letter to a young woman afraid / her life is over

heart wall by jgoldcrown, NYC, 2018

Dear One,

In 2008, I moved to Portland, Oregon. I was twenty-five.

Since the time I was 7 years old, and played Toto (yep, that’s the dog!) in a Recreation Center production of The Wizard of Oz, I wanted to be on Broadway. I wanted to be a movie star. I wanted to walk the red carpet in a fabulous gown. Those were my childhood dreams, and in 2008, I wasn’t making any progress in their direction. I didn’t have an agent. I didn’t go to auditions. I wasn’t making my own work. I was just a yoga teacher.

I’d just returned from my first cross-country road trip, and suddenly it felt as though all the doors I’d counted on in New York were closing in my face. Right when I got back, my boyfriend broke up with me. In Prospect Park. My AcroYoga teaching partner didn’t give me our class back. She was teaching with someone that she loved more and she didn’t want to give it up. I was still dragging myself out of bed at 5am to teach 7am classes. I didn’t like my roommate and I was living in this crummy railroad apartment. I had to walk through his bedroom to get to the bathroom, or else put on pants and exit the apartment to walk through the hallway to get there.

I asked myself this: If I’m not pursuing my dreams anymore, then why am I here? New York City is such a struggle! I’m scraping to pay my rent! I debate myself over whether I can buy a tea so I can sit in the coffeeshop and write for a few hours! The air is unsavory, and the entire city runs on an undercurrent of anxiety. And it’s just so hard. In so many, many other ways.

I decided that I had failed at those dreams, and spent a few months admitting that to myself. Even though there’s no statute of limitations on becoming a Broadway actress, at that moment, I had to relinquish that hope; I had to accept this little death in order to allow myself to move across the country. Because if I wasn’t pursuing my childhood dreams, then at least I could live in a place where I wanted to breathe the air, where my days would be more genteel, a place with gardens and houses that lay close to the ground.

I moved to Portland for two years. To the day.

There, surprisingly to me, I still struggled paying my rent. Yoga teachers were paid so poorly in Portland and it was challenging to get enough work. But I loved the city and its bicycles and its slower-paced culture and the blooming things everywhere, and all the all the all the green.

I didn’t have a car, so I was often biking in the rain, and I never spent the money to buy proper waterproof gear, which meant that I was forever slightly soggy or asking for rides, and this made me cranky. The grey skies and the air pressure were tough on me, as a person with a tendency towards melancholy to begin with. Depression and anxiety run in my family on both sides.

After the initial delight of moving across the country and delving into the tango world faded, I realized that I felt grey for much of the year in PDX. Summer would come around like a grand reprieve, and suddenly Portland was like Pleasantville and everybody would be smiling and I would be dry and the sunglasses would come out and my whole perspective would change. But summer was brief. I knew I couldn’t live in a place like that indefinitely, not in the way that I was, at least. So after two years, I took off.

Before I did, it was the fall of 2010, and I was feeling very blue. Blue AND grey. I didn’t know what to do with myself, how to progress, where to go, what to devote myself to. In the fall of 2010, when I asked myself what I really wanted to do with my life, the only answer I could come up with was, “I want to travel.”

“Ok,” I said to myself, “Why aren’t you traveling? That’s why you became an AcroYoga teacher, right? So you’d have this valuable, portable skill. Loads of your colleagues are traveling full time. Why can’t you?”

“I’m scared,” I answered myself.

“What are you scared of,” I asked.

I searched myself, and I found an answer that embarrassed me.

I found that when I peeled back the layers of my fear, (which I did gently, by alternating asking myself, “What are you afraid of,” and “What happens then?”) what I was afraid of was this: that I wouldn’t be able to pay my student loan bill, my credit card bill, and my phone bill each month.

This amounted to about $300.

The thing was, I knew I could do that. And once I was able to address the actual fear at the core of my fear, I could move. I decided to travel for one year.

I put my stuff in storage in my father’s garage in upstate New York. (I sent them through Amtrak, and he picked them up at a nearby station, because that was the cheapest way to ship them). I came back to NY for a couple months because I had multiple work connections here, and I knew I could save some money while staying with friends.  I scheduled myself an East Coast AcroYoga teaching tour— since AY teachers were scarce at the time, I was able to cold-call studios and book my own workshops.

And so I traveled. One carry-on. One backpack. I felt really happy. For a few months.

About halfway through that year that I intended to travel, I burned out. I was at a yoga festival outside of Berlin, co-teaching with some colleagues, and I asked Lucie, the organizer of our workshops, if I could leave. I asked if she knew where I could go. I must have looked pretty beleaguered, because she sprung into action, saying, “Lila needs a home, desperately! Now!”

She found me a place to stay in Berlin with her AcroYoga student Michael, and, instead of staying a week, as I had planned, I wound up staying a month. Michael had an extra bedroom and his generosity floored me. I cleaned his apartment and left him sweet notes and cooked for him. I danced tango and ate a lot of chocolate and peanut butter and shopped at the Turkish market, and tried to recover my energy. I did not recover it. That was month six.

I continued through month nine, because I felt obligated to the commitments I’d scheduled— mainly workshops, and the yearly AcroYoga festival in San Francisco. But I was in a bad way. At the festival, I had no wherewithal to interact with anybody. No skin. The only reason I even managed to get there was because my colleague Eza insisted on picking me up and driving me to the festival grounds. I performed my obligations, numbly, mechanically, and then I went to Portland for a week, where my friend Kiara fought with her boyfriend to let me stay in their guest room. He felt I was overstaying my welcome. I was. But I didn’t really know what else to do. Kiara had once been a person who overstayed her welcome because she was unwell. She wanted to pay it forward. She insisted.

Kiara took me to her meditation sangha, and the naturopathic medicine institute, and made sure I ate food. I made them a quiche.

Looking back I’d self-diagnose as being in deep adrenal fatigue, compounded by mild depression and anxiety.

I went back to live in my mother’s house in Florida for the first time since the year 2000, when I was 17 years old and left for college. I had never looked back with any desire to return. Now I was 27, and felt far too old to be staying with my mother. I felt ashamed and defeated. And also I felt a nothingness.

I did basically nothing for those two months I stayed with mom (October and November of 2011). I read books from the library and walked on the Pinellas Trail. Mom pushed me to go see a play and dance tango. I really didn’t want to see anyone. I didn’t want to talk to my friends. I didn’t call people back. I didn’t even return the phone calls of my best friend at the time.

I was afraid I would always be that way. That I had just royally fucked it up.

But I wouldn’t. And I didn’t.

My mom sent me to her therapist but insisted that I had to pay for it. She believes that you don’t work on yourself in the same way if you’re not the one financing it. I think she’s right.

The therapist reminded me of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs.

I had to take care of the first layer, the bottom of the pyramid: home, finances, etcetera, before I could work on my artistic self actualization.

I both knew that I could make a living in New York, and also, that it was the only place that’s ever felt like home.

I went to my father’s place upstate and spent a month watching movies, stacking firewood, and tending to the wood stove, while he recovered from an appendix operation. My only job was to protect my father’s firewood from the snow. That task of bringing the logs from the yard into the shed, (plus starting to practice yoga again — I had stopped while I was on the road and gained 20 pounds), that simple task of stacking firewood and making it neat and architecturally-sound and aesthetically-pleasing, brought me back to life.

I moved back to New York in February of 2012.

The life I have now is more exciting and fulfilling than the life I ever imagined for myself when I was 28. I felt so lost then. I could never have predicted the kind of things and people that have come into my life, the podcast that they inspired, and my excitement now when I wake up and get another day, now that I’ve found my passion project and the right anti-depressant for my body (Zoloft).

This reminds me of one of my favorite bits of writing, the commencement speech that Steve Jobs made at Stanford. Particularly, this part:

“If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts. And since Windows just copied the Mac, it’s likely that no personal computer would have them. If I had never dropped out, I would have never dropped in on this calligraphy class, and personal computers might not have the wonderful typography that they do. Of course it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college. But it was very, very clear looking backward 10 years later.

Again, you can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backward. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.”

Your life is not over.

You did not royally fuck it up.

Use this fact: you have a soft place to land with your family. (If your family isn’t a soft place to land, rely on friends who are.) Utilize this for the good fortune that it is. Use it to recuperate, to get medical help, and to cocoon. You will emerge.

You will emerge.

Big Love,

Lila

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