Lucky

I am lucky enough to be one of those people where, somedays, going to work is all it takes to make everything better. Give me a baby and some sunshine and I am on my way to a better place. 

Alone

I am sitting in my living room, alone. Until Saturday, I am back to living here with only one other roommate. And when the roommate moves in, who knows? I don't really know her. I don't really know my current roommate either; Jen works more than I do (I know, crazy) so I never see her.
Chelsea is gone which means no comforting sounds of someone in the kitchen when I wake up, no lights on when I come home. No one to help me eat the big pot of pasta I made for lunches last night, no one to curl up on the couch with and watch Game of Thrones. No one to check my outfits and make sure I don't leave the house looking ridiculous, no one to belt Carrie Underwood with me in the kitchen.
I was lucky to have a roommate who was also my friend, but now I feel doubly lonely. I guess this is the time to put on my big girl panties, look lonely in the face and say, "Hi there. I'm Olivia. I'm thinking you might be around for a while, so please come in. Make yourself at home."

The Southern Cross

While taking a morning drive up to North Portland today I heard Southern Cross on the radio. It felt wonderful to just turn it up and sing out with the windows down. I merged on I-5 and wanted to just keep heading north: out of Portland, out of here, on to somewhere new.

When I was driving to the theater today a fellow driver flagged me down to tell me one of my back tires was flat. I pulled over, hummed and hawwed and (*cringe*) made the decision to drive the rest of the way to work, so as not to be late. I did my pre-set quickly, filled up my water bottle, and went out to go change the flat in the sunshine. It was really soothing to do the physical work, to empty my mind and get my hands dirty. My director arrived as I was putting the jack away and stood there with her mouth open. "Did you just change your tire?" Yep. In less than twenty minutes too, so I could wash up and open house.

It felt good to sing one of my Mom's favorite songs, it felt good to change the tire by myself and be proud that I knew how. Today we close My Children! My Africa! and that feels good too. 

We cheated and we lied and tested./ We never failed to fail, it was the easiest thing to do./ You will survive being bested, / somebody fine will come along/ and make me forget about loving you/ at the Southern Cross.

Swimmingly

I had a dream last night that I only remembered when I hit the water this morning: my first dream about swimming.

In my dream two of my close friends were amalgamated into one woman. I have my theories about why this happened, but suffice to say that this person was like a holographic image: look at her one way and she is person A, look again and she is person B.

The dream begins when my director, my friend, and I all decide we want to exercise together, which is something I never do in real life (exercise with other people). My director and my friend wanted to go for a walk and I wanted to go swimming so we compromised*: we find a pool that is only three feet deep along its whole length so they can walk down a lane together and I can swim in the lane next to them. We start out and I try to keep pace with them, which is silly because even when I'm right next to them I still can't join their conversation. They are obviously having a great time though, laughing and smiling. I can see this but I cannot participate. I eventually give up trying and just focus on swimming. 

After I swim for a while I notice that my back is cold. Then my shoulders, then the back of arms. All of a sudden I raise my head up and realize the pool is being drained of water. There is less than 6 inches left and I am laying on the floor, alone. Everyone else, including my friends, have left and I am covered in scratches and blood from trying to swim against the pool floor. The room is dim and I make my way to the stairs, cold and wet. That's when I see these rows and rows of small children in white robes, carrying candle lit lanterns. They're marching alongside the now empty pool, lead by an adult. The adult is gesturing madly to me to get away, out of the way, out of the room. It is obvious that I have stumbled upon a sacred or secret ceremony and am utterly unwelcome. I dash into the changing room and struggle with the lock on my locker. I can hear the procession following me and I try to gather all my things, shivering and scared and confused. I drop things, of course, and barely make it out before the children reach me. When I get to my car it is dark outside and colder still. I wrap myself in my towel and then check my phone.

Somehow, my phone is able to see where my two friends are. I can see them as if I am outside the window of The Apple Barn, a store that is outside Bennington in real life. In my dream it is a restaurant and my friend and director sit at a booth, waiting for their food. The lighting is warm and cozy and they are having a great time. I see my friend's phone buzz and know its a text from me. She starts to respond and I am suddenly in the store part of The Apple Barn, still dripping wet. I have asked where she is, why she left me in the pool all alone. She responds with "why?": essentially, "why ask me that? Why does it matter?"

That is all I can remember. A couple things have occured to me while I wrote this dream out. Here are two of them:

First, I remembered a scene from America's Sweethearts. In the movie Julia Roberts has recently lost 60lbs and at one point she gets in a fight with her superstar sister, Catherine Zeta Jones. It is the first time her character has ever stood up for herself to her sister. After Julia Roberts has left the room, Catherine Zeta Jones turns to John Cusack and says, "She was so much more fun when she was fat." 

I remembered this scene because I think that is something I am afraid of. My therapist brought this phenomenon up with me this week as well, asking me if maybe some of the conflict in my life stems from that: stems from the fact that image of myself is changing and consequently the role I play for the world is changing. I told a story in a previous blog post where I compared myself to Mrs. Potts from The Beauty and the Beast and felt bad in that comparison because I cast myself in the undesirable, warm, motherly role. My therapist asked me if maybe my friends weren't ready to lose their Mrs. Potts. I think that this dream had a lot to do with that fear, my fear that because I am not the person my friends first liked, they won't continue to like me. That's how the scene from American Sweethearts came up for me. Honestly, I think I would die if anyone ever said that about me: "She was so much more fun when she was fat."

The second thing that occurred to me was when I was writing about The Apple Barn. I remembered the tarot card that is about being excluded and shut out in the cold. I think it's the five of pentacles? It depicts two beggars in the snow outside a church's stained glass window, which glows from the heat inside. I don't have a lot of insight about this thought yet, but that my dream had a lot of the feeling that is in that card.

5/25/12: I looked it up. It is the five of pentacles.

So. This has become a very long blog post. I've been mulling over this dream all day and I guess I had a lot of thoughts about it. I am nervous to post this because I have a lot of friends who read this blog and I feel like I am essentially saying, "I'm afraid you don't like me anymore. Tell me you like me?" and that is not what I'm trying to do. I'm trying to parse out what is in my head and what is in my heart. I guess I want to put a disclaimer on this post, in case reading it has made you uncomfortable. Here it is: I'm sorry you're uncomfortable. I'm uncomfortable too. I don't know a lot of things right now but I do know that I love you, a lot. So much that I get scared. And being scared makes me anxious, and sensitive, and hard to be around I think. So I'm sorry if I am hard to be around. I hope you understand where this is coming from. I hope you'll stay.

*Fish, Mona.

One Who Loved the Pilgrim Soul in (Her)

I saw an older couple in the audience of My Children! My Africa! tonight who were just sitting and chatting and waiting for the show to start. The reason I noticed them is because, as they were talking and he was gesticulating and she was smiling, she had one hand on the back of his head: she was softly, absentmindedly stroking his hair. They never looked my way and I never saw their faces. I will never know their names. They have no idea I even saw them. But watching her run his hair through her fingers broke my heart. 

I hope that, someday, when I am old and gray (and full of sleep), there is a man in my life who will take me to plays and let me run my fingers through his hair.

Drawing

The woman who writes/illustrates for the blog Hyperbole and a Half recently put up a very brave and honest post about depression. It's been floating around the internet for the last week or two, so you've probably already seen it but in case you haven't, here is the link: http://hyperboleandahalf.blogspot.com/2013/05/depression-part-two.html

I've been thinking about this post a lot ever since I read it and after a couple intense conversations this week, I decided to try my hand at drawing a bit of my feelings. I'm not an artist, have never been an artist, will never be an artist. I think that this image would actually be a lot more successful if I'd had scissors, glue, and thirty magazines and been able to collage it, but the baby was napping and all I had was a notebook and pen.

The picture depicts a metaphor my mother and I have been throwing around for the last ten months. My mom says that the weight that I carried, and continue to carry, acted as walls that I put up to protect myself from the world. When I first started on this process/journey/diet/whatever last August she warned me that it was not going to be easy to take these walls down. And she was, as usual, incredibly and painfully right. Each wall has been made of a cement mixed out of my worst fears, deepest insecurities, scariest thoughts, most heart-breaking anxieties. Taking them down has required me to melt this cement with heat and sunlight and false bravado, a belief that the longer I stare at it, the more likely it is to go away.

Two of my walls are down now and the world outside my personal bomb shelter is a scary one. I keep chipping away at my third wall but I'm also looking over my shoulder at the dark forest all around. There are predators out there and right now I have nowhere to hide. I can put my remaining walls at my back if I need to, but that doesn't feel particularly safe either.

I hope that someday, this metaphor will shift and the world outside will be something welcoming and beautiful. I hope that one day I'll throw away the last few bricks and stand up into sunshine, and feel glad that these walls are no more. Right now it's like I've traded stale, trapped air for arctic wind: I can breathe better but it hurts a lot to do so.

So... here is the picture I drew about that.

Good News

I managed to sleep through the night last night - first time for a week. If I had anxiety dreams, I don't remember them, so ha.

Also, I've found my first Summer Jam of 2013.

Anxious

I keep having the same anxiety dream over and over, which eventually wakes me up and when I fall back asleep it happens again. 

I am wandering around the bar and lobby areas of Theatre Theatre, milling with all the patrons during intermission. I do this for a while as I get more and more nervous about something I can't quite name. Then it hits me: I'm stage managing this show. I have an intermission re-set to do, calls to give, it is MY job to end this intermission. Instead I've just been wandering and this intermission has now gone on for at least 40 min. I'm mortified and begin running around, looking for my director, my house manager, anyone to help me fix this. But no one does, because it is all my fault. 

Night Off/Morning Off

I had a night off on Monday, which was wonderful and I did nothing but laugh and drink and walk around barefoot.
I had a morning off this morning, where I slept for nine whole hours, took a leisurely shower, ate my breakfast sitting in the couch, and caught up with a far away friend.

Now the baby is napping and has been napping for two hours. She's really marathoning this one and I got a lot of my own work done, in addition to the family's dishes and sweeping their kitchen/living room. I have more work I could do, but I wanted to write about a few things instead.

A blog version of gush-gush.

Legs
Or, as Australians call them, pins.  We have them, there, at the bottom of our torsos. I've been wearing a lot of dresses without leggings recently and part of that is because it's so summery outside but most of it is because I think I'm starting to like my legs. They're kind of cute, in a leg way.

Jobs
*Whew* Okay, I just wrote that header and immediately wanted to delete it.
Yeah, okay, this is too nerve racking. Never mind, next!

Hikes
I think I am going to go on one this weekend. It was even my idea to do so. I very well might live to regret this.

Baby Bjorn
It's my new favorite thing, walking around with the baby strapped to me. Sunshine, Hawthorne, and my baby bunny in a front pack.

Santa Cruz
I miss it. A lot. Last night one of my actors asked me where I was from and then immediately said, "Shit, man. I wish they had a theater scene there. I would be down there so fast and fuck the rest of the world. I would never leave." Well, yeah, Bobby. Duh.

Evelyn
Just woke up! Gotta go.

Forgotten

I am sitting in the last day of tech for My Children! My Africa! and I just realized: I forgot to write tech blogs. I do it every time and yet this weekend - it did not even occur to me. Not even a blip on the mental radar. I originally opened this post to write about a quote from my show and then it hit me.
What does it mean that I forgot? What does it say about my regular tech anxiety? Or about my adherence to patterns? Because, of course, it can't be as simple as "I forgot." Not for this lady.

The quote I wanted to include was from a monologue in the second act, when one of the characters is talking about the journeys he takes by reading. He describes the places his books take him and he says: "I can stand in the banks of those great rivers, look up at the majesty of all the mountains, whenever I want to. It is a journey I have made many times. Whenever my spirit was low and I sat alone in my room, I said to myself: Walk, Anela! Walk!"

Lately, when I need to remind myself to keep going I take a deep breath and think, "Walk, Anela! Walk!"

Somedays

... the Universe gives you a chance to sit in the sun, drink a Queen's Iced Tea from Stumptown, and avoid the big questions that have been following you around.
"You'll decide at some point," the Universe seems to say. "Today, you should just wear your new sunglasses and work on kicking this cold."
Done and done, big U.