The bedroom was too warm and I had drank a full bottle of tea in the late afternoon, but those weren’t the reasons I couldn’t sleep. The skin covering my heart did little to protect the fast beat, my right arm shook slightly from lying in one position too long, waiting for tiredness to envelope my brain. I wish I hadn’t binge watched it. Inwardly, slight embarrassment peppered my thoughts that I experienced such a strong reaction.

It’s fiction. Get a grip.

I wanted to believe that Hannah Baker, a made-up teen character conjured from the imagination of a male author, was not going to be raped before she decided to end her life. The entire premise of 13 Reasons Why is untangling how and why the events and relationships surrounding a teenager led to a decision that dragging a razor across her skin in a bathtub was better than finishing high school and enduring the shit years of young adulthood.

But rape. Rape is one of the reasons why Hannah Baker commits suicide.

I closed my eyes during the rape scene in the last episode, once I knew the scene was coming.  I didn’t need one more visual of sexual violence embedded in my memory. Not because I was raped, but because both in my work and in my personal life enough people have been raped that I sometimes I had come to believe that

Rape is inevitable.

But it’s not. It just feels that way. Like knowing an entire premise of a popular Netflix show is based on a girl’s suicide and then watching an actress ascend a long driveway toward a party— it feels inevitable how the narrative will go before the razor blades.

There’s no way to look at my 7 year old son and 2 year old daughter and do anything but worry the years away and hold fast to the truth there is nothing I can do except be there every step of the way so whatever shit the world tries to put inside them, I make myself available—an empty sanctuary for them. A place to be loved, for them to confess without judgement, and bathe in compassion.

Is that all I have? Is that enough?

Hannah Baker is not a real person, but the story is as much in the world as my children. The co-existence of those truths kept me up past 3am last night. I laid there thinking of their futures and tried to unsee the moment where I thought the scene was over and opened my eyes prematurely and saw the last seconds of Hannah Baker’s rape: her face turned to the screen, dead eyes, violated.

As I write this, my toddler has awoken from sleep, crying out for someone to hold her.

I go. Practice.

 

 

I’ve moved to Ohio four times in my life.

Age 8, from New Jersey

Age 26, from Boston

Age 29, from Boston

Age 37, from New York

Each move was grounded in home-building: My father found a better job. Nick and I wanted to get married.  Nick and I wanted to have kids.  Nick and I had two kids and needed more room.

My pattern is to leave for school or career and come home for family.  The movement normalized after a while.  I’ve learned to never say never.

But now, with two children, and clear vision of my writing, I have doubts that I will move again in the way I moved before.  Travels will never cease; writing takes me places.  But my children, as most children do, I think, sleep best in beds they are familiar with, pushed into the same corners of the same room they have grown used to and juggling parenting and writing has been easier in Ohio than at any other time before.

There are no surprises in Ohio, there are promises kept, and predictable four seasons.  An earthy texture to life that once made me flee, and now helps me rest.  It’s been reliable, like how I never question my parents house being an open door to me and smelling Adobo spices when I walk in the door, my father keying the piano with his latest melody.  That used to make me want to flee, but now it helps me rest.

I live here now.  And updates on this site will be about that transition; the ongoing work of mothering and writing, exploring the deep pleasure of simplicity, art, critical thought, and feminism.

Be like the new me: Stay.

When you leave New York, you want to appear as if it’s not impacting you as much as it actually is.  Well, that’s what I did.  I hate the cliches of leaving New York, as if there is nothing worth exploring west of the Manhattan border.  So I pulled off this facade of, “I’m sad and relieved to leave.”  In reality, inside, the never-aging adolescent in me was on the floor, face down, weeping and slapping the floor.

I suppose 12 days outside of New York should bring me some epiphanies.

The logistical ones:

you can turn right on red outside of New York

when you don’t turn on red – even when you’re allowed – people DON’T honk at you

customer service workers are straight up FRIENDLY, happy folks

you don’t have to pay for parking

groceries are AT LEAST 20% cheaper

Ohio has all the space to make you happy if you’ve been feeling cramped

The main epiphany is that the struggle to leave New York was not about leaving New York.  It masked itself in a frenzy of grief-stricken cries over leaving NYC, but the truth of the matter is it’s not about New York.  It was about growing up, growing FURTHER up than I wanted to.  It was about being forced to grow up and choose something that perfectly fit the family I created but was not what I wanted for myself individually.  That kind of choice, that kind of growing up is painful.  It is one that takes time to find the joy, it is the kind that most cannot understand, particularly single, NYC dependent-on-parents-without-dependents kinds of people.  My New York friends tried to frame this decision like it needed tweaking.  No, it didn’t need tweaking, or finding a way to reverse the decision I made.  Some decisions are made somberly, knowing that the good feelings won’t automatically surface.  That’s parenthood; doing and being the thing you know is best for everyone else in moments when it’s not about you.  Uncentralizing myself – as a writer, nonetheless – is difficult.  Monstrously so.

I was relieved to leave New York, but that doesn’t mean I don’t want it.  But wanting it doesn’t mean that I want it more than what I want for my family: sanity, a present mother, a soulful father, more biological family who can’t wait to see you, love, love, love, love that is not rushed.

New York will be frequently visited and will always be home in many ways.  I’ve heard that people go to the city for their dreams and to find themselves.  That might be true for some, but, for me, it was leaving New York that took the strength and effort to realize that I had grown up,  yes, but it was time to grow up even more.  It was time to accept that my life had grown too big for the Big Apple and I needed something different.

Twelve days in Columbus, Ohio.

Like I said, Ohio has a lot of space.

 

 

Come out and say hello!

 

It has become impossible for me to maintain my fun and light-hearted side when I post on this site.  Lord.

My name is the URL gives me the creeps – like this should be my PROFESSIONAL space where I show off how SMART I am or have the capacity to be.

The problem, I’ve realized is that SMART is not necessarily equivalent to being authentic or even compelling.  I’ve thought a lot about this lately as the end of the MFA looms.  I’m reviewing my writing – all the critiques and feedback and scribbles in the margins – and there is one consistency: I hold back.  Still, even after all this time I’ve been laying essay after essay, I’m holding back.

The question.

WHAT am I am holding back?

No–

WHY am I holding back?

Even better:

WHAT is gained by holding back?

The only answer that I can offer myself is the illusion of safety.  To write one’s mind is cathartic.  To have one’s mind read, interpreted, and opened is terrifying.  I didn’t have such qualms in my 20s.  Perhaps because I never really aimed at the larger world of publishing.  The internet, as vast and limitless as it seems, is not very scary to me.  There are niches and pockets of places where I am read, but I figured they were all rather small in number.  To project oneself PAST that world, into places where I don’t know, into communities where I would not identify is something of a different animal; a realization that puts me in a cold sweat.  Maybe the difference is minute, but it feels stark.

To bid farewell to one’s work and watch it be metabolized into bodies unknown is what holds me back.  I don’t want to be mistaken, misunderstood, or judged. (A rather common desire, I think.)  And I very well could write in circles for the many years to come, giving just enough that I gain some kind of circulation and respect for writing some fraction of my truth.  This would be safe.  This would ensure interest in my writing but not really a response or challenge.  This is one option.

The other option is the one where I write the process of how I arrived at such a belief; the contrarian existences in my life that I employ in my everyday.  This is the other option: to be brave.

I’ve been slammed in workshops not for my writing but for my reluctance to share the process of my mind behind the story.  What I submitted as essay has always been story telling with the occasional aphorism to inject some jazz and spark every now and again.  But I won’t share the fire of my contention or the heartbreak of pain or the resurgence of ghosts, habit, and failings.

Maybe I will.

Maybe I will write down instead of writing up.

 

Three weeks until my coursework at Columbia is finished.  There has not been one day that I took it for granted and walked without knowing the immense weight, gift, and privilege it is to study the craft of writing.

I’ve been processing offline in my friendships – having friends over for dinner, long talks with a handful of confidants, and jotting down fleeting thoughts about grief & the end of things.

I take great comfort in the words of so many talented professors I had who expressed uncertainty if they knew what constitutes great writing.  It’s art.  It’s subjective.  It’s varied and complex.  But the one thing that writing demands is an authoritative voice.  A knowing presence stringing one word to the next.  I’m still experimenting with my voices.  Because I don’t have just one, I learned.  I have many.

My writing is hovering near the surface because I’m emotionally overwhelmed these days.  The end of things.

I have a hard time letting go, even when I know when I’m ready to move on.

 

I’m learning so much I’m afraid to stop learning.

But learning is in the silence, the rumination between two puzzle pieces – past and present – reconciling their differences before fusing together.

Learning is in the silence of transforming what you thought yesterday.

You are what you think today.  An accumulation of the past.