I Feel Like an Off-Broadway Play That Took a Hiatus

And then came back to low ticket sales

Themes: Being so anxious and worried and sad it’s hard to function, nachos, love

It has been a while! The longest break I’ve taken since I started writing this newsletter, like 3 years ago. It’s been maybe 6 weeks? I don’t know. I have a draft post that I was writing into over the course of that time but I decided those thoughts are not for public consumption, and I wanted to start afresh.

I have been very depressed and sad! I had a birthday, then I got sick, then I got scared I was sick, then it was EJ’s birthday, then I came back to New York, a lot has been going on. I wasn’t sad and upset the whole time, but enough to rob me of the impulse to connect and share that is usually motivating me to write.

I pulled a tarot card this morning that was the ten of swords, if you’re familiar it’s a man laying on the ground with a lot of swords, (ten), sticking out of his back. He’s partially under a red blanket and facing the ocean. This card indicates a deep feeling of betrayal and sadness that you generally need to accept to move on in your life. This is DBT! Radical acceptance! Showing up in the cards, very beautiful. I laughed when I pulled the card, because it’s so funny to be feeling *off* and be faced with a stabbed and bleeding man in the surf. But honestly I relate to him!! The ocean is right there and it would be so lovely if he wasn’t bleeding out. But he’s not actually! He’s okay! And so am I.

I wrote in my journal this morning, and that was so good. Journal writing is medicinal, I recommend it to anyone. EJ was saying he doesn’t feel like he has enough thoughts to capture, or that they aren’t interesting or important, and I was arguing that time is what gives them importance (which I stand by) but I also forgot this thing that happens when journaling, which is the act of writing often makes you find new thoughts you didn’t know you had. So in writing something, often it elicits another thought right behind the first one that was hidden to you previously. For example, my dad gave me a birthday card when we went to see him and I wrote that in my journal, but writing that made me feel what I felt about it, so I wrote that. Writing one thought pulls the other thoughts out. Worth it!

This morning I unpacked and cleaned my room which felt good. Someone is baking something nearby that smells amazing. My new roommate is here and I brought out the DBT packets because for the second time there were dishes in the sink. He said he was clean!!! But I think this is an example of a normal situation that’s triggering an abnormal reaction in me because of past history I have. I’m so on edge with bad roommate stuff, I’m struggling to communicate from a place of calm because I can’t tell what’s normal or a sign of bad things to come, like the bad situation I just got out of. I drafted a text that felt okay and sent it, and he was very normal and nice back. It’s hard to create a new dynamic in a space where there was a bad one.

I was disappointed in myself today because I checked the jiu jitsu calendar after being up for a while and saw I was going to miss a class I would have wanted to go to and there weren’t any more today. But I think it’s good for me to rest, I still have some mucus in my throat from being sick, and I haven’t been sleeping great. Just waking up and having a hard time passing back out.

I’m watching Alias and I really like it. I think what people think Buffy is doing, Alias is doing. As a Dark Angel fan I didn’t want to watch Alias for a long time because it feels like it’s doing the same thing but came out after, so copying, then Dark Angel got cancelled and Alias stayed on for 5 seasons so I was bitter. But it’s good. It’s a striking combination of misogyny and talent, where it feels like network execs wanted to dress a hot girl up in outfits and wigs and make her run around, but the hot girl they chose is a great actress so she’s making it feel compelling and good despite the sex parade they’re putting her through.

I was looking through my journals at EJ’s house and found my Weight Watchers diary where I kept entries of what I ate everyday and how many points it was, and how much I exercised. This was in 7th grade and I showed it to EJ to kind of be like, “Isn’t this insane?” but to him it was heartbreaking and sad, because I wasn’t that much older than Nicholas, and he said I deserved to be a kid, just playing and having fun.

That, hit me. I was looking through the journals to try to find one from high school to see what my experience of my parents was when I was living there. Was I happy? What did it feel like? I couldn’t find the ones I was looking for, but realizing that a. I didn’t feel comfortable to talk to anyone about this and b. it felt in some way enforced by my mom was hard. Like that I knew me losing weight would be a good goal they agreed with. My mom hated her body and was always trying to lose weight and would talk to me about my body and eating and exercise and weight and I knew at the time that losing weight was what she wanted for me. I don’t know what she would say about it now, probably that she just wanted/wants me to be “healthy.” She still conflates weight with health and wants weight loss for herself and me.

Reading the entries and knowing how far I’ve come, but also how much of that is still with me is really tough. I still look at my body critically and focus on size as an indicator of my worth. That’s difficult to stomach. I’m 36, how much longer will this be the narrative inside me? It feels so unenlightened to care about this. Especially when I have the love of my life and he loves my body. It’s exposing that it’s not a means to an end, or influenced by reality, it’s just me. I don’t want to feel that way towards my body. I’ve done a lot and come a long way but I think it made me realize there’s still a lot to unpack.

I did therapy high recently and that really helped me to be open and vulnerable in a way I’m not usually. To myself, about things that happened in the past that I decided were okay then without really seeing if they were with me now. They were not, actually!

The tooth saga continues. I need an endodontist and boy do they not want you to have one if you have Medicaid. I’ve just accepted that it will take a long time. (It’s already been 2 months!). I also want to switch my health insurance back to Healthfirst from Affinity, which seems to suck. I liked Healthfirst and they changed it and I want to change it back.

I’ve been working at the carousel more and that’s nice. It feels good to be making money regularly and not be so strapped. Look out halal carts! I have 12 dollars all the time now! I’m looking forward to having a regular shift for the first time since I started working there over a year ago. Woohoo!

My fish is sick and I’ve done so many things to try to help him. I just ordered a heater and some almond leaves which are supposed to help, I hope he can hang in until they come. If these don’t work I have literally no idea what to do.

I want to go to Costco today but I have to work myself up to it. It’s always such an ordeal when you don’t have a car. I take the train an hour, then shop in this underground cavern with no windows, then take a cab home, then drag everything up two flights of stairs and put it all away. And it’s expensive! But it will be nice to have all the things when I have them.

For EJ’s birthday I planned the whole day and he seemed to really like it. I woke up early to make a pan of breakfast nachos, complete with veggie sausage, eggs, avocado, and candles. We ate while finishing Joe Versus the Volcano, and incredible early Meg Ryan Tom Hanks movie that I LOVED, then drove an hour and a half to Charlotte for a day of escape rooms. Before dating EJ I had done an escape room once, because a friend starting working at one and needed friends and family to run a practice room on. There were 8 people in there and it was chaos.

Now, I have done many escape rooms in multiple countries! EJ loves and is very good at puzzles, and that’s what these are. A room full of puzzles! It’s really fun to do with him, not only because the pressure feels off because I know he could solve everything by himself probably, but also because we work really well together, we complement each other really well. On his birthday we did four escape rooms (with a break in the middle) and it was so fun.

I had the idea to do multiple escape rooms in different places and when I was calling around to check some of them out I talked with a lovely woman in Charlotte who co-owns/designed a place with her husband that had incredible ratings and seemed really good. They had four rooms and on EJ’s birthday, the day I was asking about, they were closed for a private event in the early evening. So, because it was just the two of us, she opened the entire place up for us and we had the whole thing to ourselves. Locked the door, private tour, ordered food, had beer, the works. We did the first two games (magician and police themed-boooo) then we had Indian food and drinks, and did the next two (Area 51 and gene splicing themed).

Afterwards they invited us into the control room where they ran each game and had a wall of monitors and computers and each digitized element of every game. It was so cool to see, and felt like a very special experience.

Afterwards we went to Pinky’s, a restaurant with Beyond patties and cool burgers that claimed to not have a discernible theme but EJ decided ‘weird heads’ and I think he hit the nail on the head. There was a Frankenstein, (Frankenstein’s MONSTER the English major in me wants to correct), Lucha Libre masks, Easter Island statues, a lot of weird heads. We split two burgers (white trash burger with crispy onions, provolone, spicy ranch and fried pickles, and the burger of the month: avocado, jalapeños, lime crema and maybe also provolone) and tater tots with wasabi ranch. I got a margarita that was bad and I didn’t drink that was taken off the bill at the end, thank you to our server who was very nice.

Then we drove back to Winston-Salem and got the kids and went to Coldstone for some ice cream. I got cookie dough (which had NO chunks of cookie dough, scam) and peanut butter ice cream with butterfingers in it. EJ got a chocolate with I think almonds and coconut, Nora got mixed mint and lemon, and Nicholas got a strawberry cheesecake milkshake? Then also a side of rice from Chipotle next door, lol. We tried to play birthday questions with them, a game James taught us when it was my birthday, but they didn’t really latch on to the idea and mostly abandoned it. We did scratchers and dropped them back off, then at home I gave EJ my present which was a watercolor of Colton, their German Shepard who passed away this year who EJ and Melissa got when he was a puppy. I also pre-ordered a new book of poems by Billy Collins, a poet EJ really likes, which is about dogs and illustrated with watercolor portraits by a woman whose name I’m forgetting. Then I think we got high and watched something and ate leftovers. It was a really nice trip, my nervous system was so relaxed.

It was Mother’s Day, that was weird- I saw a lot of content from people who love their moms who are still alive, and then a lot of content who love their moms who are dead. Not a lot of content for the middle ground, people who love our moms who are alive but we don’t speak to because we’re trying to work out our relationship with them that has been harmful to us. Hallmark hire me!!

I saw a beautiful play, Hold Me in the Water I really liked and another play Last Bimbo of the Apocalypse that I didn’t really like. Hold Me in the Water was the most accessible play I’ve ever seen, there was live captioning for all the words, a quiet area in the lobby if you wanted to take a break, the lights were dimmed but not off, you were encouraged to get up at any time, and all visuals were announced by the performer. I really enjoyed it. Last Bimbo I found a little forced and insensitive and shallow, with a lot of potential but not a final product I loved.

In personal news, there’s a girl I went to college with who lives in Israel, and moved there from America at some point after college and works for a non-profit that does work with refugees and I always was trying to figure out, is this a Zionist organization that does humanitarian work or is it a genuinely good org doing hard stuff in a tough place and after a few years of wondering I went on a rabbit hole that gave me my answers and unfortunately it is the former. Sad.

I’m trying to hold the complexity of the world in me, that it is both fucked up and sad and devastating and terrible, but also beautiful and gorgeous, wonderful, exciting and hopeful. It’s really scary to be alive and witnessing so much corruption, violence and greed and feel like you don’t have a clear channel for how to stop it or help. Figuring out how to live and love under these conditions is the thing I struggle with most these days. I hate this administration but I also hate democrats who support a lot of the same policies, in a quieter way. For me it’s so simple: use the money from the people to fund things that help the people. I saw a meme that was explaining (lol) that people have a natural distrust for government because they’ve only ever experienced a capitalist government. Yes, queen! But also, anarchy!

I am obsessed with The Rehearsal this season, forever and always but this season especially. It’s so insanely good I hope everyone is watching it. I am convinced Nathan Fielder is a social psychologist at heart but also a comedic genius and he has found a way to blend the two in the most profound way. Being alive at the same time he’s making art is a blessing. History unfolding!

Okay, this is enough for now. Thanks. Some pictures:

Thank you so much for reading!!!

Julie