Yesterday morning I watched a video of a couple venturing boldly into the wilds of Patagonia toting backpacks and trailed by the voice of Don Quixote. Because my wanderlust has been fiercely rattling its little cage, the brain hamsters decided this was a fine time to make me feel like a failure of a human for not owning a backpack or having a nice Spanish man to narrate my life.

Long story short, I got really upset. Since I’m a thought-based life form, my usual plan is to stifle upset and mull fruitlessly. For some reason, fruitless mulling never does me much good. So, in what I’ve decided to call a major step forward in the world of feeling your feelings, I let myself get really upset. Sometimes crying on a Wednesday morning when you should be doing your work really is an improvement.

When I got to Nicole’s, she inquired about the suspicious redness of my nose. I had to flail for a few minutes before I could get a handle on what the hell was going through my head. Because Nicole is a genius at sifting through the Flotsam of Crazy, she asked two very helpful questions: “What do you want your life to be? What would help you get there?”

Turns out, I already knew exactly what I needed. It had been floating around my head like wrackspurts for months. I need to have more fun. There are Fun Things I’ve been meaning to do, but haven’t taken any steps toward because More Important Things kept taking precedence. Guess what? When you spend a morning crying about something, it officially becomes the Most Important Thing.

(I mean, yeah. I was crying about not having enough fun. I fully recognize and appreciate my very first-world problems. Thanks, first world! You’re pretty swell.)

So I scheduled a Fun Thing for this weekend. I scheduled a more involved Fun Thing for March. I’ve committed to do a Big Fun Thing, a Fun Thing I Have Been Pondering For a Long Damn Time, in April. I spent half an hour emailing people to coerce them into my plans, and then I felt better. Peaceful. Calm. Like the brain hamsters were snoozing happily in the back seat and all was right with the world again.

Realization That I Should Have Had a Long Damn Time Ago

Feelings have a purpose.

Another Realization I Should Have Had a Long Damn Time Ago. Or Not. Because These Things Appear At Their Own Pace and Trying To Rush Them Never Works.

Action toward that purpose is very soothing.

Identify your feelings, figure out where they’re pointing you, head in that direction – and you feel better. Almost immediately.

Motion is fun. I was concerned for a long time about taking the wrong motion, but there’s no such thing. Sometimes you just have to get up and start swinging wildly at the first pinata you find. Maybe you’ll bash at it for awhile until you decide this is someone else’s pinata and move on or maybe you’ll get lucky and score a few mini-Snickers bars and a turquoise plastic dinosaur.

The idea that all my feelings exist for a reason still feels revolutionary to me. I really thought their sole purpose in life was to make me miserable. But, no. They just want to help. They want to direct me toward the action I need to take to feel better.

So fun things are afoot. Now when I watch the video, I just feel really happy. Excited. Because my own journey has been set in motion again. I like my story a whole lot better when I’m moving toward it.

a story for tomorrow. from gnarly bay productions, Inc. on Vimeo.

The first time I passed Grand View Avenue when I moved to LA, I thought, “Okay, sure. Whatever, soulless boulevard.”

Today I actually walked down Grand View Avenue and discovered that a mere five minutes from my house is a spot where if you turn to the east you can see all the way to the skyscrapers of downtown and the San Gabriel mountains beyond. If you turn to the west, you can see the sea shining in the sun.

Fine then, sign. Don’t let me be cynical.

Aside from my five-year relationship, I’ve been more or less single my entire life. Yes, “more or less” covers a whole lot of ground – from six month relationships to two years of yearning to the one with all the sex in all the ridiculous places. Oh, mid-twenties. I miss you. Now it’s all, “Sure, the forest floor is nice. The bears aren’t that close. But you know what’s nicer? A BED.”

For all that it makes me cranky sometimes, my more-or-less perpetual singledom has been invaluable. It’s helped me understand that everything that happens in my life is mine. My experience, my responsibility. When you’re in a relationship with someone, it’s easy to fall into the trap of thinking “Well, if he didn’t do this, then I wouldn’t do that.”

Dear Self: Unless he’s chasing you with an axe and you’re stealing a car to get away, THIS IS ALMOST NEVER TRUE.

So I’ve had to relax into the idea that it’s all me. My feelings, my thoughts, my actions and reactions, my decision about the kind of love I want.

Here’s That Secret, The One I’m Making Another Color Because Nothing Says You’re Serious Like Jaunty Orange:

It’s About Being Loving. Not Being Loved.

Honestly, this makes me a little crabby. Frankly, I’d prefer to be adored. Coddled. Doted upon. Maybe fanned with palm fronds.*

* Not really. Love and partnership and having someone to do found object puppetry with in the grocery store totally trump palm fronds. That said, I wouldn’t mind having someone to crack my back on demand. There’s only so much you can do with a chair, especially in public.

A lot of my…stuff (for lack of a better word) (hi, I’m a writer!) has come from wanting to feel loved. I mean, don’t we all? We all want to be loved. We all want to be thought of as smart and successful and amazing and intensely adorable. But, in my experience, wanting to feel loved – and brilliant and hot and desired – just creates a sucking vacuum of need. A black hole of hubris.

Nobody wears Black Hole of Hubris well. Plus, it’s exhausting when all the love just gets sucked in and is never seen again. Sorry, ex-boyfriends!

So, hey. Trying not to do that. Because I want people to like me.

Wait. Shit.

See? This is hard.

But I want to follow my heart, not my ego. The ego is louder, but that doesn’t mean I have to listen to it. For me, the best way to step back from the obsessive cycle of affirmation craving is to be loving. Not loved. Same word, different tense,* very different effect.

*Because I’m a word geek who just thought about tense, I spent a solid minute laughing about how I want Future Perfect, feel stuck in Imperfect, when I should really just be Present. Grammar jokes for overly-contemplative hippie girls with vaguely Buddhist leanings! Haaaaa. I’m going to be snorting about this all day. No, seriously, you guys. All day.

More Love, Less Bullshit

I want to create love, rather than sitting around and letting my rabid little ego hijack my space. If I want a hug, give a hug. If I want to be told in poetic language how awesome I am, go write an ode to someone else. If I want to feel love, tell someone I love them.

If I want my back cracked, too damn bad. No surprise amateur chiropracty allowed.

Whatever you want, do it for someone else. Be loving, not loved. Muttering this wildly under my breath is the best thing I do to create a perspective shift. It picks up the brain hamsters and gently places them elsewhere. It refocuses me on others, instead of the graspy want-want-want trap that I swan dive into sometimes. It feels better. It’s simpler than my ego wants to make it. Love breeds more love.

A few days ago, I broke the handle on my car door. Don’t ask me how, these things just seem to happen. Snap. Now every time I want to go somewhere, I have to climb in on the passenger side and clamber over to the driver seat, which is noticeably awkward when I’m wearing a skirt or a date walks me to my car or I park next to the restaurant on Abbot Kinney with sidewalk tables and lots of blasé shiny people.

Now I’m wondering if I should get the door fixed or just buy a new car. What? Buying a new car is an eminently reasonable, if fiscally irresponsible, solution. This plan didn’t occur to me when my transmission busted, by the way. Or when someone smashed into me and totaled poor Suzi the Suzuki. The insurance company didn’t realize that all she needed was a little love and a lot of life support. Luckily, I’m a very persuasive automotive advocate. Until my car gets the equivalent of a hangnail. Then I contemplate sending her to the slaughterhouse.

But I’ve had Suzi for eleven years now, so I guess I couldn’t be accused of flagrant car purchasing were I to consider putting her and her busted door handle out to pasture. Not that I’m morally opposed to flagrant car purchasing, you understand. Everyone has their thing. If that’s yours, you have my blessing. Purchase flagrantly away! Mazel tov!

The Moral Imperative of Working For Yourself and Living Ten Minutes from the Beach

For the past few days, my innards have felt like beef carpaccio. Raw and tender, like someone has been beating me enthusiastically with a wooden mallet. Nothing to worry about. Nothing even terribly unusual. I just have a…rich emotional landscape. This week’s landscape featured lots of tears and wild arm flailing as I almost fell off the treadmill because I closed my eyes for two damn seconds to feel a feeling before the reality of the present moment reasserted itself in an abrupt but not permanently injurious* manner.

* Injurious absolutely does not seem like a real word. But it is. Don’t worry, I looked it up. I often look up words because I’m convinced they’re not real words, that my brain created them to fill a paragraph hole in an efficient but inaccurate way. I haven’t invented nearly as much of the dictionary as I seem to think.

Anyway

When Nicole and I decided to stop working early to obey our convenient moral imperative as self-employed LA-dwellers to get the hell out of the house and enjoy the February sunshine, she strode off to ravenously absorb Twilight and I drove to the beach.

On Taking a Break, Especially If That Break Can Be Taken Next To The Pacific

If you give yourself permission to step away for an hour or two, your brain calms down. Sitting on the sand in the sun gives you space to remember that just because you feel like the emotional equivalent of an abused pink appetizer doesn’t mean you’re doing it wrong. It may even mean that you’re doing it right.

Then you get to feel warm and peaceful and happier than you have in days. As a bonus, no one flinches when you accidentally flash them because you’re wearing a sundress and are required by life to do weird things to reach the steering wheel.

The beach tells me I’m doing it right.

Thanks, beach.

My parents almost named me Sunshine.

Hippies the way only East Coasters who moved to San Francisco in the early ’70s could be, my parents meditated on roofs, toured the country in a renovated bread truck, ate tofu pudding, grew a lot of hair, did things with crystals that I still don’t understand, adopted a stray mutt and named it Freedom, and eventually pondered naming their first child after the stuff that comes off the star around which our entire solar system revolves.

Which, come to think of it, might have worked for me. HI, I AM THE CENTER OF THE UNIVERSE. THANKS FOR NOTICING.

As you may have cleverly surmised from my header, they didn’t. Because what if I…wasn’t? As cheerful as the name implies, that is. I know they worried about this. Few other names come with such specific expectations of good nature. What if I was ornery? Angry? Tinged with ennui? Draped in a blanket of deep melancholy? What if I asked for smelling salts and a fainting couch for my fourteenth birthday? There’s a lot of misfire potential in christening a child Sunshine.

As it happens, calling me Sunshine wouldn’t have been as much of a lie as, say, Grace or Chastity. But this is not something a parent can know until long after the birth certificate needs signing.

I consider myself a happy person. Except when I’m not. Because I’ve been all those things: angry, ornery, marinated in ennui and melancholy. It wouldn’t be a huge exaggeration to say that I’ve lost years of my life to depression. To save my mother the worried phone call, it may or may not have been true depression, but I certainly didn’t do what I was capable of for years, simply because I was trying to get through them. To untangle myself from that blanket of melancholy. (They sell them at Ikea. Don’t buy one.) But I decided I wanted to get through those years in my own way and so I did. And that was exactly what I needed to get where I am – a place that, on most days, I’m pretty darn happy with.

My Point

You get to choose who you are. Your parents name you something, your family develops a certain expectation of you, your friends know you as one thing or another – but none of that matters. You get to choose. You choose who you are and who you become. By choosing what you pay attention to and where you put your focus. By focusing on your life and no one else’s. Focusing on what you want that life to be. On what makes you happy.

I have a lot of joy in me. In large part because that’s what I’ve chosen to cultivate. I was born with a lot of potential for happiness, but I was also born with a lot of potential for the other thing. I choose what I want to lean into. I have to keep choosing it every day. We all do.

How Not To Finish a Cleanse

By living on juice for three days and then diving headfirst into a bucket of coffee and a plate of eggs after being a sugarless, caffeineless, joyless vegan for a month. (I wasn’t joyless. But I am melodramatic. For melodrama brings me joy. My dates have a lot to put up with.) Followed the next day by the best damn butterscotch pudding you’ve ever had, recommended by a woman sitting at the next table, eating her breakfast with the woman we think was Joan Rivers, although I remain unconvinced.

But I promised that my official version of the story would feature a conclusive Joan Rivers and since I always keep my promises…. Guess what! We ate brunch next to Joan Rivers! And chatted long enough to net a butterscotch pudding recommendation, something I’m certain wouldn’t have happened if it was actually Joan Rivers or if I had suspected it was Joan Rivers. Not because Joan Rivers and her friend wouldn’t kindly recommend amazing butterscotch pudding but because I would have been weirdly and obviously enthralled by her bone structure and general Joan Rivers-ness. I’m not good at playing it cool.

Why isn’t there an iPhone app that answers questions like, “Did I just have brunch with Joan Rivers?” There really should be.

Venice Beach

In Conclusion, The Worst Way To End a Cleanse Is To Have Two Big Brunches In Two Days Followed By Two Beach Excursions and By Worst, I Really Mean Best

Over the next few weeks, I’ll be figuring out how I want my real life to look when it comes to food. So far I’m leaning toward injecting myself with deer DNA so I can grow a few extra stomachs in which to store the pancakes. One stomach for the every day green juice, tofu, and all those other strange things that don’t make sense in any context my past self recognizes. And another stomach for weekends and brunches with friends and beach walks and butterscotch pudding recommended by Joan Rivers.

This advice is probably not for you. Because you’re a peerless specimen of well-mannered manhood and also I’m pretty sure only women read my blog.

That said.

Relentless sociopaths aside, I think everyone wants to be nice to the woman they’re seeing, screwing (sorry, mom) or marrying – especially if they want to see her again, sleep with her again, or not end up at the office with couch cushions imprints on their cheek.

But we’re all fragile human creatures. Sometimes our heads are stuffed with other things, sometimes we don’t think, sometimes it just didn’t occur to us how someone might take something. Therefore.

A Not-At-All-Comprehensive Guide to Being Nice to Her, Because I Believe In Your Potential

1. If you get yourself some water – you know when – offer her some too. Don’t just suck it down and leave her to fend for herself. Especially if she’s in your house. She’s not a camel. Unless she is. Then you have a whole different set of problems, problems I am not equipped to advise you on.

2. If she cares about Valentine’s Day or birthdays or Martin Luther King Jr. Day, you get to care about them too. Not because Valentine’s Day isn’t a corporate shill dressed as an armed toddler, but because it will make her happy.

3. Condoms. I mean, obviously.

4. Talk to her. Let her talk to you if she needs it. Women like talking. Everyone likes to feel heard.

5. But don’t talk about your ex. That never goes well. No one likes ghosts. Especially ghosts who are still very much alive and possibly hotter and/or less crazy than she is. (No, I don’t speak from experience. Why do you ask?)

6. Make her bacon in the morning. Just saying. (Unless she’s vegetarian. Then maybe don’t do the bacon thing.)

All this goes for the women too, obviously. Maybe substitute football for Valentine’s Day. You don’t necessarily have to watch it with him, but you get to be cool about it when he wants to spend six months of the year bowing to the god of intramural testosterone. Because he likes it. Enough said.

Extra Credit Is Given For…

1. Asking her to text you when she gets home so you’re sure she’s safe.

Yes, we can all take care of ourselves and yes, she managed just fine for 20 or 30 odd years without you, but it’s a nice gesture. It tells us that you would care if we got mugged or hit by a bus. We like that in a guy.

Extra Extra Credit For…

2. Driving her home or paying for her cab.

Again, we can get ourselves home and we can pay for our own cabs, but when people do that for me, it just feels really nice. I tend to retain fond memories of that person, that person who cared for my safety and well-being even if he was a little disconcerted when I fell asleep standing up at the bar at eleven p.m. (What? Eleven p.m. is late.)

In Conclusion

It’s not always going to work out. But you can leave someone with good memories. Knowing that you behaved the best you could gives you a peace of mind that actually does make a difference in your life. I’ve acted poorly in situations and have the alarming ability to feel bad about it for years. Seventeen years, to be precise. That’s my personal best. High school was rough, man. I’m not wracked with remorse or anything, but if I didn’t treat someone the way they deserved to be treated, it eats at me a bit.

So be nice. How else will you get her to turn to you for sex when she breaks up with the next guy?

I’M KIDDING. SORT OF. NOPE, DEFINITELY KIDDING. DON’T WORRY, MOM.

In Real Conclusion

If you’re dating her, sleeping with her, or marrying her – just respect her. Show her that you care. That you like her. Even love her. Everyone wants to feel safe and loved. And if she does the same for you? Well, you just might have something there.

How muddy the dog is, because it’s been raining. Sir Calzador of the Muddy Paws is not welcome in the bed. He doesn’t understand, his paws feel the way they always do. Yet he is banished from the big warm bed with the human. It’s cruel.

How I got really excited tonight and bit my finger. What? It happens. I was eating a dried apricot that looked alarmingly like a wizened ear from a miniature orange person when I got an email and lost all sense of time, place, and where my fingers were. Chomp.

Boom she clack clack. Boom she clack clack.

A big thing is launching tomorrow. The press is already starting to come in, and part of me wants to stay up and see what happens, but the rest of me knows that I’ve been working for over twelve hours already and my frantically clicking media fingers need to be fresh – if slightly bitten – tomorrow morning.

Why on god’s green earth would I choose to do a three-day juice cleanse on the week a big thing was launching and I will also – apparently – be rife with delightful coursing female hormones.

Since I did decide to do my first juice cleanse, why on earth would I choose the one that promises to “unearth the crayons you ate when you were seven” instead of, you know, the friendly one. The easy one. The one that isn’t all perfectionist and Type A about juice. Not to mention DIGGING TWENTY-SIX-YEAR-OLD COLORED WAX FROM THE DEEP, DARK DEPTHS OF MY INSIDES.

Boom she clack clack. Boom she clack clack.

My finger is still throbbing.

This week will be fun. I like being busy. I like making things. I like writing things and writing things fast. I like pushing my body to weird limits, even if those weird limits come with a liquid cookie every night. I like that it’s raining. I like that I’m totally going to cave and let the dog sleep with me, muddy paws and freshly washed duvet notwithstanding. I like that there are so many options, spread out before me like a buffet of everything I ever wanted. I just have to choose.

I’m back on my meditation kick. It tends to sound a little suspect, especially if you’re not from California, but meditation is just the hemp-wearing cousin of your standard Baptist-approved prayer: quiet your brain and connect with something larger than yourself. It all comes from the same place, really – the basic human desire to live a good life, not piss off the gods, and maybe get a pony.

It’s also good for politely requesting custom-fit muzzles for the hamsters in your brain, the ones that think they know all the answers but really just don’t.

Brain Hamsters: You’re not very good at this thing you do. Yes, that one. Also, you’re almost 33. Shouldn’t you have a kid by now?

Me: Not listening.

Brain Hamsters: You know who is good at that thing you do? This other person. The one who’s not you.

Me: Still not listening. Ommm.

Brain Hamsters: You should cut your hair. You’ll never meet someone when your hair looks like that. At least buy some hair spray. Don’t you want to meet a nice man? I mean, you’ll need him to support you because you still aren’t very good at that thing you do. Yes, that one.

Me: OM THIS, FUCKERS.

Brain Hamsters: You’re not very good at meditating, are you?

Brain Hamsters are like your cranky Aunt Mildred, the one who shows up to Thanksgiving and leaves bright orange lip prints on your cheek before asking why you’re drinking whisky – it kills eggs you know, and yours aren’t getting any younger. Brain Hamsters and Aunt Mildred really do want what’s best for you – but sadly for everyone involved, neither Brain Hamsters nor Aunt Mildred have any bloody idea what that is.

So you have to figure it out. Hooray for personal responsibility! Also, for getting to decide what’s true for you.

I treat my brain as a separate, anthropomorphized entity – it keeps me from getting all enmeshed in its drama. But everyone kicks the ass of the Brain Hamster differently – jogging, knitting cat hammocks and putting them on Etsy, reading novels, sending so many texts that AT&T threatens to repossess your car. Whatever works. It’s a different combination for everyone. I happen to like meditation.*

* And exercise and reading and sending so many texts AT&T threatens to repossess my car. Actually, they just send me dire warnings about changing my plan unless I want to pay through the nose because obviously I don’t have a firm grip on my phone habits.

Backyard where I grew up. I mean, I didn’t grow up in the backyard. They let me in the house occasionally, for meals and such. Anyway, peaceful, yes? At least until the squirrels launch another carefully plotted bird-feeder strike.

Here’s Why I Like Meditation, If You Want To Know

Sometimes it plucks some important thing I had to do out of the recesses of my lapsed memory. So I pop up to do it, completely forgetting the whole point of meditation, where my only task is STAY IN YOUR DAMN SEAT. Sometimes it really does make me feel like a better version of myself. Sometimes it just annoys me. But that’s good too, because then I have to question why I’m annoyed. Sometimes it’s so relaxing I feel like tossed back some illegally-obtained South American pharmaceutical and put the Brain Hamsters into a medicinally-induced coma.

When the Brain Hamsters are napping, sometimes I get answers, answers I can’t hear otherwise.

Yesterday, I was supposed to work a lot during the day and drive downtown in the evening to learn the steps for a tap dance flash mob. Neither of these things happened. Because the cleanse broke me. Instead, I fell to dramatic, sobbing pieces during the day and then had to miss the flash mob to make sure the dog didn’t die. *

* The dog is not dead. The dog is not to be trusted within a paw’s distance of a bottle of pills ever again, but the dog is not dead.

When you do a cleanse, the books warn you about emotional detox. It’s normal, don’t be alarmed, the world isn’t ending. Basically, they’re saying that your reward for eating like a healthy person is to cry a lot. Really? I feel betrayed by this system. And unless the authors of these books are prepared to come to my house at 3 a.m. to give me a hug, they just shouldn’t be so perky about the world not ending. **

** The world didn’t end. The Mayan Calendar didn’t kick in because I bought this off Amazon.

But the cleanse did steal all my caps and exclamation points. I just didn’t have the heart to move my pinky to the shift key and that was oddly disconcerting.

It also kept me awake until four in the morning. It’s really dark at four in the morning. That’s not even meant to be all deep and symbolic. It’s just…really black.

4 a.m. 

See? Dark.

The first couple of weeks on this cleanse, I felt amazing. Energetic and creative. Like I’d pulled my ass kicking boots out of storage and they still fit. Then something set me off yesterday and suddenly I was drowning in grief. A lot of grief. Waves and waves of grief. That didn’t let up for hours.

I realized yesterday that I’ve been actively avoiding grief for years. I don’t let myself properly mourn – not deaths or breakups or passing phases of life.

Oops.

All I can say about yesterday’s unexpected Grief 101 is “Man, this suuuuucks.” No wonder I avoided feeling that way for years.

Emotional detox is kind of like cleaning the drain in an apartment shared by three girls with long hair. The top looks all pristine and sparkly until one day everything clogs up. So you pull up the drain and realize the whole thing is packed with wads of slimy hair and encrusted with soap scum until you have to stop inspecting the gunk and just mutter a heartfelt ewwwww as you drop it in the trash and wonder how you ever let it get so bad. It got so bad because you couldn’t see it. You were just trying to shower and get on with your day, and you never gave the drain a second thought. But once you yank out all the gunk, everything starts flowing properly again.

Apparently, my soul was slimy and full of hairballs. Hairballs I metaphorically coughed up all over the carpet yesterday.

I got through it. I cried and sobbed and felt like my heart was literally cracking open, but I stuck to that @#$% cleanse. To the letter of the law, if not the spirit. I didn’t dive face first into a bucket of fried chicken, but I sure as hell wasn’t eating 80 percent vegetables either. More like 100 percent fried polenta and vegan cheese and episodes of Modern Family.

Then it was bad again for hours. More grief stricken will-this-ever-end-who-knew-pain-could-feel-like-this, until I found a video at 3:30 in the morning. Watching it on my phone in the deep dark quiet reminded me that there are good things, things beyond 33 years of pent up grief. Even when I’m in a hole I don’t yet see the way out of, there’s creativity and people who can move their bodies in astounding ways.

That’s what art is for, I think. YANKING YOU OUT OF THE LITERAL DARK NIGHT OF YOUR SOUL.

Hey, look. My caps are back. And I feel like me again. That’s a relief.