been that way about most things. It’s, historically, impossible for me to start something until I’m infallible. I seemed to believe that if I just played my cards right, I could create a 0% risk of pain, embarrassment, or heartbreak. There was no trust between me and my ability to handle those sensations. If I became the best writer in the world before anyone had to read anything that I wrote, then I’d be ok. I suppose that’s what I thought at least. I’m not sure. It wasn’t just writing either. It was the dreams I had about music, musical theatre, photography, dance, creative marketing, love, and anything else that required me to take a risk and build something.

I will say, I had to face plenty of my fears of fallibility in that writing class. My teacher’s biggest complaint was that my writing was too lyrical, too abstract, or too poetic. Professor Mika was a master’s student, probably not much older than me. He explained to me that although my metaphors were beautiful, they weren’t quite grounded enough to understand. Supposedly, I was expecting my audience to know what was happening in my head. Mika and I went back and forth for quite a while, trying to decide why I instinctively took that approach every time, but it wasn’t really a mystery to me. I wasn’t ever thinking about the audience. In my head, when I wrote, absolutely no one was listening. It was simply a way to dig things out of myself, things I really hated to face straight on, hence their abstract quality.

Saying things plainly felt like one of those dreams where you somehow forget to put on pants before you leave the house, terrifying and way too vulnerable. I was scared of feeling, wanting, desiring, all of it. I couldn’t bear to read the old love poems I used to write, with my ache stained all over a page, and I wanted nothing to do with the feeling of falling in love again anyway. Hedonism was my antonym. I couldn’t accept the idea of expressing pleasure in anything. That meant someone could take it from me, and I needed to be untouchable. That was the only way.

What that meant for me was creating a mass amount of space between myself and anything that might spark something in me. It was hard for me to think about wanting something and having it taken from me, but obviously isolating myself from everything that made me feel a “want” really wasn’t great for the creative process. Even now, I’ve stopped in the middle of writing this who knows how many times to ask myself, “How do I say what it is I really want to say while also making sure I’m doing it well?”

Lately, that “ache” of want has been much louder. While I had attempted to continue to silence it, it stretched itself over everything that I had been so carefully concealing from myself. Like how if a year ago you would’ve asked me what my future looked like, I would’ve told you kids weren’t in the plan, and the idea of sharing a bed with a man again made me recoil. I would’ve given you some small picture of a safe, attainable career and brushed all my creative tendencies under the rug for you to find later. I only wanted what I felt confident I could have. Myself and I were always at odds. We weren’t friends.

We were such horrible friends in fact that I did pretty much everything in my power to do exactly the opposite of what she desired. I shivered at the word desire. Desire meant danger, and I was a control freak with zero room for error. She wanted to know what it was like to have a man touch her and it feel like something other than obligatory. Even more, she wanted to have a family, to work on her art again, to be kind to herself. I wouldn’t let her. Well, I used to not let her at least.

I’m not sure exactly when that all changed. Something in the events of the last month turned me entirely on my head. What I can tell you with certainty is that it’s not just a bed I think about sharing with a man somewhere in my future. My brain is tracing over the idea of the pause between words, someone holding my face in their hands, looking at me and actually seeing something. It’s not assigned to someone like it used to be. I am not bending over backwards to get someone to stay. I’m tired of that act. I simply want it to be mutual, gentle, pleasurable. Nothing in me even seems to care what he’s like or if he’s the “type” I tended to lean toward. All of those walls have crumbled at my feet. I’m not scared of being “too traditional,” and somehow I don’t even feel caged in by the word “wife” or “mother.” Although far off, they feel like a choice. One I’m allowed to make.

I’ve spent the last few years wretching at the idea of any of those things as if my body had just become accustomed to rejecting them. Now, it’s like I feel my ribs cracking open over and over again with every daydream I entertain about what I could actually allow myself. Jessi (redacted last name I don’t go by anymore) is open to the idea of being open. The “ache” won.

The Unraveling

About a month ago, two of my best friends and I were sitting across from each other in my tiny, shoebox living room. Trenton, who is also my roommate, sat at the small folding table we call our “dining table,” and I was sprawled out on our “far too massive for the size of the living room” couch next to Cierra as she quietly scrolled through her phone. I had asked Trenton if he might pull out his tarot cards and see if they wanted to tell me something about my love life.

Now, I am not often one to ask for a “love reading.” As we know, I had decided, after the last “situation”, or maybe even the one before that, that pleasure was just never worth the pain it caused me. I had convinced myself it wasn’t going to be a part of the life I had built, and I had smothered all my desire for the gentle, grounded man once conjured up in my imagination. While that nameless man once functioned as a north star, he was, then, hidden very deep in the ground. My desires were draped in the cloak that I might just be non-monogamous. I might just fall in love with everything, so I don’t have to face being left with nothing. Not to say that for some, that isn’t a very valid form of love and connection. It just, for me, was a bulletproof vest. I was very familiar with never being chosen, so I reached the point where I would simply not ask anyone to “choose,” I suppose.

Trenton shuffled through his deck, tossing cards across the plastic table. I knew when he looked at me with both intrigue and hesitation that he had something to say that I probably wasn’t ready to hear. He asked me, “When you imagine waking up in the morning, a handsome man rolling out of your bed to go make you breakfast… What does that feel like?” My leg started to bounce uncomfortably, and my shoulders tensed up. I had yet to even respond, and he already sensed where I was headed. He sighed, fully understanding that the concept made me want to turn myself inside out. I told him, “Well… it scares me, truthfully. It makes me incredibly uncomfortable.” Cierra peered from around her phone to interject.

“Girl,” as she always started her sentences addressing me.

“Have you ever been in a relationship where someone has done kind things for you, ya know, just to do them?” I paused, scanning the recesses of every instance in my memory that I could pull from. One would come to the front just for me to remember it really wasn’t all that “kind” and so on. I had clearly been doing this for far too long when she said

“So no?”

“Yeah… I guess not.” I let the words fall out of my mess of tangled memory, and Cierra and I both learned something about me in that moment. I had no idea what a relationship without a knife behind its back felt like. It made all the sense in the world that I wanted nothing to do with it. All I knew how to be was skeptical, and no one really blamed me.

That was one of the last times I tensed at the idea of being loved. I had Trenton shoot me random romantic hypotheticals to play out in my imagination, every once in a while, just to see how my body would react. I noticed that I started sinking into the idea of being made breakfast, or being held for something other than lust and gratification. Maybe I could be the kind of person who trusted someone, and that was really it. The beginning.

The Turning Point

Just a few weeks after my realization, I had a trip planned to go back home to California for Christmas. I won’t get into the details, but just know that place stopped being “home” the second I left to move out here to Colorado. It was grey and empty, minus a few rays of sunshine, which were the select members of my family that I miss when I leave. It was clear to me that I was pulled back once again by a misguided nostalgia just to be reminded why I never came back there. I always did that.

After moving my return flight up a day, I made it back home to Colorado just in time to decompress for the weekend. I knew very well that after this weekend hiding away in my room was over, it would be time to re-enter the “real” world. I had jobs to apply for, apartments to tour, people to see before they left town, and this newfound “openness” I needed to explore. I wasn’t as bothered by the California-shaped hole in my chest as I had been after previous trips. I was just truly so grateful for what I was surrounded by here instead.

In my new pursuit of my desires, I told myself it was time to try to make more than the minimum wage I had been scraping by on. The idea of leaving my current job and all of its predictability loomed over me, and I ignored it. I had to ignore it. If I were truly going to follow that ache for more It wasn’t just going to be about my love life. It was everything. My newfound hopefulness was spreading through me fast. Much faster than I was prepared for, but that couldn’t matter right then. I needed to jump. There was no time to process or hesitate. I applied for one position, only one. I told myself I would take my time and honor myself by only pursuing things that felt truly right for me. To my surprise, just a few days later, they reached out, and before I could think or hesitate, I had an interview for the next Friday.

When I rolled out of bed that Friday morning, I was violently nauseous. I quietly tiptoed down the hallway to then end up pacing around the kitchen, trying to figure out what was making me so ill. Quickly, I realized I hadn’t eaten since lunch yesterday. The day had already been a lot of “new.” I was up, or kept up, you could say, until 5 am the night (or morning, I guess) before, exploring parts of my “openness” in details I don’t think I can share with a Substack article. Needless to say, I was evolving, both shaken and a little proud of myself as I shoved a peanut butter tortilla and a Dum Dum in my mouth, trying to bring my blood sugar back up to equilibrium.

Even then, with a few hours to spare until I had to be sitting at that conference table, I didn’t think much about what I was going to say or how I was going to say it. I simply took myself back to bed to try to get maybe an ounce more rest. That did not happen, but you can’t blame a girl for trying. It turned out, I couldn’t sit still for a single extra second.

After running off for a quick cafe debrief with Cierra, I found myself standing in the office parking lot with quickly scrawled notes that I knew I wouldn’t reference in the interview anyway. It was really just like a safety blanket to have them there. I know I stepped up to the door, pulled it open, and gently stepped into the waiting room. I also know I spent an hour in there talking about my passions and yapping as if my life depended on it. They emphasized how my role would require creativity, ideating, and networking. I assured them I would be ecstatic. As I got in my car to leave, what I really didn’t know was how well they received it. They were polite, funny, and personable even. One of them had told me she was newly from Texas, and the other had been working with the organization for years now. They were both lovely regardless.

I drove out of the lot feeling in my gut that something had just changed, but I still wasn’t sure it had anything to do with the stunning, yet cozy, office building I just occupied for the last hour. I had things to do (as usual) and places to be. Trenton’s birthday dinner was that night, and I was not about to miss it. There was no time to process whether or not they had liked me or even the reasons I had been up until 5 am the night before (although I sure did want to recount that). I just had to keep moving.

By the time I got back home, I tossed on a much less professional outfit and sent off a quick “Thank you for your time! I am incredibly enthusiastic about the role” email, before I hopped in the car and promised to put the job market thoughts away for the night.

Trenton’s parents’ house was as lively as ever, always hosting a dozen aunts, uncles, and cousins for any family event. My roommate and best friend was notorious for making his family adopt his friends, and they never seemed to mind. Cierra sat to my right, and Trenton to hers, and somewhere in the chaos, they pulled out one of those “most likely to” games. We always had a little bit too much fun making fun of each other via the prompts. Cierra and I always referred to Trenton for advice on who to choose so that it would be his fault if someone we barely knew was offended. How am I supposed to pull a “who’s most likely to be a stripper” card and confidently give it to his cousin myself?

This went on for hours, but when there was finally a natural pause for a snack between rounds, I decided to grab my phone. Nothing that had happened that entire day had prepped me for the subject line I was about to read on my lock screen.

“Employment Offer”

I could feel my heartbeat in my hands. Trenton immediately saw my face fall in shock.

“Jess? You ok?”

His voice came through as the only thing my brain could actually hear in an otherwise blur of tunnel vision while the rest of his family chatted away with each other.

“I got it.”

Cierra locked in on the light emitting from my phone as I scrambled to open the email, reading it over my shoulder.

“You have to take it.”

They might as well have said it in tandem with how the two of them echoed each other. I assumed, like any other interview, it would be a rejection. How could it be possible that the interview I prepped for the least was for MY job, THE job? I was speaking from the heart on 4 hours of sleep. I was nothing but fallible in front of those women.

My life flashed before my eyes. Everything I had worked up to my last 7 years of schooling was laid out in the offer letter. Generous hourly, a three-digit number of PTO, wellness time, comprehensive medical, and more. The position involved making a massive impact in my community and included every aspect of a job I used to dream of being able to perform. I had done it. After what, quite literally, may have been my entire life up until that moment, I had made it somewhere.

I couldn’t think. I could barely read.

As I’m writing this, I’m sitting at my desk finishing out the last day of my two-week notice. I start my dream job on Monday. I just got word that my application has been accepted for a charming, newly built, 2-bed 2-bath apartment that my new income can somehow magically support me living in alone. Surprisingly, I even submitted volunteer inquiries to just about any local theatre I could think of to quell my artistic ache. I’ve changed. Thank god I’ve changed.

I have spent a whole lot of time tearing up and staring at the ceiling, thinking of 200 different iterations of myself who felt stuck, and all I can say out loud is…

“I guess you could say I had quite a month.”

…and god is that an understatement.

I have this horrible tendency that seems to be so deeply etched into my DNA, of putting art off until I’m ready to perfect it. I will pace my room, scroll my phone, and mindlessly distract myself from the fact that I exist until I have spent hours never beginning. Pages stay blank, guitars stay propped up in the corner, and although I’m alive and breathing, that reality permeates me as more of a duty than a feeling.

I feel the most alive when I’m making something. A poem, a song, a well-researched paper on something I give a f*ck about, for lack of more eloquent words. It doesn’t really matter what it is. What matters is if it means something. Yet because of this meaning I have so graciously assigned it, I have also torn myself away from it. The pressure to be the best writer, musician, woman, public figure, all of it. It all makes me feel as though I rather curl up in that corner I lay my guitar in and hide.

I had convinced myself to a degree that if I hid well enough, if I numbed my brain and found ways to even momentarily exit my body, that I didn’t have to face what I wasn’t living up to for myself. I didn’t have to face myself at all, really. I had learned by every force of nature and beyond, that my body, inside of myself, was the least safe place I could be because there I would have to see what I really cared about.

I loved to instead look forward to this perfect, future version of myself. Surely she would write that book, take that writing class, release that album, and tour the country. She would know exactly how to do it, even though I never fostered it in her. Right? I saw her in a beautiful office she paid for with her self-employment income. I imagined fresh flowers always waiting for her and New York City cafes she would write at whenever she desired. Yet the thought of losing her was so unbearable that I could never entertain the idea of even beginning to try to create her. I think I just hoped she would materialize one day.

Now, truly, I could attribute it to so many things beyond the perfectionism behind what I loved, but that wouldn’t be what really mattered to me. What mattered to me was finding a way to fall in love with beginning, to be ok with messy and, god forbid, imperfect art. Maybe imperfect existing if we really got down to it.

What would it mean to wake up in the morning and think about the idea of creating a song without my stomach tying itself into knots about how I don’t know how to do it “right?” What might it feel like to pour my thoughts onto paper without feeling ashamed of the fact that, truly, I’m pretty sure I don’t know all the places commas are supposed to go in a sentence? (Does it maybe feel like this?) What would it mean to do what I love without the dark cloud of perfectionist pressure looming over me?

Maybe it would create the woman I loved within myself. Hopefully, someday I’d find myself sitting in that home office surrounded by fresh flowers and filled loyalty punch cards for the local cafes I frequented. Just maybe I’d find myself on tour singing to people who cared about the art I made just as much as I did.

If I don’t learn how to love imperfection, I don’t think I’ll ever know. I don’t think I’ll ever get to meet that girl, and that is more terrifying than the idea that I might lose her in the process of being imperfect. At least then I tried.

I think this looks a lot like trying, and I know it looks a lot like being imperfect, human, even.

Subscribe now