Tag Archives: life

Seeking Transcendence

sobriety2

First off, it looks like my Subversion post got a lot of traffic through Facebook. That always weirds me out, because I can never tell if it’s good or bad traffic or who shared what with whom and what they thought of it, but this is the nature of blogging. Anyhow, I hope people liked it, because they sure came to read it!

Sometimes I write about drugs on here. I’ve been pretty open about phases of my past and the fact that I stopped drinking, etc. by personal choice in 2002, when I was 21. I’d already lived enough of the party life, and moderation wasn’t for me, though I think a lot of people do better with moderation than abstinence. I fully believe that addiction is a choice, not an uncontrollable brain disease like modern propaganda purports in order to endorse religious programs. That being said, whatever works for you, drugs, no drugs, religious programs, your own strong will–do it.

So, that aside, I live in California, home of drugs. Drugs are everywhere. They are a major part of people’s life and lifestyle. Psychedelics, pot, alcohol, they’re like a religion here. For years, I stayed away from most situations that involved any sort of drug, even on the periphery, but after so much time with my own commitment to sobriety as a form of transcendence in my own life, I am OK with being in bars or going to shows or spending time with friends who use, only because I know how committed I am to my choice. I’ve proven it to myself, and I have so many people in my corner who know my past and support my decision to seek spirituality through meditation, yoga, hiking, writing and music rather than through substances.

Mostly the battles were in my mind and body due to years spent seeking a cure to anxiety and depression (my tortured artist lot, I suppose, the genetic card I’ve been dealt) through pills that ended up causing more harm than help, left me staring down an abyss. After that debacle of years, I was the loneliest I had ever felt in my life, an experience and feeling nobody who hasn’t been there can really relate to, and I don’t expect them to. I came to some conclusions about how short life is and what really matters to me.

All these little things, the structures I’ve built: Part-time county job, rented room in a Victorian in Oakland, plenty of time to spend on music and art, being completely sober of all mind-altering substances, exercise, lots of time to reflect and process so I don’t struggle too much with anxiety or depression–these things may not seem like a lot to others. They may seem boring, even. But to me, they are all I have. They are my foundation.

***

I dated a guy once, when I was 19, who was trying not to drink so much. I was sober at the time, due to being a crusty punk street kid earlier in my teens and almost dying out there due to excessive consumption of whiskey daily, fights, elements, etc. I knew in my heart how close I’d been, and I was scared shitless, so I went straight edge. No sex, no drugs.

And I was happy. I enjoyed things more than I ever had before. I was working on music constantly, I was fit, I had awesome friends, I trusted myself. I looked and felt great.

But this dude came along, my soul mate I believed, a musician, passionate, intense, real, deep, successful, everything I thought I wanted, and basically he systematically worked at me until I decided to cave, because I thought love could conquer all. I thought if I drank with him, moved in with him, changed all my values, that our love would make it work.

I was so wrong.

And anyone who truly loved me would never have demanded that of me. But I was young. And I learned an important lesson which is this. No matter what your values are, whether it’s drugs or no drugs, sex or no sex, religion or no religion, if you change them to satisfy another person, you become hollow inside. You are not living up to your own convictions. You have to be true to yourself or shit just won’t work.

And no truth is static. We all ebb and flow in what we believe in. We change daily. Some of us are stubborn in our convictions, like, for me, I will not budge on the no drugs thing for another person EVER again. Doesn’t matter what comes. I believe in myself more than I believe in love or any other person. That doesn’t make me a narcissist, it makes me strong. Our own selves are all we ever have. If I make a choice, it has to be something I am doing for myself, because it feels right. And drugs don’t feel right to me now in my life.

***

I’ve been on some strange personal journey lately. I bring up the drugs thing because a couple things have happened to test my resolve, and I’ve found that I’m stronger than ever in it. I just don’t want those things in my life. I watch my friends use them constantly, and to be honest, I am not jealous  and it doesn’t look like fun to me. My life is subtle and simple and slow and takes time. I’ve accepted that. I love to be excited and learn new things, I love to feel good, but for me, quick fixes never last. The only thing that lasts is me, day to day, for however long I last as a conscious person. And I can transcend through many other means.

I write music in order to transcend this mortal coil. Because I can’t have some of the things I want, because I am sensitive and feel everything sometimes, I try to put it all in music so that it can be larger than me, and affect on a plane I can’t access through any other means. Same with writing. I transcend through art. That’s enough for me. It’s what I have and what I choose. Anything else distracts me.

I met a musician recently, a few months back, who was real excited about some of my songs. He was up front with me after reading my blog and told me he hadn’t realized I was “so straight edge.” I wouldn’t really call it straight edge. Some of my best friends use substances, a lot. I love them, and respect their decisions, and listen to their stories. That’s enough for me. I try to be as open as I can. It’s not black and white to me what others do. Only what I choose to do right now.

This guy decided not to work with me because I don’t drink or use drugs. He was admittedly a big burner (Burning Man), and I felt like what he wasn’t saying was what I’ve heard a few times since then. If I couldn’t be in his world, on the same page as him, then he didn’t want to work with me on music.

I was bummed and pissed, because I don’t ask that of anyone. I don’t cut people off because they use substances. I just don’t use with them. And I don’t put myself in situations that are too much for me, depending on where I am inside myself at the time. But I am finding it works the other way around. People can and will reject you as an artist and a friend because you’re sober. It cuts both ways.

I was talking with an artist friend last night, and was saying that a lot of people try to change me. They say I’m too reflective or morose or depressed or think too much. She struggles with depression and anxiety, and she was saying that when someone close to her is suffering, she wants to take their pain away. She feels like for some reason, she could handle it better, because she’s well equated with pain in general.

I feel like that with those of my friends who are using drugs to cope with this world, that they are completely justified in doing so. Some of them may be using drugs for other reasons, they believe they take them to a higher plane or whatnot, but I have many who use them to simply numb themselves out, or to fill the empty spaces. If I could use something to numb myself out, sometimes I feel like I totally would, if anyone needs to take a chill pill sometimes, shut their brain up, it’s certainly myself.

But for me, I got tired of the endless empty hunt for something outside of me to make everything better. I think I have all I need inside. I can handle the pain of life, how hard it is, how much loss we all feel. I can put it into my art. It’s not easy, but it’s what I’m here for. I truly believe that, for whatever it’s worth.

Everyone Must Stand Alone

When I was little, the only access I had to much music that wasn’t classical was the radio. With my ear glued to the speakers and a cassette in the recorder I would wait for the songs I loved to come on, songs by Beastie Boys and Depeche Mode and INXS, the only OK bands from which I could choose.

My parents didn’t much care for music that wasn’t soothing or peaceful to them, believed some music channeled evil, was from the devil. My mom had a hidden stash of records in her office closet, records she would listen to when my father, a classical music purist, wasn’t around, like Michael Jackson. In the car, The Carpenters and Simon & Garfunkel were the only tapes from which I could choose. I listened to “The Boxer” and “Bridge Over Troubled Water” so many times I can still recite the lyrics by heart.

In second grade I met Allison. Somehow, maybe through her older sisters, she had gotten access to a white Madonna cassette tape. Her parents forbade Madonna. As far as they were concerned (and my parents too) Madonna, with her pokey bras and lacey stockings, was a hooker slut that would turn our souls pure black. My mom wouldn’t even let me buy those stockings with the lace at the bottom that were so popular during the time. “Madonna wears those,” she said. And that was that.

But in Allisen’s giant walk-in closet with the ugly brown carpet, we sat with our tiny handheld tape recorder and listened to our Madonna tape quietly enough that no one could hear it. Madonna was “evil” but we gravitated towards her music precisely because it was verboten, because it actually made us feel something.

As the years have gone on, I’ve become more elitist in my musical tastes, mainly because I have a certain aesthetic I like to listen to and have been surrounded by whiney folky emo psychedelic music living in the Bay Area for so long I will shoot myself if I have to sit in the car too long listening to that shit. I need something raw, visceral, “angsty,” even. Something that speaks to my scars and my truths and my experiences, something that makes me feel.

But beyond that, we all like what we like. In the car on the way  to the airport, my friend Kirsten and I were listening to The Cure, “From the Edge of the Deep Green Sea”, and out of nowhere I started singing Madonna with no shame, “Life is a mystery, everyone must stand alone, I hear you call my name and it feels like home,” because Kirsten, with her love of Maroon 5 (who I cannot stand, by the way, if you hadn’t guessed) brings that out in me. I’m not afraid to be cheese ball or goofy or like stuff that isn’t cool around her because she, like a handful of friends I can call my own, wears her soul on her sleeve.

You may argue that those opening lines from “Like A Prayer” are simple, pop madness bullshit (especially my punk friends who are more elitist than I am about musical tastes, but I reckon each of them has a skeleton in their closet they are ashamed to admit in public like I so shamelessly am doing right here, right now, for you, my loyal readers on this little blog for no reason I can think of except that I like to talk. A lot. And, to be purely honest, as I am writing this, I had a strong urge to listen to Simon & Garfunkel’s “The Boxer” and AM DOING SO RIGHT NOW.)

But those lyrics never rang more true as we drove down the Portland highway to the airport and I felt the openness of my life, all of the people I have lost who I have tried to hold onto, all the dreams I have had that seem to have gone up in smoke or are in limbo, all the barriers I feel have been erected in my way, the doors closing in front of me, the limited scope of my current universe like a soul penitentiary. And how one person, sometimes, can call your name, and you feel, in spite of the madness and mayhem that is our lives here on this planet, that you have come home–even though you can’t keep or own or have or control another living soul–in that moment, the mystery is reconciled and you KNOW there is a reason for this madness and the other person is mirroring you back to you, if only for a second, before the clouds go back to obscuring the view of life’s eternal meaning and you realize once again that we only really have ourselves, can’t always feel the connection everyone has to each other, go back to questioning if it even exists.

Everyone must stand alone. Once you know that, feel it, accept it…it has power.

Madonna knew that, with her simple pop lyrics. And she wasn’t afraid to say it. So yea. “Like a Prayer.” Song of the day. I have no shame. OK, I do, I am judging myself right now, but that’s not going to stop me. I had a moment. Now, back to listening to dark ornery gloomy music which is much more comfortable for my morbid misanthropic soul and tentative sense of belonging to the underworld of troubled souls who ponder their existence on a daily basis.

The Disease of Wanting More

It’s been a doosy of a ride lately. For a while here, I was updating almost every day with some sort of artistic inspiration for all you peeps who read this blog. Lately, I’ve been putting my nose to the grindstone to keep on the path I set in motion years ago. I haven’t had much to say. I’ve been focusing on filling the empty spaces inside with music, writing, work and taking care of basic duties.

Years ago, lonely, living on the hill in El Cerrito, I dreamed of a day when I would have sober musicians and writers to talk and hang out with. I’m officially in Oakland again. It’s cool, I’m close to a lot of things now: clubs, coffee shops, new people I’m growing to like, artists, writers, musicians. We all seem to orbit in our own little circles, coming together at random intervals to compare notes.

I seem to have manifested a little seed of this, but I’m still yearning for more. I struggle with the disease of more. If I get some attention, I want more attention. If I get a show booked and it goes well, I want another show. If someone offers me some company, I want more company.

Because people can only do so much, I’m learning to give myself what I need. I’ve had to focus on meditation, journaling, prayer and helping others to get me through these rough times. I’ve had a few people approach me with confessions about their drug and alcohol use, as they notice I’m still sober and going strong, focusing on making sure I keep my sobriety as the center stone of my new life.

It’s crazy, because I always wanted only one thing: to be liked. I wanted people to notice me and pay attention to me, because I often felt growing up that I was invisible, and no one could notice my special powers.

I still have a hard time motivating myself to keep progressing in the world of music and writing, even though I keep taking forward steps. I’m fearful of success, whatever that means, and because I care about life and people and the present moment, I don’t want to fall into the American trap of putting work and career in front of everything else. I don’t want to grow old and look back and realize I never enjoyed hiking with friends, sharing my music one on one, helping others develop their art, or essentially enjoying the life I have been given.

Today, I was hiking up a large hill, as I am prone to do, and I had my music playing on my iPhone. One of my songs came on, one I had forgotten about, called “We’re Lost.” As I came down a giant hill, I saw the entire Bay Area spread out below me, with San Francisco in the distance. The water was ripply and sparkling blue.

I tried to capture it in a picture, but just couldn’t.

I felt happy, listening to something I had created, looking at the area I’ve lived in most of my life. I was alone, but I didn’t feel alone. I felt like I had my own company. I appreciated something I’d made, and I appreciated the ground I was standing on. Feeling whole for the moment, I thought to myself, “If I died right now, I would be happy, because I created these songs and I hiked these hills.”

Happiness is fickle and hard to define. It seems I am always looking for it, over that bend, around that corner. But when I stop to feel this body I’ve been given, to appreciate the every day gifts of this world I live in, to listen to the voice and the music I’ve been able to create, I know that there’s something there. It’s something I cannot quantify, or really explain, but it’s powerful and real.

I’m always wishing for more, for that future date when I will have arrived, when people will finally notice my strengths and my beauty and my power. But what I forget is that it comes from within, this recognition. It’s something only I can give myself. And if I don’t believe it, no matter how many people tell me I’m awesome, I won’t feel it.

Life is a struggle. Life is pain.

But life is also joy. And joy is found in the moment, joy is something that lands on your shoulder once in a while.

As I descended the hill, I saw a guy doing a photo shoot with a chick who had high heels on and a tattoo on her leg. As I rounded the bend, a monarch butterfly flew up into my view and drifted away. After I hiked, I took my guitar over to a patch of grass and practiced my set for tonight’s show.

People walking by seemed confused. Why the hell is this girl playing her guitar and singing on the grass, their faces said. Few of them smiled: it’s a wealthy area, where I was sitting, and everyone is busy heading somewhere else.

I sat in the middle of their orbits, watching them pass, practicing away. People may never really stay in my orbit. They come and go. I’m here, eternally me, eternally alone behind a skin and mind barrier. I don’t know what that means, only that I am doing things for me, and I only hope that if I was given gifts to share, I can continue to hone and share them. I only wish to express what it means to be alive, how we all cross paths at different speeds, in our own time frames.

I don’t know what to hold on to, or what exactly means anything, only that I’ve got a pull towards art, always, and it’s what I do to fill the empty spaces. And I’ll be damned if I don’t enjoy this little unpredictable life I’ve been given. Sometimes, when I look back, it’s at the worst times, that I had the best times. Sometimes, when I look back, I find that the path was right here all along.

Filling the Empty Space

Life requires more than a series of projects to keep us busy – Stephen Elliot

Monotony and sameness are a rule for most of us, rather than an exception, although I’m sure we all picture “others” who don’t have to face these things. Art seems to me a method of filling the empty spaces.

It seems maybe that I am lofty with my goals—some judge me, saying I have it easy. Maybe I have it easier than some. I am lucky to have two jobs I can tolerate, friends who support me, an apartment that, though right by the train and not the prettiest, is somewhat affordable for the area I live in. A family that encouraged me to be creative growing up. The passion for creativity above most everything else.

I am passionate about creating stuff. God forbid you get stuck in the car with me. This seems to be the place I start ranting about art. Yesterday, I was telling my friend that creation is amazing because it allows you to process things that you can never resolve, and help others with what you end up with. A few months ago I told another friend, “Some people do drugs. I create stuff.”

But really, I’ve been thinking about art and creation lately, and part of the reason I do it is because I can’t usually sit still without a pen or guitar in my hands. It’s a way to channel anxiety. I think for a lot of artists what they create fills the emptiness of not knowing anything. For me, it’s the emptiness of not knowing why I’m here and what connects me to this world or other people. And it’s often to channel boredom and loneliness, too. Since I was young, I’ve felt alone, even when I’m with people.

I don’t say we don’t know anything to be all nihilistic and apathetic (though I do suffer from permutations of those words), more to say that that’s a part and parcel of this life we’ve been given, where things are not distributed fairly and we’re left to create our own maps, just as soon as we realize nobody else has one, either.

Some people claim to know. This was common in the church I grew up in, when people would go up and bear their testimony that the church was true and god had a plan for them (and all of us, in the audience, too). I was guilty of doing the same thing when I was 17, telling everyone I knew. One of my friends always told me she didn’t, and I judged her, until I didn’t either.

Nobody knows. This is the reality I know.  Once I accepted that, or decided that I didn’t know, I was free to make whatever meaning I wanted of my life, and I started focusing on the here and now instead of the next life, which nobody knows is real or not.

And there’s an urge to leave something behind me. There’s an urge to help people. There’s an urge to help my younger self, too, and I’ve heard this from a lot of artists. Dear Sugar, on The Rumpus (Cheryl Strayed) talks to her twenty-year old self. Sherman Alexie, author of The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, writes to his teenage self.

I could write a whole blog on writing to a younger self, and probably will, but I am trying (trying I say) to stay on topic, since I tend to ramble, though my points often do connect if you keep with me.

I am learning that I can’t fill all of the empty spaces with doing. In order to create, I also need to do nothing, reflect, or just hang out with friends sometimes. It is quite possible to get caught in a grind with your art, too, if you don’t take a breather. I have weeks where I am spending every spare moment writing music and non-fiction stories and poetry, and then weeks where I am bereft of ideas and the wherewithal to edit any of it. On those weeks, I still tend to it, but I squeak by. And if I force myself to work on project after project, I start losing sight of other things that are important in life, like my husband and the dog and all of the amazing friends I have right here in the Bay Area.

Perhaps life is about more than filling the empty spaces with projects, and filling the empty spaces with projects is just my way of channeling the anxiety of not knowing and hoping to leave something behind, hoping to change the world in some small or large way, and these two things are enough fuel to keep me perpetuating creations. A third reason is that art helps me process absolutely everything. I’m sensitive, I see a lot, I take in a lot, and I get overwhelmed easily. Music and writing help me make sense of emotions and people, too.

My husband used to comment, when we both stopped drinking, etc., about “filling the empty spaces” we had filled with substances before. Art fills those gaps for me, too.

Why do you create?

Stay on the Roller Coaster. It’s Your Life.


I was having a conversation with my husband today in the car: we were talking about how hard it is to move forward when you’re stuck in a (comfortable) rut. I’ve been trying to focus on expanding my writing from within the niche that I get paid to write in, but have ended up instead being all over the place and spinning my wheels. I’ve been thinking so hard my head hurts and working so much I’m straight up burnt out. Yet, I can’t sleep for the need to get something moving in another direction.

I’ve read so many books on the craft of writing, most of them contradictory.

The most common sense books tell it to you straight. In real life, you usually have to start small. You have to get good at a few little things, master those and then somehow, you end up reaching the next step. Not in your own time — the universe has some plan that we can’t see and it drives us all apeshit — but in its own time.

The one thing I would have told myself when I was younger is don’t give up on your writing. Don’t let it slip. Don’t listen to all the critics out there. Hone your craft, but keep going. Grow a thicker skin. Baby steps, like in the movie What About Bob?

It’s frustrating to slave away at the little stuff, but if you can’t handle the little stuff how will you be able to handle the big stuff?

As a culture in America, we people are always looking for that quick fix, that overnight success. But look at the people around you. Are they masters at everything or are they good at one thing? If they’re good at a lot of things but masters at nothing, are they well-rounded? Or are they stressed out?

I’m asking these questions myself. Is it best to be well-rounded and do a little of everything? Or is it better to specialize? I think the days of specialization are over, but that may not necessarily be a good thing. More will be revealed. Now, we are each doing so much more, yet we only have the same amount of time people have had since the dawn of time. Our jobs now demand us to be good at more than just one thing. We have to write, read, network and be social in most cases. In order to survive, we’ve had to adapt to being jack of many trades. It’s not a luxury; it’s a necessity.

I see a lot of success out there. I see a lot of people preaching about how easy it was to obtain their success. I see less people telling you straight up that it is hard out there in the trenches. You have to have a thick skin. You have to be motivated to work 12-hour days or more sometimes. And you have to believe in yourself, because at first it will seem like no one else does. The results will come, but they will take time.

So my motivation for the day is:

Keep moving ahead, do some little thing toward your goal every day. Write for five minutes. Paint a corner of your bedroom wall. Jump rope with the little kids in your neighborhood. Give the dog something horrible like an ice cream cone, just to see that look of pure adulation on its face. (Actually, don’t do that. It will just make your dog sick. Try peanut butter instead.)

Give yourself credit.

Don’t give up. Things get dark just before they get light. And visa versa. Life is one big rollercoaster ride…there’s no getting off this one. And if it’s all too much and you’re considering illegal substances, read my post on Drugs and Creativity to dissuade yourself.


Waiting

Life is like a room with concrete slab walls and a door that only opens intermittently, say every Tuesday at 3pm for about three seconds. I don’t mean that in a tortured woe-is-me way. I was just contemplating the redundancies of life, and this idea of spending day after after day in a job you don’t like, waiting, in essence, until you are released like a carrier pigeon to deliver a message to some far distant territory. Maybe even enemy territory. Assuming you are ever released, that is. Some people never are.

But it’s not just jobs. Life can be pretty monotonous. As an American girl in California who only works 9-5 five days a week, with a relatively short commute, I tend to have some free time. It’s just the activities that I have to repeat over and over again like cleaning, shopping for food and endlessly picking up after my husband and the dog and cats that make me wonder if this whole deal is just some hyper inflated representation of a hospital waiting area. You are always wondering what the prognosis is. You don’t know how long you’ll be sitting on the cracked blue vinyl chair with the gaudy wooden arms. So you pick at the stuffing in the cracks. You look at the clock as the little hand barely barely moves. Tick. Tick. Tick.

Tick.

Some days are like the five minutes before the last bell in school. Time is irrelevant. We are all inside a big holding cell, like a cattle round, waiting for the rancher to open the gates and let us out into the wide pastures we’ve been pining away for. We chew on our cheeks. Spit out grass. Leave big cow pies on the ground. Sometimes one of us wanders too close to the fence and gets a big jolt of electricity. Runs back to the herd with his fur standing on end. “Whoa,” he says, his nostrils wide, “that was a shock!” So we gather around him hoping for a good story.

Sometimes life is just that. A good story you tell after it happens. We spend a lot of time on the train, staring at the scenery or looking at our ripped jeans. A lot of times we don’t even end up at the anticipated destination. We realize that maybe the train ride is the destination.