Would You Do It?

[I want to know your answer]

Welcome to a new week Word Nerds!

My Substack is where I am able to express myself creatively, share on all sorts of topics (not exclusively sickness) and it helps me to archive this “ongoing legacy” that I HOPE is the continual memoir project I’ve started.

(Full Disclosure: I am only “one long work day” away from finishing my current memoir manuscript. I just need my spine and time to behave enough to finish!)

Here, anyone who needs or wants a scholarship gets one… because kind friends help support the writing there, even if it’s just $5.

I write (now) every Monday, Tuesday, Thursday and Friday (barring emergency… and sometimes, even then).

Why check out my column on CF News Today every Wednesday?

It’s the place where I write about illness with much less prose, and a lot more clarity. For some, this sort of “to the point” approach to medicine is refreshing when trying to understand a complicated disease, new test results, or any other sort of updates.

But here?

Here is where we (hopefully) get to hang out- imperfections, typos, and all.

Hopefully you enjoy some new words cooked up just for you.

xo

“I don’t want to be this person”, I said, both out loud and in my head…

“I don’t want to be this person, instead….”

But that’s where the shibboleth ended.

Lately, I’ve been haunted.

That’s what I call it when the parts that are me (the precuneus and the cingulate cortex and the IPL-whatever) suffocate me from the inside out because they see a show inside my head and they can’t function without the outlet that was ‘that’.

“What if I try to write each of the 13 or 14 stage stories as novels first, while I’m waiting to build back a dance community of friends again-“ I said, while far more hysterical than this schmaltz implies, “- even though writing hurts me so much that it hurts YOU and Follin because it often means I can’t move well for a week, or I have to cancel plans from pain, or I pinch more and more nerves.”

Lately, long form writing (speed expelling a novella, not thumbing a canticle such as this one) can have the power to floor me for a week or even turn off some of the functions in my hands or left leg.

If you lost movement in your foot from writing for a couple of days… Would you do it?

“Since I’m waiting to hear back from multiple jobs” (being in the arts is sort of like having many Carmy’s in the kitchen. You hope that the one project with your agent works out, and that thing with the director who was going to work with dancers currently dispersed, or that company you love and wants you to guest with goes forward, or that secret producer you’re FaceTiming on differently timed coasts keeps coasting)- but I’ve learned that no matter how many things you have in your secret-frying-pans:

You can never trust if plans will truly pan.

‘Which will light on fire and which won’t?’

Typically, they all will… but they’ll just take 5 years to do so.

Being a choreographer and a performer (and a teacher) is a lot like being a patient in healthcare: Never trust a damn thing until you’re staring at the OR lights.

I say this phrase too too much… And I’m likely going to say it again.

Things will get cancelled after you’ve excitedly told someone about them.

I’ve even been AT the gig, contract signed, months of daily shows ahead of me, the venue actively being built on the lot before my very eyes… and had the entire project need to be paused.

Construction done. Circus over…. That’s just the way the arts can be.

It’s weird though how much we blame the person trying to be the ringleader? Without their work, there is no tent. There are now clowns to call our cozy community. But when fate and finances suckerpunch nearly every single one of us at one point or another a few times in this life, all the elephants step back and hold their pointer fingers in accusation towards a singular direction.

Suddenly, the elephantidae in all of us have the best memories of all the mammals.

We love to watch someone fall.

We watch entire TV shows built upon it (I have never clicked by parts of ‘America’s Funniest Home Videos’ or ‘Ridiculousness’ or ‘Tosh.O’ faster).

And then, we wonder why the world’s first reaction to someone being harmed is to pull out their cell phone.

(Yes, I said cell phone. It hasn’t earned the societal right to be called anything less progeria’n.)

If you lost movement in your foot from writing for a couple of days… Would you do it?

[I still want to know your answer]

I know that I need a circus family to feel happy, and I’d push through appendage-asphyxiating writing sessions to get books out in the meantime but…

Looking up at a trapeze wire and knowing that some people will always stand below you… phone in hand…. hoping for the pavement-hit but not ready to climb alongside…

I don’t want to be this person…

But I’m still afraid of what I know of heights.

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?