I Do a Strange Sort of Dissociation...

(Advice wanted)

Sorry it has taken a handful of days to properly BRB, my friends!

Wow, has it been a doozy. I kept writing (so yay for lots of new pieces the next few weeks), but had a complete and utter setback with my spine that made it cry-levels of painful to even just ride in a car to my spine doctor, for example… Let alone properly get my “post on” here.

I am so sorry.

I owe you whatever you want, if you’re kind enough to be a supportive Word Nerd- because I ALWAYS want you to know how seriously I take trying to write as much per month as can (yes, even knowing I’m a lil’ psychopath and some Substackonians only do so like once a month and it’s still accepted).

I want to be accepted at “doing my best”- but the full truth is that my “doing my best” is always still going to be many, many posts and archived, uncut additions per month, and that’s just a fact. That’s a promise I’m always willing to make.

What I can’t seem to promise perfectly (after the first year of writing almost every single weekday, as a jump start) is being able to chart exactly which weeks will be on, and which off. Because I keep being taken by surprise when something goes south with health.

However, I’ll never be gone for long… always will hope to “make up for it” with extra long or thorough pieces… and: Will always “owe you” whatevs you want.

So if you’re a supportive Word Nerd here and feel like, “Dude, but I also want a poem because you slacked out for the last week”… I’d probably fully do so, haha. (You probably know by now that I’m actually not kidding?)

I’m grateful for you.

Since I’m still smack in the middle of a week of major medical procedures and this pain resurgence, I’m going to now shut up and let this intro become an outro, but…

I hope the pieces speak for themselves for the next couple of weeks, and that I can update you soon on the afore mentioned procedures and set-backs! (Soon)

For now, I want to beg YOU to do me a favor and let me know how you are too?

Truly and honestly.

How about: Let me know how your week has been in 3 words, if you can?

I stink at responding but I read every single word, always, and am always sending love… trying to respond in a weird symbiotic way by writing here… and, sooner or later, I’ll spam a friend’s face off in direct-message, you know?

3 Words

+

You =

How doing?

xo

PS: The below is, as often, an uncut, full length, less filtered tincture of a really recent piece shared online, cut to bits. Kiss-kiss!

This was the first time I’ve “danced” in months.

I had been “dancing” a lot over the winter while choreographing for Hadestown, and even popped in to sub an adult class or two as of late … but overall, I still keep this feeling tightly contracted in quotations.

“I don’t have the ability to drill this right now,” I said to my partner, who was begrudgingly-ish pulled from his lunch to archive this, “So I’m only doing this choreo at 30%.

I’m doing everything at 30%.

But I still want to document this in case I want to come back to it later.”

Maybe I am 30% forever? I have not been able to dance without the quotation marks in years. Not since many many spine surgeries ago. And it’s not because of the surgeries, to be clear. (If anything, they’re the only recent I’m even at reduced-70.)

It’s because of the reasons why I’ve kept needing spine surgeries: degenerative misery and nerves that pinch so badly, limbs shut down.

I shouldn’t be openly writing about being less of a dancer than I ever was online, considering that I still have an agent (thank goodness), and plan to eventually tap into my inner Shaq and grow some damn comeback confidence.

I’ve performed as a ballerina for a circus and one of our premier dance theatre shows in the same day, a state apart from one another - driving to and from. I used to be able to be at 200% in terms of devotion, even if never in the physical.

“This isn’t my most original work,” I said to my love, before doing my usual archival process for memory sake later.

I am not someone who remembers choreography, unless I’m actively IN it for a show season. Or… even creates it very consciously? I used to write novels and be like, “ooh thats a weird choice. Who made that up?”

For as long as I can remember, I do a strange sort of dissociation whenever I’m creating things that are of catharsis. I tap out and let what needs to be, be… because if I get too “in my head”, ego or self criticism takes over and I can’t make anything at all.

So, at least for me, I sometimes have to give up on being the “most original” when I’m first putting my biscuit back in the water. This is that. But, normally once I’m truly in “show made” and creating something more expansive (like a purposeful storytelling type thing), then I pride myself on trying to have choreography that doesn’t all look the same.

Choreo always looks like the brain it comes from, of course (like this, which was a lazy painful 30% phone-in), but I love pushing outside of the typical textures and styles and signed inflections that I’m oft inclined to make. But since there was no reason for such this time… Ring, ring- she phoning.

Not long ago my partner had asked me if I should start working on a new show and archiving each dance somewhere (which I’ve done with a couple other un-produced shows, living at cost on Dropbox), purely to keep my psychology alive.

The lyrics of this is too close to home, yes, but even my southern wariness can’t stop me from wanting to create worlds in the realistic characters of this unlimited character limited song.

“Sharecropper eyes” and “we burn these joints in effigy” and “no one dies with dignity” is like something once housed in my veins and pulled to the air accidentally; Perfectly perfect snd repurposed prose that need a Pulitzer.

I really and truly have not been doing well for over a year now in a very non hyperbolic sense… and so everything I share is somewhat a lie.

No one wants the truth. Especially not me.

▪️▪️▪️▪️

We don’t take people very seriously in this life, I’ve found.

If someone cries and out asks for help, very often, the weary well meaning masses of this tired planet earth will say, “Can you pick a better time?” Or “But do you really mean that?” Perhaps they’re feeling disposable too.

There are billions of us here. We ARE disposable.

If you’re someone like me though, you tend to not say a word even when you’re writing them.

Sometimes I wonder why people will obliterate someone behind their back or online or socially, without ever even talking to that other human like a human … but then if something were to happen to that human, you know they’d likely be the first in line, dressed in black.

Cynical? Yes. But I’ve also seen it happen. So, how do I get more optimistic? How do I find that hope again?

For me, creating is often like pushing a button inside my skull that recalibrates something. It’s stronger than therapy (no offense to my therapist) or Cymbalta or my favorite sushi with Mayo. Watching someone create or savoring art with someone else (why I cling to cinema or music, sometimes, like a literal f*cking life vest), or making some type of art for someone else, or being IN some type of art even if I often don’t remember creating it: Is the strongest tether to this globe I’m yet to find.

And I don’t know why… but this week, I had to find my tether again.

I’ve been in a grief relapse of sorts for many very specific and targeted reasons, but I also still feel guilty when I dance without my friends.

Dancing WITH others is what I loved about dancing, I think. It’s not making solos for myself. Sure, I love to do barre or lay on the marley alone - my church or meditation- but… it’s nothing like being in the story of a lyrics with another person. People I trusted.

I shouldn’t write about a body thats at 30% and needs to embark on some more potential operations to keep keeping kinda-on (more Ks than a Kardashian Kristmas) when I know that eventually… I might want to prove to myself and my agency and the splinters of scar tissue in my heart forever that I still want to make something. Spaces for people like me, maybe. I don’t know.

Why do we believe that dancers who aren’t truly “working” as dancers aren’t real dancers?

I don’t know how to shake that. I don’t know how to not miss my best friends when I dance.

I did some time working in another field and I learned a lot. And, I’m never going to be able to do anything without suffering in some way, to be honest. Maybe I need to be honest with myself more about that. I still find dancing a lot less painful, ironically, than sitting and typing … but losing long form writing and losing the gains of dance is still a serotonin shift I can’t chemically carry.

(Advice wanted)

I couldn’t do this dance twice, like I’d hoped - in order to archive it and try to feel even remotely decent about the movement or moments between. I had a foot half out the door mentally the whole time. But…

Even just the once is better than the months of too much nothing.

PS: Kindly consider booming a supportive Word Nerd if you’re able (every little bit counts and helps keep this ongoing memoir going, or… Share with you someone you like?