Her, circa 2006, taken via Sidekick
There’s an event I’ve gone to off and on the last several years. It’s an experiential designer’s wet dream, the place that bends my mind in all the right delicious ways. The first time I went, it made every other event I’d ever produced or attended look less dimensional. I remember feeling inspired, turned on, and a little bit at a loss for words, like what the fuck just happened. I loved it.
This year a bunch of my friends who’d never been, and who I’ve been dying to take with me, decided this was their year. In the midst of the tantalizing wait in a randomized queue online, thousands of people refreshing at once, it felt like a miracle when I got through to grab the coveted golden ticket. Sometimes the universe has funny ways of luring me in while also testing my commitment, and this was one of those times.
Everyone was going, so I had to go, and besides, I had to show my partner this weird world I’d been a part of and cherished so deeply. What I overrode was the very obvious reality that I was already stretched thin, weeks of travel and celebration behind me, before I’d even get there. I had enough oura ring readings in the past couple years to know exactly what throwing myself into a weekend of being nocturnal on top of that would cost me.
So I sold my ticket to a friend instead. Telling the people who were counting on me felt worse than the actual decision, I braced for their disappointment, worried about how I’d be seen. What I got instead was people telling me they felt inspired, that watching me choose my own North Star gave them permission to think about theirs.
I find myself playing monkey in the middle with my maiden and my mother, turning my body back and forth as I toss the ball between them. In practice this looks like overcommitting myself, saying yes to lots of fun things despite how that impacts my body, and at the same time becoming a full-on prepper for it as I prepare to stroke my fingers along the doorway of the threshold.
It feels really fucking hard to say no to things I love, or have loved, for something much greater.
Shedding skin ain’t a comfy experience, even though I’ve heard the saying, saying no is saying yes to me, blah blah blah. Yes, I hear you. I’m doing it, and it’s not fucking easy.
And this isn’t about throwing away an old identity. It’s actually a story about someone I invited onto the bus that I’m driving into the abyss to pick up the future versions of me.
Being a teenager in South Florida in the early 2000s looked like taking the TriRail down to Miami to meet up with boys, smoking cigarettes on Clematis on my way to a show at Ray’s downtown where I tried to fit in with other people who didn’t want to fit in, and inevitably got shit for not being straight edge. It looked like showing my boss’s ID to the security at my Thursday watering hole, Respectable Street, where I once poured a beer on top of my high school boyfriend because he wouldn’t let me get my Spanish book from his house while Don’t Stop Believing played as the closing song for what felt like the hundredth ladies night. It looked like going to a guy’s house who said other people were coming over, and they never did. Giving the bouncer at Club Space twenty dollars to ignore that my boss didn’t look like me. Taking out my friend’s parents’ car before I had my license, only to scratch their other car on the way out, a real two for one special. Going to a pool hall with my best friend, convincing men to play us for a pitcher of beer if we won. Unassumingly, we always ended up with the pitcher.
I remember her. She was fifteen going on whatever the fuck the age was to get into wherever she wanted to go. Heavy side bangs, a sharp bob cut, hair straightened flat, a self-inflicted Monroe piercing, a little cleavage showing (before the arrival of the coveted side boob), and a snarky upturned side smile.
Over the last several years of my adulthood I’ve taken a very hard stance on her. She was a bad girl. She was mean to her mom. She lied, she manipulated, she got herself into “bad” situations. Underneath it was real anger, at what I experienced at home, at the boys who weren’t taught how to treat girls, and a fierce independence from my family that was really a form of rejection.
After years of telling my story like a comedy routine, all drama and no vulnerability, I took my medicine, literally and figuratively, and chose something other than anger. It led me down a trail of forgiveness, compassion, acceptance. Compassion for my mom, for the first time in a real way. Guilt too, for how I’d treated her, and for all the ways I let those boys treat me, like I should have known better, should have protected myself. Those teenage years weren’t easy. It was challenging to be around so much pain, and challenging to feel like I had to be the adult in the room, even at the club, when I was still just a kid. Forgiveness and compassion drove me to a softer place, and pulled me toward working in the realms of intimacy. It also eventually led me to swing the pendulum a bit too far, edging into bypassing my own experience. Those bypassing years taught me a lot too, including how to become the one people could rely on to have her shit together, even when the bar for that was sometimes hilariously low.
All this to say, when I came up against her face to face, the girl my dad left alone for thirty minutes in Camden Market and who came out with tattoos on her hips before she could drive, she asked me, why do you hate me so much? Why have you pushed me so far away from you? I’m just trying to live my life, can’t you see that?
The mountain of guilt, the ocean of sadness. Breathless, I lost it. Sobbing, crushed by the weight of every year I’d spent as an adult avoiding her, making her wrong, fearing becoming her again. Fuck, I said. I’m so, so, so sorry.
My armor against her disintegrated. I looked at her, her piercings, the eyeliner like war paint, and I finally understood the message she’d been trying to send me all along. She wasn’t broken. She was gearing up for battle, testing every edge she could find, because that’s what it means to be human, to feel all of it. For the first time I wasn’t just grieving what she went through. I respected her. Her choices, her hunger to find out for herself what it means to be alive and leave no stone unturned.
She wasn’t broken. She was gearing up for battle.
I sat with her in that reverence. Everything I love most about how I move through the world now, the zest, the relentless appetite for experience, the refusal to stop being curious, none of it started with my adult self. It started with her. She’s the reason I’ve spent my whole life an astronaut of my own consciousness, still pushing into unknown territory, still ferociously asking questions knowing some will always be unanswered. She’s the one who took the first step into the mystery.
In my sideways attempt at exiling her to avoid losing my shit, I chose to wear a very uncomfortable collar with a short leash. I’ve done a lot of saying no in recent years out of fear, fear of not sleeping enough, fear of some cost I’d pay later, fear of causing harm to others, so busy managing the future that I missed the chance to hold life with more levity in the here and now.
This time, I’m choosing to keep her close instead, to hold her hand and jump the cliff with her, because I’m going to need that spunky lady to remind me and reteach me how to be comfortable in the mystery.
Burning Man is part of my maiden’s lifestyle, one of the rhythms she’s built her whole life around. This year I said no to it anyway, for the third time in a row. I’m saying no to other things that bring me awe and joy too, so I can say yes to awe and joy of a different kind, exploring my edges in the most scary, crazy, complex, wild way possible.
So I’m trying it out. Choosing the harder, quieter path over the easier yes. Going into the underworld of an old identity and coming back changed. And I know birth itself will ask this of me again. Its own descent, its own return.
What would your fifteen-year-old self say to you right now? Tell me in the comments. I read every one.
Love feeling you here, with her, in this dance of the life that you’re choosing. ♥️