Now Listen Maxine, it’s ok to take a little IRT*
Happy Thanksgiving dear ones. It’s been a year since last I wrote, but today I’m going even further back because Monday morning I woke up with Thanksgiving 2014 on my mind and though my thoughts will likely be jumbled, I had to get some down.
Ten years ago I’d finished traveling for the IRL Project too late to get to my Bay area family and stopped in Kansas City for the holiday. It was the most familiar spot on the map between New York and California and I thought it might still feel a bit like home. In fact, it felt like camping outside a place that evicted you. For several months I’d felt myself on the edge of a precipice but by Thanksgiving Day 2014 I’d fallen in, my life in so many pieces that it was unrecognizable. Sitting on my lifelong friend David’s couch, I was grateful for exactly one thing that day - that he didn’t force me to join him and his family for dinner. Instead he told me he loved me and walked out the door, leaving me wrapped in a blanket on that sofa and pondering the deep dark hole in which I’d fallen.
Arriving in California a few days later, I began seeing what looked to be handmade poster prints in multiple locations, first at an artist friend’s studio, then at a grocery store and in a shop window, eventually in a mural on a building. Each time felt like a mystical voice was speaking; an assurance of things hoped for in the midst of days where I could barely raise my head.
“All will be well and all will be well and all manner of things will be well,” said Julian of Norwich, but for years they were not. There were more false starts than a nervy Olympian. Three steps forward. Five steps back. Loss after loss and mistake after mistake and then, from nowhere there was daylight. Just a smidge at first, then a sliver of blue sky and finally one day a ladder thrown down and there was me climbing out - so changed I wondered if my DNA had been rewritten. My last Thanksgiving in California was spent waitressing at the country club where I worked, dinner eaten late after our patrons had gone home, yet rather than exhaustion I felt joy. Nothing about the day had been Rockwellian. I hadn’t arrived at my final destination. There were bends and twists ahead and a few roadblocks that looked terrifying, but the road beneath my feet was going somewhere.
In the days following this sorrowful election outcome, those posters came back to me and I realized that the same hopelessness I’d felt then was washing over so many of us. How could this horrific turn of events yield anything good? And yet…
This morning I woke up to my favorite two year old saying, “Kata?” We’d had a sleepover to give his mama time to get ready for a houseful of people today while his dada did two shows on Broadway. This morning we strolled through the rain to join them and then I returned for a little *Introvert Recovery Time to write all of you on my holiday off from an amazing job that lets me work at home and still have time for creative pursuits. The dear friends and neighbors who surround me in this city I once dreamed of make it special, not because it’s fancy, but because it is home. Despite the losses and scars which I will carry forever, it is indeed, all that I was promised and more.
Perhaps today you are feeling this same gratitude, but if instead you find yourself consumed with fear of the future or on a couch wishing for any life but the one you have, here’s my hand and my promise. Let’s keep walking. It will be more beautiful than you could ever imagine.