The Ground Beneath My Feet
Vol. 16
Well hello there -
I have wanted to publish a newsletter for some time but have consciously held back. I am sitting in deep contradiction. Part of me feels that the mere practice of writing is what’s most important – the habit, the ritual, the challenge. The other part of me wants time. Time to consider, to think, to sit in boredom and confusion and uncertainty, and to let it all happen before writing about it. There are updates, there are life shifts, and there are moments, all worthy of their own newsletter, but for now, they will nest here as one. These moments exist across time and space but I’ve kept most in the present tense, from the perspective with which they were written. I am single. I live in Los Angeles. I tour with a band across the world. I cut my hair. I got rid of clothes. I am starting over. And for the first time in a long time, I am believing in myself, and that is scaring the shit out of me.
I spend a lot of time wondering what my younger selves would be thinking of my life at present. I’m not sure why their fictional perceptions play such an integral role in my life, (my cumulative work as an undergraduate student, a ten-month exhibition, investigated that very idea.) But somehow, their presence in my mind feels even bigger now. In many ways, I feel like I am getting closer to who I once was. Working in music, living in a big city, and surrounding myself with people who support and challenge and force me to grow, all feel like mirrors of my younger selves. Yet with that very knowledge, it all feels so new and uncertain. For one, when I was young, I thought I’d live in Paris and sing songs in sensuous velvet-studded bars while holding dirty martinis and wearing my mother’s thigh-high patent leather boots. Although I lived in Paris and consumed more martinis than most, I sang very little and spent a lot of time in my apartment. There were no blood-stained leather boots, and as much as I felt like I was becoming, I too felt lost.
Before I moved to Paris, my uncle gave me two small sterling silver spoons from the 19th or 20th centuries. One spoon represented Colorado, my hometown. Cavernous mountains are etched into the spoon’s handle with a river running between them and flowing into rolling hills. The other, Paris – the handle sculpted into an intricate Eiffel Tower. In the note, he offered one piece of advice I often return to: “Run towards something. Otherwise, you’ll spend the rest of your life running away.” Upon reading the note, I knew what he meant. I had spent so much of my life running away – to Scotland, to summer camp, to boarding school, to Asia – in hopes of finding someone or something or some light within me I could believe in. I reinvented, I absorbed, I impersonated, I melted away, all in hopes of fitting in, promising myself one day I could be me. I lived in Paris, I fell in love, and I graduated from college. I travel the world, I work seven days a week with very little sleep, I’m three months into being twenty-four, and feel, in so many ways, like I am just learning how to walk.
In all the chaos and confusion I feel in my head and my body, I am trying to let it all happen. My Lexapro is working (thank god) and being young, or maybe just being curious, is fueling me with enough energy and determination to keep going. But even with the speed with which my life is taking hold of me, I’ve tried my best to take moments for myself, to look around and soak it in. Whether that be an early morning walk, a coffee date with myself, a wander through an antique store, or stretching after waking up, I am opening myself to a few moments of complete selfishness, because frankly, I deserve it.
I spent five weeks in Europe this summer. I visited twelve countries, nineteen cities, and left with so many hotel room keys and piles of mismatched change, that I continue to find accidental memorabilia inside jacket pockets and zipper pouches. By the end of tour, I was drinking six cups of coffee a day, smoking cigarettes whenever I needed a break, eating loads of chocolate in green rooms and on the bus, and falling asleep in almost every cab ride I took. Fatigue is a word I understand more clearly now, a tiredness of everything – mind, body, spirit. I never felt rested. Touring with a band in Europe has been one of the greatest privileges of my life. Being able to play a role, no matter how small, in the creation of a show, is a dream of mine I am shocked I have already fulfilled.
As I write, I am in Bend, Oregon for our second leg of the tour around the Pacific Northwest. I am nervous, unsure, and just as anxious as I was before the last tour. My only saving grace is that more people know my name and I’ve done this all before. But in truth, I am still faking it. I’m not sure what is right, I’m pretty sure I know what’s wrong, but in the heat of the moment, I just attempt to remind myself that I can do it. But the longer I am here, the more I am beginning to realize just how much everyone around me feels that way too. Everyone is living with something we cannot see. The barista who hikes on her off days in hopes of one day climbing Mount Everest. The guitarist in a band who makes his own music on the side. The cab driver who flies a plane simulator to one day become a pilot. The assistant who has his own dreams of walking onto a stage. Some fake to survive, others, like me, fake to belong, and some fake because they do not know what else to do. Part of becoming is dismantling the fraudulent shields used to keep us safe, revealing something raw, vulnerable, and unprotected, but real instead.
I arrived in Los Angeles with my entire life strapped to my back. A ten-foot U-haul truck with my car hooked on the rear felt at once like so much and also like so little. “This is all of me,” I remember thinking as I pulled away from my home in Colorado to head West. It is a bizarre idea, packing up a life. You leave so much behind when you tape up boxes and wrap glass cups in paper, sometimes on purpose, other times on accident. Materials things, like my belt and retainer case, my vintage Utz chips tin and bedside table – artifacts left in Denver from a previous life somehow abandoned in my rush to move forward. Maybe I’ll go back for them and others I will mourn. The friction felt when we travel to new spaces, our lives pathetically filled within bags and boxes, is built largely on the unknown, but also, for me, on the fact that I am just these few things. I am aware that one’s life is in no way a reflection of the things they possess. In many ways, the fullest of lives are those spent with nothing at all. But things, like my silver tea cups gifted to me following my birth, my boxes of books from school and travels, the glass goblet I found in an antique shop in Reims, the vintage Chinese tea box lamp, and the small Japanese dishes built in the 40s after World War II, they mean something.
But today, I don’t have a belt, so I walked through boutiques to find one. Each one too stiff, their shine too bright, their smell too sterile. I knew what I was looking for was my own, an impossible task, three years of daily wear was the only way to achieve the texture, flexibility, and comfort I searched for. But eventually, I no longer yearned. I still don’t have a belt, I would like instead to hike up my pants every few steps but I need one if I want to be productive while I work, so I’ll find one this evening after I finish running around. I’ll wander through stores and try a few on, wish for the one I once had but remind myself that it isn’t the belt that made it special, but the life I live alongside it that did.
I’m in a coffee shop in West Hollywood. It is just before two o’clock in the afternoon. I’m in my neighborhood, my new home. There is something dramatically childlike in getting older, a palpable freedom that makes one giddy. As a child, you run free with ideas and perspectives, dreams and big ideas, often sheltered by those closest to you, telling you when to sleep, what to eat, and how to live. Now, so much of that childhood liberty feels to be reimagining itself within me, only now I have no bedtime. Instead, it is the pressure of the world that feels suffocating. Los Angeles has forced the confrontation of my dreams by seeing them lived by those around me. Expectations feel higher, my presence feels smaller, and my dreams feel more tangible. It’s fear that keeps me from starting, “Get out of your own way,” my boss often reminds me when I talk about what I wish for. That sometimes feels to be the hardest part, letting myself fly. I’m trying to step aside and let myself go, it’s getting better but I’m not there yet. LA feels at once like a runway strip with blinking lights on either side and also like a bird cage, the facade of freedom just beyond reach of the metal bars.
My current affections include dressing in all-black. Sure it’s New York, but frankly, not very me. It is, however, part of my job. When my boss is on stage, which is normally six days a week, so am I. Only he’s under the lights and I’m off to the side. To blend in, my work uniform is head to toe black. Currently, I’m wearing Doctor Martin low-top derbies, my Acne Studios wide-leg jeans, and a few black t-shirts, mostly thrited or from Jungmaven. When it’s sunny, I’m wearing Tom Ford aviator sunglasses gifted to me by a dear friend.
I’ve been reading a lot. Housemates by my college advisor and mentor Emma Copley Eisenberg, James by Percival Everett, Bellies by Nicola Dinan, Weight of the Earth by David Wojnarowicz, Martyr! by Kaveh Akbar, American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis, Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver, and The Uncensored Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde.
I’m eating salted cereal with blueberries and peanut butter, wheat crackers with Boursin, and drinking cortados with whole milk and extra dirty vodka martinis with three olives. I’m using Cerva Ve cleanser and La Mer moisurizer, Ollie & Co. finishing balm, an eyelash curler with aquafor for an extra lift, unscented body lotion as hair cream for less grip, and Dior Homme deodorant instead of cologne. I’m loving my vintage green beaded bracelet, stacks of books instead of tables, my reading knook in the corner of my room, and five o’clock dinners. I can’t take off my new waxed green denim jacket and amber Lucchese lizard skin boots, and in my back pocket each day I’m carrying a small pad of paper, souvenirs I’ve collected from hotel rooms around the world.
That is all for now.
Until soon,
C
xx
