May

On Now: The music muse, starting over, and being okay with not being ready

May was the sky cracking open and fire in the dark and writing until the music stopped. It was voice memos and breaths that made me shake and eating whole chocolate bars in the sun. It was the searchlight moon and fireflies flickering like stars in the trees. It was baby birds in my hands and not knowing how to trust that things are going to be okay. It was walks in the warm rain that already felt like summer and the feeling of being on the edge of something really special. It was French sparkling wine and trying to find the pivot without rushing, grasping, doubting. It was brioche croutons and picnics in the park and new friends with the names of birds. It was my son moving to a big kid bed and no longer wearing diapers and me being ready and not ready all at once. It was armfuls of lavender and a surprise dinner orchestrated by my husband to be celebrated for my role as Mother. It was chocolate stout and buttercream and blowing out all my wishes. It was singing on the way to the record store and my son finding a Penny Lane 45 to add to his collection. It was reading poems at the dinner table and sidewalk chalk bouquets and watching the cygnets flourish at the water’s edge. It was rocking out with my son in the living room to the same CDs I listened to when I was in high school. It was crying outside in the woods with strangers and finally understanding love. It was writing and not writing and being okay with both. It was dancing in the kitchen to Stevie Nicks with my son at his request and feeling the growing weight of him in my arms. It was sparklers in his eyes in the dark and him saying the sparks look like snowflakes. It was hawks in the trees and the first dahlia and trying not to take steps backward. It was ripping up the old flooring and starting over and thinking this time it will be different. It was seedlings sprouting out of red solo cups and clearing space and saying the words even when they’re hard to say. It was waiting even though waiting is one of the hardest things I’ve ever had to do.

WHAT I’M READING

What I Talk About When I Talk About Running by Haruki Murakami

I've had this book for a long time but never got around to reading it. I've loved Murakami for over a decade, and he is one of the writers whose books I buy without even looking up the premise. What I Talk About When I Talk About Running was the perfect pre-bedtime read for where I am in my life right now. I'm doing the most self-healing I've ever done, and of course, it's happening when we're in a wobbly financial state. My brain is going a million miles an hour all day and night, my emotions are heightened, and I'm just trying to remember to take deep breaths. I tried to read The Poisonwood Bible, but I don't have the mental or emotional capacity to take in the depth of that story right now, so that's going to be my read for June. 

When I lived in Los Angeles, I was a runner. I ran to keep myself sane, and I wrote for the same reason. Murakami's book ties these two seemingly unrelated things together in a way that resonates with my life. His discipline is something I could relate to pre-motherhood, but since my son was born, I have had a more easygoing approach. I'd like to think it's a good thing, but in terms of writing and getting the damn thing done, it's probably not. It's probably why I've been working on my novel for almost three years, forever starting and stopping, changing the story, not sticking with it. I want to tap back into the Murakami of it all—the marine-like discipline and unabashed confidence that leaves no room for doubt or procrastination. I can feel this season coming, but it's not now, and I'm okay with this no longer being my forever state. The older I get, the more I realize that most things in life are a season and not everything has to happen all at once, all the time. 

I read a quote by Arriel Vinson where she said, “You can work as hard as you want to work or say you’re working as hard as you want to work, but the book is ready when it’s ready and you’ll know when it’s ready, but you also have to be ready.” It resonated with me because yeah, the book isn’t ready because I’m not ready. That’s just the truth of it. Maybe I'm just letting myself off the hook, but damn, it felt good in my body to acknowledge that.

At first, I had a hard time taking in the prose of What I Talk About When I Talk About Running, or I should say, the lack of prose. It was almost too laid-back and not at all what I would’ve expected from Murakami, but after a while, I allowed myself to lean into it. Once I accepted it, I actually started to love how low-key it was. It felt like just sitting with Murakami in a cafe while he told me about these two great loves of his life.

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WHAT I’M LISTENING TO

“Did I Ruin You” by Era Nash (my husband)

My husband recently released a new song, and out of his entire beautiful catalog of music, this is my absolute favorite piece he's ever created. The first time I heard it, I was sitting at his computer with his giant headphones on while he was waking up our son from his nap. I just broke down, sobbing with my face in my hands, my shoulders shaking. The response was so raw and violent; I didn’t see it coming. Clearly, I had something that needed to be released. Since then, I've listened to it again and managed to keep my composure. The last time, I let the music muse take me and wrote until the music stopped. This is what came out…

When you finally, after the longing 
fades and the air settles, take a deep breath 
and see what’s left of the one you love. 
When they lay their body on yours 
in the blue dark, and its lightness 
makes you question whether it ever existed. 
Not it as in their body, but as in their love. Surely 
it was real. You saw the bright and brilliant fury 
of it light up the morning with a tangerine roaring. 
Was it the years, the years of yearning and wanting, 
of waking and only half-sleeping that ruined you? 
That ruined me. Us. Was it the fights disguised 
as passion, disguised as nurture, disguised as love? 
This is how I love you. Don’t you see me fighting 
for you and for us? Isn’t the fighting enough? No. 
It was the ordinary wordless nights that rolled 
into heavy mornings with everything you needed to say 
collecting at the base of your throat in a watery burden. 
A drowning. The weight of talking about nothing 
or not talking at all, a screaming silence 
like bones crushing. You can hear it and feel it 
and yet you can’t change it. What happens then, 
when the weight is gone, the quiet is lifted, 
and still, the fields of your heart are on fire? 
You don’t know whether to rage or to grieve, 
and so you stand in awe of your own power to destroy 
a life. The orange flash warning of love, the darkening 
sky of love, the back-when-yearning of love, 
the held chaos ruin, the burning ache.

Healing and Healing, Still

EMDR Intensive

This month, I had the opportunity to undergo an EMDR intensive using the Internal Family Systems (IFS) modality. It’s a four-hour deep dive into your core limiting beliefs, childhood trauma, and how these factors shape your present. This approach is a gentle and compassionate way to understand and address difficult aspects of ourselves. It takes us back to the past to heal but doesn't leave us there. It’s incredibly powerful. Next month, I’ll be sharing an in-depth piece on this experience for my paid subscribers because the raw truths are too tender to share so openly. For now, I want to express how grateful I am to have had this opportunity to heal and show compassion to myself. Before I started therapy, I had no sense of self-compassion. Now, it comes effortlessly, and I’m amazed by that shift alone.

When my therapist first suggested the intensive, I thought I wouldn't be able to do it because it’s not covered by insurance and I couldn’t allocate the funds to pay for it, so I told her that once we were back on our feet and feeling a bit more stable financially, I’d reach out about it. Then I wrote it on my manifestation list. I wanted to manifest the money needed for this intensive because I truly believed it would help me. A few days later, out of nowhere, my mom’s best friend, a long-time family friend, reached out to me and said she wanted to deposit the exact amount I needed for the intensive into my account. She knew nothing about the intensive or its price and just said she wanted to help me out. I was so grateful to see the manifestation come through so quickly and booked the intensive for the very next week. I can’t wait to share the full experience with you.

I’m just so grateful for the financial support, for my therapist who truly sees me and all of my gifts, for my husband who makes space for me at my worst and my best and gives me the time I need to do this work, and of course for my son, who since the moment he was born has been guiding me back home to my whole, worthy, and authentic self—the self I lost so long ago. What a beautiful gift it is to share this life with him.

Starting Over

My mom moved out, which was a manifestation in itself, and you can read all about it here. We’ve been working on starting over with what was once our guest room and then became her room. I remember how excited I was for her to move in. I had set up the room in hopes that she would one day fill it, and I was overjoyed when it finally happened. I put up a hat rack to hold her many baseball caps, placed her favorite shampoo in the shower—the one that smells like oranges—set out fresh towels, hung fairy lights, and cleared out the walk-in closet. 

When she finally moved in, I watched the room transform from a symbol of hope for me into the marred reality I had always experienced with my mother. The room was not cared for; it was neglected, destroyed, and treated with no respect at all. It was always dark and dirty, with so much clutter strewn across the floor that you could hardly walk through it. When people came over, I’d shut the door, pretending this wasn’t happening in my house—pretending, something I’d gotten really good at my entire life. My mom is sober, but in many ways, she still lives like an addict, an addict with unmedicated ADHD. It was a disaster. I wouldn’t let my son in there. He’d stand at the threshold and call for her to come play with him. Oof, not my favorite sight to see. At least he had someone protecting him from the dirt and disappointment inside, whereas my child self would be standing in the midst of it, with blackened feet and a sticky face, calling for her.

When she moved out, she left the room a mess with everything she no longer wanted. “Donate it,” she said, leaving it to me to clean up after her, which, of course, has been our pattern my entire life. Complaining to her about doing it herself was truly more work than just doing it myself, so I did. I filled my car with 60-gallon trash bags full of her unwanted things—the life she took for granted and didn’t give the love and care it deserved in the first place. She left drawers full of sentimental items—photographs, her copy of the little book of short stories I wrote about our life and dedicated to her, the piggy bank I gave her stuffed with love notes, her deceased dog’s paw print in clay, and so much more.

I have compassion for her because I know how hard moving is. I know her addictions have stunted her mind, even now, and I know how hard it is for her to perform any kind of adult executive functioning tasks. But still, what the actual fuck?

There was no thought like, “If I leave this here, my daughter will have to use her very limited time and dwindling energy to clean it up.” My daughter, who is already trying to keep her head above water while running a household, making all the decisions, figuring out a more financially secure situation, and taking care of all the beings that need and love her. My daughter, who is trying to heal herself from the trauma I caused her. My daughter, who is trying to be the best mother she can be for her son. My daughter, whom I love.

Okay, of course, she isn’t going to arrive at this place, but at the very least, she must see that whatever she doesn’t clean will be left to me. But she didn’t because she’s always been too wrapped up in her own present existence to think a second past the moment in front of her.

Once I got everything out of the room, my husband ripped up the unsalvageable carpet. No matter how much you cleaned it, it smelled like a hamster’s cage. He tore it out while I was in the EMDR intensive, moved the furniture all by himself, all while the baby napped. My husband is a goddamn hero. I hate that he always has to clean up after her. I’d been doing it my entire life, which didn’t make it okay, but I was acclimated. She was my mother, after all. But he didn’t sign up for this, and yet he did it anyway because this is what love looks like. 

I wish we didn’t have to redo the flooring to begin with. I knew we didn’t have the funds for actual hardwood, which is what we have throughout the rest of the house, so I figured we’d have to go with laminate or vinyl. I wanted to make that room feel like a home, but I had to be mindful of my resources at the moment, so on my manifestation list I wrote down that I wanted to refloor the room for under $400. I don’t know a thing about flooring, but that number seemed doable to me. 

My husband went to Home Depot to price it out while I was with our son at French music class. He met us there and showed me the receipt. It said $399.45. Right under $400. And it wasn’t the shittiest option either. It’s actually pretty nice tongue-and-groove vinyl in the color we wanted.

It seems like a small thing, I know, but this is the kind of stuff that makes a difference for me. It keeps my spirits up when things are hard. It builds my trust in the Universe. It puts me in my worth and my gratitude, and is there a better place to be?

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Next month I’ll be sharing a piece on worth—where it comes from, my own journey with it, and the both/and that shows up in building a life around worthiness.