I had dinner with a group of middle school students tonight, invited by a friend who is now their teacher. The idea was to share about our lives in DC, our jobs, and general advice we would give ourselves, if we could go back and talk to ourselves at that age.

Which of course, got me thinking: what would I tell 13 year old me? First of all, I probably couldn’t have told her much. I have always insisted on learning my lessons personally, the hard way. No one’s advice ever made much of a dent compared to personal experience. I had to touch the hot stove, no matter how much I was warned away from it. I still do.

But even so, if I could sit her down and tell her anything, I would tell her this:

I would tell her that having your heart broken will always hurt, just as much, just as deeply, but you’ll get better about picking up the pieces and moving on with your life. You will cry in the bathroom and at night in your bed, but otherwise you’ll be able to hold it together pretty well. I would tell her this is important-having a heart capable of being broken is how you know you’re still in there, somewhere.

I would tell her that you’ll get better at managing the fear of putting yourself out on a limb, not knowing what will come next. That much of being an adult is managing the fear of uncertainty, of sitting in that discomfort and making friends with it. I would tell her that most people are not this brave, and this is a feature that will propel her to many, many amazing experiences, and a few really difficult ones. I would tell her that vulnerability will hurt like a son of a bitch, but that so does the loneliness of not opening up to others. I would tell her she doesn’t get to avoid pain, but she can usually choose which kind she gets.

I would tell her that many men will find her alluring, despite what everyone is currently telling her about her body. I would also tell her that attraction isn’t the same as respect, and lust isn’t the same as love. I would tell her not to worry about whether they like her, and focus on whether she likes them. I would tell her not to get addicted to that dopamine hit- it will fade and you will be left chasing it forever. I would encourage her to embrace the slow burn and not jump to the ending out of a deep discomfort with uncertainty.

I would tell her that there is very little she can control in this life, and that worry is not an action, it’s an illusion. That the world will try to convince her otherwise, that if only she was a little prettier, better, smarter, whatever-er, she can will the world and the people in it to respond the way she wants. I would gently, lovingly, tell her this is deeply wrong. It will have nothing to do with her, in most cases (I would also tell her that I had to be reminded of this fact again-by a friend, gently, lovingly-this very week).  I would tell her that five year plans are bullshit and she should deeply distrust anyone or anything that asked her to develop one.

I would tell her that her parents were right about a lot of things- whether to take trigonometry, whether to join a sorority, whether you need to go out or stay home, whether you should be friends with those people, or date that boy. But-and this is perhaps more important- that she will realize one day that her parents were really, really wrong about other things, things that you believed like breathing, things that were based in love but also fear, and also their own stuff. And I would tell her that she could choose to put those things down, and not carry them with her, even if it feels impossible.

I would tell her to trust her gut, because it will rarely be wrong. I would tell her that her gut will keep her safe, even if it doesn’t make her happy. If she cultivates it, listens to it, trusts it even in the face of all evidence to the contrary, she will know what to do next. Her gut is her connection to the Divine. Even when it doesn’t make any sense on paper, her own inner knowing will walk her home.

And, I would tell her that one evening you’d look around a table of friends that had come to you in various ways, and you’d be joking about something unremarkable but erudite and you’d realize with a start that this was what you’d longed for most in your young life, to be seen, to be heard, to be loved, by people that you respected and adored.

And you’d remember that if that dream could come true, even 20 some odd years later, than so can others.

I’m currently on a plane, flying to San Francisco. I fly to San Francisco a lot, and besides the 6 hour journey in coach, it is not the world’s worst place to have to visit with regularity. Even the 6 hour journey can be welcome. If I don’t log into the in-flight wifi, I can ignore the real world and give myself some time to read, to think, to write, or to catch up on TV.

Which is what I opted to do this trip, to catch up on my latest obsession, The Magicians. It’s on ScyFy (the dumbest possible spelling) and is full of wry humor, pop culture references, and unsentimental heart. It’s ostensibly about magic, but it’s really about people. I’m not going to ruin it for you, but I encourage you to watch it, as a flight of fancy and also as a meditation on love and humanity.

I knew the show was more than a trifle when one of the characters tells another something to the effect of, “you treat magic like a drug because the people that taught you to use it behaved like drug dealers. Magic is everywhere, you don’t have to barter and bargain and sacrifice for it.” That resonated in a deep place for me, except replace “magic” with “love,” which is basically what the show does. I’ve written about hustling for worthiness-for love-before, and I suspect I’ll write about it for years to come, but this statement was shattering. Because that is how I treat love. Not the love I give, but the love I want to receive. I give my love to others freely, but for some reason expect that theirs comes at a price, it comes with conditions. Only if I’m good enough, or give them something worthwhile of mine, will I get that love. And perhaps love feels like a drug to me because it always seems like the first hit is free. After that it will cost you. And dearly. It costs me a piece of myself, which is exactly what magic costs this character. But it didn’t have to- it was just the only type of magic she knew about.

That’s something I’ve been thinking about a lot lately too, if there are other types of magic, figuratively speaking. Magic, and love, that is less painful. Less costly. Before I went to law school, I was an actress. I was also a mortgage officer and a concierge and a lot of other things to pay the bills, but what I went to school for, what I felt called to do, was be an actress-a creative artist. But good God was it hard on an emotional, sensitive person like me. When I was performing, it was like I had magic running through my veins, electricity emanating from my heart. The constant rejection, the fear of failure, the feelings of not being good enough. It felt like I had purposely chosen the hardest possible path for myself, because of the rare moments of fun and passion…. Sound familiar? Sound like anything else in my life? Love feels this way for me-like letting a wild animal made of light run around inside your chest.

So after a few years of deeply unhappy struggle, in love and in life, I made a new choice, I decided on law school, which I’d always sworn I would never do, and I moved half way across the country and I started a new life, a completely different timeline. I put away performing and I didn’t even go to see a play for about 5 years. It was too hard. It felt too raw, like seeing an ex who had hurt you deeply. Like with anything I love that betrays me, I walked away and avoided it entirely. I embraced this new person, the student and the lawyer and the civil servant. I made new, wonderful friends and built a new beautiful, challenging, rewarding life in Washington D.C.

And yet.

It would bubble up. It started with singing in the choir at the National Cathedral. The amount of emotion that I felt from those practices, from that experience, told me the door I’d tried so hard to shut, hadn’t been totally barred. I started writing again, not just memos and briefs, but blogging, and writing some fiction. The words flowed easily, pouring out of my like a dam being released.

Other things started to come back to me, other loves, from even earlier in my life. Mythology, history, fantasy-magic. Things I’d been fascinated with as a child, that I’d put away when I thought I had to grow up. Things that I decided weren’t acceptable for adult, professional women. Soft, lovely, joyful things that have no particular utility other than making me happy, the things that make you feel like there’s pop rocks in your heart.

For a while I didn’t know what to do with these things. I kept picking up the old books of my heart, uncertain in what order to shelve them. I liked being a lawyer, I liked the skills and the logic and the order it brought to my chaotic, reckless, overwhelmed and overwhelming heart. Learning to reason in this way gave me rules, and rules have always brought me comfort. Rules make sense when nothing else seems to. Rule provide boundaries that have always been porous for me; rules are safe. At a time in my life when I felt like the magic I’d once had inside of me had dried up, or wasn’t enough, the rules offered me a place to lay my head, and feel normal- even strong. But it was, I see now, an overcorrection, a pendulum swing out of frustration and deep longing. The rules weren’t enough. The safety wasn’t enough for my big, chaotic, reckless heart, the heart that just couldn’t convince itself to settle for comfortable security instead of an epic love story-romantic and otherwise.

Because as I’ve let the magic come back in, I can understand that I am both of these things: sense and sensibility. Lawyer and Magician. The Lawyer is the “adult,” she guides and counsels the Magician. She tells her when to go to bed, and when to eat at a reasonable hour. She dries her tears and reminds her that things will always look better in the morning, and you can do anything for one day at a time (perhaps unsurprisingly, the Lawyer often sounds a lot like my Mom). But because the Lawyer is there, the Magician can be all heart, and no fear. I had to experience the one to appreciate the other. I had to discover them both, to be whole.

But what do I do now, now that I’ve let the Magician come back out to play, to stretch her wings, to be her chaotic, reckless, gentle self again? How do I fit her into the life I’ve created, the one with clear rules and boundaries? Do I let her blow it all up? What comes next for us all?

Where the fuck is Spring?

Seriously. It’s April 9th and it snowed today. Not a lot. But it still snowed. In April. In what is essentially Virginia. Not cool (or rather, too cool. Words are weird).

I’m not the only one kvetching about our missing spring, and discussing the weather, is not, as a rule, what one might consider interesting. But this never-ending winter has been trying my patience, and I am not known for that particular virtue. It has been working on it in a way that seems significant.

First, some context: I have never been a patient person, from childhood on. I wasn’t raised by patient people. On both sides of my family you can find individuals that range from driven to relentless to rat-terrier-trying-to-dig-a-hole. We are powerful and dynamic and smart and committed, but patient we are not. We want what we want when we want it, and not just a bean feast or a cute yet vicious anthropomorphic squirrel (raise your hand if you got that *very* attenuated Veruca Salt reference). Once an idea has entered this steel trap of a mind, it very rarely shakes loose until satisfied. Even to my detriment. It’s a lesson I have been taught time and time again, but rarely retained.

But this winter, something seems to have shaken loose. It feels like giving up, a bit, to a person so hellbent on maintaining control and moving ever forward. But somewhere along week 17 of January, I felt something shift, something give. The idea of surrender popped up everywhere. In church, at work, in books I was reading. A trainer asked me what would happen if instead of trying to change my circumstances, I simply worked with what I had? Not embraced it, not keep a gratitude journal (an idea that makes me instantly bratty), just accept it. Surrender.

It was a terrifying thought. If I’m not keeping those plates spinning, if I’m not shouldering the world on my back, what happens? Does it all come crashing down? Or, do I find that things tend to resolve themselves without my interference, for the most part. Turns out, it’s the latter. It wasn’t my will that was keeping things afloat, but rather my anxiety I was keeping at bay. Or so I thought. Mostly I was just giving that little rat terrier inside my head other things to chase, when really what it needed to do was lay down on it’s dog bed and fall asleep.

It also turns out once you take the pressure off yourself, it’s a lot easier to take the pressure off others. When you decide that it’s not up to you to decide, you remove a lot of judgment and neediness. If I don’t have to have things perfect, then others don’t have to be perfect to participate. And it is truly amazing how people show up when you don’t expect anything of them, if you just let them be. It’s amazing how much they can give to you when you aren’t sucking it out of them, or smacking them like a ketchup bottle.

Resistance, persistence, struggle, surrender.

Case in point, I recently started dating someone I stopped dating a year or so ago, because things weren’t moving as quickly as I liked. But when we came back together, I didn’t have an agenda. I didn’t have any expectations. I let him lead (which is the hardest), I let him reveal himself to me, and I’ve learned so much I never let myself see when I was trying to force an outcome. It may go somewhere, it may go nowhere, but I’m enjoying this a hell of a lot more than treating our interactions like chess moves.

I don’t think it was just the winter, though, I think it was also an important piece of growing up that I’d simply never quite mastered. Realizing that planning for every possible eventuality might be good business, but it means I miss everything in the moment it’s happening. And there’s some good stuff happening in those moments. Some great stuff. And if there are no more moments, then shouldn’t I enjoy the ones I’m in, instead of worrying about how to preserve those that may come in the future? None of that is promised, but this moment is. It just is. It’s an excruciating paradox of life, we must live it, second by second, plans or not.

I’m not saying I’m good at it. It’s an experiment, leaning back and just seeing what happens. It’s not easy for me. It drives me crazy sometimes, but it’s a different sort of crazy than compulsively trying to control things.  Being open to possibilities other than what I think should happen feels unnatural, but it’s far more natural than what I was doing. It is natural like this endless winter; I can’t do a thing about it. It just is. It’s working on me, and it’s leaving in it’s own sweet time. I can accept it, or I cannot, but neither choice matters a damn bit. So why not keep my powder dry for things that matter?

As Florence and the Machine sing, “I’m not giving up, I’m just giving in.”

There’s a pretty common saying that “what you resist, persists.” I have found that to be true.  For instance: I don’t do well alone. Not in a occasional Friday night in, or a living by myself, or a going to dinner or the movies for one sort of way, all things that I do, and often enjoy. I mean fundamentally alone. Without someone who knows you, or knows what you’re going through, or can bear witness to your life.

It should be mentioned here, that I am an extrovert. That is an understatement. Saying I’m an extrovert is like saying that Grand Canyon is a pretty decent hole in the ground. I can’t function without people. My motto is the more the merrier, even when it’s probably not. I process everything externally, needing a sounding board for the smallest decisions (what do I wear today) to the largest (do I take this job out of town). Now, often this external dialogue is just a quick photo text to a friend, or a one-sided dialogue with my cat (although Gary has a lot of opinions). I don’t wish to convey that I can’t make my own decisions-it’s that coming to my own decision requires me to talk it out, like contestants on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire. I usually emotionally know what answer I want to get to, but because I’m also a lawyer, I need to back it up with logical steps.

Part of this is inborn, part of it is being an only child who’s only hope at siblings was friends, and part of it is moving so much as an adult I got good at building community whereever I landed. But regardless of the reason, this is a fundamental truth for me: I do not want to be alone.

And yet, I find myself alone again (and again, and again), in the sense of romantic partnership. Surrounded by friends, embraced by family, some very fun flings, but coming home to an empty house. For a person like me, who is a Cancer (like Elizabeth Gilbert, who wrote “I am the planet’s most affectionate life-form, something like the cross between a golden retriever and a barnacle…,”) it feels cosmically cruel. I tried to explain this to friends recently, when I said I wanted a partner to build a life with. One of them asked me what the hell I had been doing-was this not a life? And yes, of course this is a life. It’s a great life. But lately I’ve been craving a deeper one.

I’ll admit, for years I would say I was ready, but I wasn’t, not really. In going back through blog posts on this very site, you’ll see me saying similar things. But a disastrous relationship where I lost myself seemed to confirm my deepest fears: I could be alone and deeply unhappy, or with someone and totally lost. Pick your poison. After that experience, where we had talked about marriage, deep down I thought of marriage and kids as anvil and anchor, and I didn’t want to stand still for long enough to get tethered. It made me itchy. Pushing things away that didn’t look or feel perfect, hiding behind “rules,” saying I was making room for better things.  Running away, traveling, focusing on work, pushing the fear and loneliness away with all manner of bad habits.  What I figured out was that I craved the validation of a relationship, but couldn’t come up with better reasons than “achieving appropriate adult milestones and feeling pretty,” which I think we can all agree are shitty reasons to get hitched. If you’re only seeking validation, you’ll keep trying long past you know you should stop. You’ll keep chasing that dopamine dragon, looking for love in all the wrong places.

But the slow realization has been dawning on me that while that definitely was very true for me, it isn’t any longer. I’ve come up with better reasons than validation.

I’m not sure when I fully understood it. Maybe when my Dad was in the hospital, and with it the realization that he could be gone and never walk me down an aisle, never hold a grandchild. That was terrifying in a way I didn’t expect. Maybe it was watching my friend and her family at church, the little unit that fits all together like a lovely puzzle. Maybe it’s seeing the joy in another friend’s face even in the midst of exhaustion. Maybe it’s seeing how they didn’t lose themselves, but became deeper versions of themselves. Like the Velveteen Rabbit, love looks different from the inside. And there are scarier things, it turns out, then loving someone and letting them love you.

I think it is all of these things, and this: I’m ready for the life I’m building to grow much deeper, and I’ve reached the end of what I can reasonably accomplish alone. I need teammates. And while I have amazing friends (and I think our friendships are sorely undervalued in a society that places so much privilege on romantic relationships), they can’t grow with me in this way-they are growing their own families. Turns out marriage and kids aren’t anvils and anchors; they’re roots, and roots can come with you and be repotted. You don’t have to stay in one place.

I feel exposed and vulnerable acknowledging this now. Wanting something, and worse admitting you want something, opens you up to the possibility of failure. But on this score I am already living the worst case scenario, and it’s honestly not bad at all. It is a great life. I just want to root deeper into it.

Easter Sunday feels as good as any day for a relaunch. The story of Easter has three parts over a weekend- the tragedy and loss of the crucifixion (Friday), the uncertainty and despair afterwards (Saturday), and then the promised redemption, the pronouncement that all is not lost and in fact, all has been gained (Easter Sunday). I don’t know about you, but I have living in the Saturday, for months. For at least all of winter, if not longer. Maybe since the election. This Saturday has been for-fucking-ever, just a long expanse of unmet hope and expectation. Of disappointment, loss, and confusion.

Since last we met I’ve had two sad breakups in rapid succession, both with nice people where we were both trying our best, but for personal reasons or physical distance, we just couldn’t work it out (which, let’s be honest, is way harder to deal with emotionally than shitty behavior or a no-holds barred breakup. Anger is so much easier than sadness). Then there was a parental health scare, drawing my family into itself and making us all confront some hard truths. And then work continues to be… I don’t want to talk about it. So in conjunction with all of that, this blog has ebbed and flowed and lately it’s been in a hard ebb. But so have I. I’ve struggled to put into words all of the heavy feelings we’re swimming in these days, and the joy feels more blanched and hard to keep ahold of. I’ve been fixated on my phone, on posting things, on likes and loves and comments. I don’t know why. I guess we all have a gaping hole of some sort inside of us and mine needs near constant validation. That’s my monster, what’s yours?

When I’ve mentioned my blog recently, the feeling that I need a revamp, or I need to be more relevant, people-well meaning lovely people who only want me to be successful- keep telling me I need to own a domain, I need to post pictures, I need to expand, I need to be strategic. They’re probably right, but all I want to do is tell stories. My stories. They’re personal and they may not always be on message, on brand. But neither am I. Because I’m not a brand- I’m a person. I contain multitudes, I don’t want to be a commodity (but we’ve even tried to commodify Whitman).

But that’s what we’re trained to be. It’s been recently revealed that Facebook users aren’t customers, we’re the product. I have lots of friends that work for or adjacent to Facebook so this isn’t a conversation about what was or wasn’t done or why. Merely that in a social media landscape, and I’m including blogs here, we’re trained to market ourselves. In online dating profiles, we’re selling ourselves as “perfect wife or husband (or “non-label-having partner of limited to long-term duration”).  We’re doing it the same way I pick out a toaster on Amazon. I used to think of it as auditioning, but that’s done in person. This is catalog browsing.

This isn’t a novel revelation, but it certainly was one to me. It recently occurred to me in a conversation about online dating with someone new to it why I was so resistant to dive back in-not into dating, but into the online arena: I’m tired of marketing myself. I just want to be myself. And myself- my real, authentic self-comes across as deeply weird in an online snapshot. Truth be told, I am deeply weird, but it’s charming in context, when you get to know me (I think. I hope). When you can watch me flail about with my hands when I talk, when I get darkly funny about inappropriate topics, when I touch people-strangers, friends, small children-like I’m patting a horse, because I find touch reassuring. None of this is stuff you can-or should!-say in an online profile. The me you get online is two dimensional, basic. Flat. Geared towards the common denominator with the pictures that make me look uniformly pretty and appealing. Not the real best pictures, the ones with my face cracked into a chortling laugh, or lost in blank-faced thought, or scrunched up in incredulity, as is most often the case. I don’t particularly like the person I am on an online dating site. I don’t know how to showcase the things about me that I do love. And that’s what I get back, from the men I meet. Our least offensive selves, trying to find intimacy.

I’ve been thrown by someone I found myself liking in real life, because I’m so used to meeting men in contexts where I already know they at least find me somewhat attractive; it has made me realize how intolerant of vulnerability I have become. Online dating is the least vulnerable why to meet a person because it tries to control all the variables. All it really does is suppress our most interesting characteristics in a risk-averse pas a deux. How can you connect with your soulmate from the most beige part of your being?

I have to find a better way. For my own sanity. The need or comments, or likes, or trying to game the system brings out a really unflattering side of me (and I’m not talking about Instagram selfies). I’ve been running to the same well I always run to-pleasing and performing-whenever I feel vulnerable and uncertain. Even now, as I write this, there are people I hope read it, because I’m hoping it will bring them closer to me. I don’t like that I want that. But I can’t help that I do. Part of it is how I was raised, but I think a lot more of it is about the society we live in-where we’re all encouraged, now explicitly, to think of ourselves as products, as a value proposition in a person.

A friend of mine recently shared her theory that we’re all suffering from a low-grade simmering rage, because of this life we live in a capitalist society, where we’re always in a constant state of anxiety about having enough, making enough, being enough-and we’re starting to suspect that the game is rigged. We can’t actually get ahead in a meaningful way, not most of us. Not enough people are buying our personal product. And so our rage comes out against our bosses, our work, each other. It’s why you don’t want to go to work on a Monday, it’s why you get the Sunday Scaries, it’s why you wake up in the middle of the night asking yourself if you’re living the life you imagined? Did you, in fact, go confidently in the direction of your dreams? Do you even remember what those were?

Or is that just me?

(It’s not. I know it’s not. You don’t have to raise your hand, but it’s not.)

I have a lot of friends who are entrepreneurs, who have that hustle or die spirit. Who sell themselves and their work and do so joyfully. I do not. I can hustle, certainly. I do, often. But sitting in that energy for too long makes me edgy and full of anxiety. I’ve felt a lot of pressure lately to fit that mold, but every time I do, I feel exhausted and incompetent. But I’m not incompetent, it’s just not my highest vibration. My inner voice doesn’t tell me to conquer-it tells me to care. To tell the stories and hold the space and be a witness and a scribe.  It’s that voice I hear when I start to write. It’s the voice that tells me just keep writing. It doesn’t matter if it makes sense in the moment, if it’s on message, if it’s funny, if it’s poignant, if it’s total dross. Just keep writing, in the way a ditch digger keeps shoveling. You keep writing to get to the bottom of things. Or at least I do. And that’s enough. Writing because it’s how my brain turns over an idea and polishes it until it’s shiny or grinds it into dust is reason enough, even without hashtags and links. Not everything I turn over is going to be pretty. Not everything will even be worth reading or looking at, not everything will be a product you want to buy or an idea you want to endorse. But for once, I’m ready to say, it’s not really for you. I hope you will read because I very much hope you’ll find something that resonates, that helps you find your own voice. But it’s not for you. It’s for me.