Tick. Tock.

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Mortality knocked on my door today, utterly uninvited … that bitch.  I mean how rude. Here she is showing up as I am drifting happily along in the cheap hotel jacuzzi of my denial.  She hides her house warming gift in the middle of the thicket that is my pony tail. A gray hair. SONNOVABITCH.

And now some context …

We gray very slowly my family.  My mom at 64 has very few grays.  My Nana passed away at 78 still salt and pepper.  It was my expectation that my hair would stay brown (or whatever the hell color it is) until I was at least 40. But alas no. “Fuck you lady.” says The Universe.   “You gotta get old too.”

Heartless.  Just heartless.  I was able to get on with my day fairly well, although I could not escape the feeling that I was being chased by something, like … my future.  Visions of crumbly bones, sagging jowls, and Depends had me on the run.  Granted some of these fates are avoidable with dietary changes and an increase in exercise, but the water in this denial jacuzzi is so blasted warm and comfy that I don’t know if I feel like …

It’s not the dying part I’m worried about. It’s the growing old and “losing” the things I do like about myself. Like my taunt, clear skin.  Hell, I just started liking my fat ass and eventually it’s gonna get to looking like an empty trash bag.  It’s another one of those universal lessons on the impermanence of things I s’pose. “The only thing that is certain is uncertainty”, I hear Eckhart Tolle whisper in my head as I sob quietly into my youth rejuvenating tea.

It’s like 50 First Dates.  I have to keep finding ways to fall in love with myself everyday.  It’s a challenge that I’m up for most days, but others … well that’s where my jacuzzi comes in.  Join me.  The water’s nice ;).

Rosie.

So much to aspire to, so little time.

Unseen.

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I wish there was a way to “unsee” everything that I’ve seen in my career as a therapist. Well maybe not everything, as there has been a large amount of good. It’s just that there’s so much that comes with knowing.  If the story of Eden is true, then this is how they must have felt. Overwhelmed with the beauty and ugliness of the world, with each bringing its own type of pain. Beauty, no matter how beautiful in the end we know is as finite as our lives. Ugliness, when in the midst of it, seems to have no end.  I’m sleepy, and perhaps in a state of exaggerated emotion after a long night, but no matter how long I’ve done this it still doesn’t seem fair that babies should die and old folks are kept alive to suffer because “we just aren’t ready to let them go.”

Rosie.

All of my possessions.

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I’ve been a lil slow on the key stroke lately because I’m currently acting, and I have to say it’s been a strangely and wonderfully odd experience.  Each night I leave the stage I am utterly drained.  Think about Swayze in Ghost … okay well think about his situation in reverse. Every time he jumped into Whoopi‘s body (umm … yeah), he was completely drained afterwards.  For 2hrs four characters that were and are honest to God human beings inhabit the inside of me.  It’s like slicing the pie of my conscious self into four pieces, four very different pieces.  I try my best to have each “spirit” tell a 100% honest story  that usually begins in a place that I can personally relate to on some level.  It’s been like an exorcism sans the pea soup and holy water.  I never thought that I could love acting this much. Who knows, this might just be habit forming ;).

Rosie.

Gratitude by the hour.

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Alright, so rather than go on a long and winding diatribe about how grateful I am for all I have (see my Facebook wall for that), I’m going to give you a quick and dirty trick I picked up for keeping gratitude with me all year.  While my friend Mekkah and I were working on some project or another, a robotic voice announced the time.  It grabbed my attention even while we were up to our necks in concept creation. She quickly informed me that I wasn’t loosing my mind and that it was her computer announcing the time.  She sets a reminder for every hour so she isn’t late to her appointments.

A light bulb turned on immediately. It had to be  some type of divine intervention, but in that very moment I decided to add the same setting to my computer, only I was going to do it to remind myself to be grateful. Every hour, on the hour (when my comp is on, which is a lot) for the last few weeks  a robotic Australian voice announces the time to which I simply respond “thank you”.  I am already seeing results in the form of a mild shift in my attitude. When I’m frustrated or angry and I hear the time, I still say thank you. That millisecond taken reminds me that it’s never as bad as I think it is. If I’m in a great place, it reminds me to give thanks for that too.

There’s my trick.  I hope you find use for it or something similar.

Happy Thanksgiving!!!

Rosie.

1096: A Testimony.

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I woke up yesterday morning at approximately the same time I did on November 10, 2009.  On November 10, 2012, I knew exactly where I was; at home.  I was in my less than savory bedroom with clothes in need of washing, papers in need of filing.  My first thought, as usual, was “Okay, what do I have to do today?”  November 10, 2009 was worlds different.  I woke up not knowing where I was and only vaguely sure who I was.  Dirty clothing and assorted documents were the least of my worries.  I was sick, in my body, in my mind, and worst of all in my spirit.  That morning I knew, in a way that old women tend to know things, that if I didn’t stop getting high, I was going to end up dead or in a situation where I sorely wished I was.

It’s hard to describe the type of desperation one feels during a bottom.  The closest I could come would be to say it’s like an animal caught by it’s leg in a steel trap.  That would be the obsession element of addiction.  You’re there, stuck, you know something bad is going to happen if you don’t get out.  You’d be willing to chew your leg off to get out, but you can’t. You’re too terrified to think.  So, that’s the cycle of thought:

I want to stop.  I can’t.  I’m afraid.

(repeated so often, in my case that I was ready to drive off a bridge … literally.)

Then, you hear the hunter coming.  It’s the compulsion element and you know once it has a hold of you, your ass is done.  During active addiction, when the hunter shows up, you freeze up.  He gets you, fricassees that ass, and serves you for supper. The wonderful part about a bottom, if you’re realize you’re at one, is you become willing to chew your fucking leg off (or anything else for that matter.)

On November 10, 2009 I chewed my leg off, well I should say, I removed the trap with the help of my family, my friends, a great recovery program, and my higher power.  Yesterday marked the three year anniversary of my escape from the trap, the thing with addiction is, the trap is out their waiting for me at any time.  The minute I forget that and think it’s  safe for me to test the hunter, is the moment of my assured doom.

While I must stay vigilant, being clean for me hasn’t just been about existing in a bubble while being afraid of my own shadow.  It’s been the opposite in fact.  Abstaining is just that, not using while white knuckling it through existence. Recovery has turned my world on it’s  ass challenging everything I ever thought about my life and myself.  It makes me realize just how great things can be. I have lived more boldly, honestly, and beautifully in the last three years than I had in the thirty-three that proceeded them.  Gratitude only scratches the surface of what I feel about my life right now.

Someone told me the other day that my story was an inspiration. I cringed a little, as compliments make me squirm, but it’s true.  Well no, maybe my life a testimony.  That’s it!  It’s a testimony that an overweight black girl raised poor in a housing project can persevere through sex abuse, being raised by and then becoming a single parent, a turbulent marriage, addiction, frequent battles with self hatred and loneliness  and host of other internal cluster fucks. The beauty of it is, my testimony isn’t the only one.

So, on my anniversary I’d like to wish you the best life you can possibly live.  Make it your testimony, your highest truth.

Rosie.

1095 days + today = One day at a time.

Election Anxiety or Today is the Last Day Before Tomorrow.

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It did not occur to me until two days ago how much anxiety I have around this election. It, like most of my anxiety, stems back from my childhood. One of my earliest memories is of me waking up the Wednesday after Election Day, the first day of the Reagan presidency. I was probably 4 or 5. My mother was rushing around to get me dressed to take me to day care. She said something while she was dressing me that I promise you I can remember until this day: Hurry up, so I can get you there while you can still go.

I was terrified. I didn’t understand that she meant the vouchers that allowed me to attend day care would be snatched under this presidency. All I heard was that I would no longer be able to go to this happy place, with pleasant smells, singing, coloring, and pleasant familiar faces that I’d become used to. A few months later it came to pass. My mom lost her child care vouchers.  I spent most of my days in front of a television (mostly PBS thank God) with my Nana who had to quit her job, that was also an asset to the family, in order to take care of me while my mom worked longer hours at what was then New Jersey Bell where she’d worked since she was sixteen. I said all that to say my mom was anything but a leech to the system. she went out and got it daily and appreciated the support she did get when she got it.

A year or so later came crack, drug wars, joblessness, further urban decay, and the destruction of anything resembling stable mental health care system. Enter the menacing issue of homelessness then plop me, small child with a vivid imagination, in the middle and it’s not hard to see why I believed Reagan was Satan incarnate. Somebody had a good time during the Reagan era. but it damn sure wasn’t the people I grew up with.

Mitt Romney strikes that kind of fear in me. There’s is such a disconnect between him and people of color and poor people that it should seem obvious that he shouldn’t be leading this multicultural nation, but alas this only seems obvious to people of color. I don’t know if there is a point to this except to say that I’m frightened. I’m not even sure how justified it is, but I am. I’ll await the results like everyone around the country and world today. Despite the results, I know we’ll survive. What that survival looks like, is another matter all together.

Rosie.

As IT is.

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It’s 9:10 am.  I drop my kid off at school and breeze down the highway trying to decide where I want to eat breakfast.  My breakfast date is going to be an hour late or so.  I’m eat-my-hand hungry so I decide to segue to our newly regular bagel shop.  I dash off highway 277 at the N. Davidson exit and plan on making  a U and getting back on the highway.  Not so much.  I run into a line of disgruntled  commuters waiting on a the AM train.  They caught it, and not in a good way.

Instead of looping around and avoiding the sure to be 10 minute or so wait as the train idles through, I decided to sit. I put the car in park even, exhibiting a type of patience that’s becoming easier to as I get older.  Immediately my “gut” tells me to continue reading the chapter in Eat, Pray, Love that I’d been in this morning (I shan’t be judged for my literary choices.)  I do what my gut tells me, read the following, and promptly burst into tears in the line of disgruntled commuters:

“The Bhagavad Gita — that ancient Indian Yogic text — says that it is better to live your own destiny imperfectly than to live an imitation of somebody else’s perfection. So now I have started living my own life.  Imperfect and clumsy as it may look, it is resembling me now, thoroughly.”  — Eat, Pray, Love the 30th bead.

Ever since I’ve decided to go to school, got accepted, and found out that my past financial follies were keeping me stateside for the moment, I’ve been looking at my life.  I’ve been examining and reexamining it as one does fruit before purchasing.  I looked at all the imperfections. I sueeze myself through introspection to find that I was, as my friend Shelly would put it, R.Y.P.E. (realizing my potential everyday). That’s pretty dope, because I’m now recognizing that many don’t and never will.

In the end if my writing career and my life mean anything to others I want it to be an example of how to live life fully and on its own terms measuring successes with one’s own yard stick.  It may not be a perfect life.  I may never stop falling for the wrong men or get myself together financially, but I’ll never stop trying all while living the best life I know how; the one I have.

Salud!

Rosie.

Wait!  Funny how things come full circle.  When I wrote the following piece, I thought it was abut my blog.  Little did I  know 🙂 : As is.

Coming Out.

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Once upon the time in the ghetto, there was a little girl whose mother had taken very ill in her lumbar spine.  Her mother would be restricted to bed for at least a few weeks, this making for the most terrible of living conditions as there was, no interweb, no DVR, No TiVO … hell there was no cable in this particular ghetto (not until the mid-nineties anyway). The little girl was in a state of deep despair.

“How,” she pondered “will I save mother from a fate worse than death … BOREDOM!”

She wouldn’t ponder for long before an idea came to mind.  After gathering bed sheets, shoes, kerchiefs and anything else she felt might be useful the girl mounted a one woman show: Gone with the Wind Redeaux! With pain staking attention to character movement, vocalization, and wardrobe she seamlessly became:

Scarlett O’Hara –

“Fiddle-De Dee … I will never go hungry again!  Tara!”

Mammy –

“You ain’ spose tuh show yo bossom fo three’o clock Miss Scarlett, but go’on since you’s a hoe anyhow!”

Ashely –

“I would love you Scarlett darling, if I weren’t a homosexual married to my cousin, and if you were a man.  A hot, hot man.”

Melanie –

“Oh Scarlett. Sweet Scarlett.  I’m Ashley’s beard.  Besides, only a woman can give you what really need.  Ooo look there between my thighs, I think I’m having a baby.”

and

Rhett –

“You ought to be kissed, and often, and by someone who knows how! And I don’t give a damn!”*

*which oddly explains why the little girl as an adult often fell in love with emotionally unavailable men who screwed like champions.
 

Guess what?  The heroine of this trite and tale, is yours truly.  I never conceived of my childhood shenanigans being anything more than me being silly to get people to laugh, and more important, like me.  What I was being though, was an actor.  In the last few years I have sheepishly studied the craft  particularly enjoying dialect and character study.

Despite being officially learned, and pretty good at it by the assessment of others, I’m often too intimidated to put myself on stage. I have forced myself through here and there, but now I’ve committed to do the first honest to God play  that I’ve done in years. There are multiple roles that will force me to flex every acting muscle I have, to utilize every drop of dialect training I got and …

I LOVE IT!!!!

I’d forgotten how much I love it. There is a reason why I choose to consider myself a “theatre artist”.  It is because while writing is and always will be my first love, I want it all. I am theatrically poly amorous.  My attention starved inner child – you know, the one that parodied one of the most racially inflammatory movies of our time for my bed ridden my mother – craves the adoration that only a live audience, captive or liberated, can provide.

I shall not deny myself that pleasure a moment longer.  Why did I wait so long to embrace this side of myself?!  No matter. It is here and now that I make my confession to the world: I. AM. A THESPIAN!

Rosie.

P in pretty.

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“Yo!”, I  was thinking as I heard this song on my drive home from work this morning.  “This song used to be the SHIT!”  I was about 19 when it came out and as about self-conscious/self-loathing as I could get.  Outwardly, there was no good reason for me not to think I was “thebomb.com” (I hate Tamar. Why then, am I quoting her ? Anyway …) I was gorgeous, had all my teeth, a bad ass shape, and flawless skin.  My insides however, were about as ugly as they could come.  I had blinders on.  I could see little of my external beauty and none on the inside.  I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: Awareness is a BEAST.  Looking back it’s utterly amazing the shit I did not know or could not see.   If I could’ve see myself then as I see myself now the world would not have been safe.  Either that or I wouldn’t have depending on how the other variable in the equation, my incessant need to self-destruct, played in.

It’s cool though, we “see” when we’re supposed to “see” and are never too old to shift our perspective.  As of right now though, to quote Yeezy : “Goddammit, I’m killin’ this shit!” and I’m killin’ it despite a few less teeth, a larger body with rickety bones, and the onset of adult acne (that apparently only I can see, which might mean I have dementia :/.)  All of my good feelings about me are beginning to originate on the inside and spill outward.  The foundation for my new attitude is my growing ability to accept myself just as I am. Thank God for moments of clarity like this.  Every now and again I throw the blinders on, but Awareness eats through them with the ill x-ray vision pretty damn fast these days. Life is beautiful, and so am I.

Rosie.

Speaking of songs that make me feel hot over 30 … 😉 yowsah!

Vote, and shut the fuck up. Please.

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ImageOn the eve of this evening’s final Presidential debate, it has become painfully obvious to me that I’m over it.  All over it.  Social networking battles to the death containing little or no semblance of truth, the ending of friendships over comment strings all serves to do what exactly?  Send you to bed pissed off, or worse, out into the world pissed off looking for a release.  Here’s a little bit of insight that hit me the other day. Voting is a very self-centered thing. Our current democratic system plays on every fear, real or imagined, that we have THEN asks our paranoid, self-obsessed crazy asses to go out and select someone to lead the entire nation.  We go, and we vote our own needs and rarely the needs of others.  If you say that’s not true then you’re lying to someone you should never lie to … you.

I know I’m not going to vote in a way that may necessarily benefit a rich corporation more than it’s going to benefit my poor black artist ass.  Why would I? It’d be self-defeating.  Are there solutions that would be mutually beneficial to all American citizens?  Hell, probably.  But, that’s not what I’m here to write about.  I mainly just want to say that the odds of anyone’s minds being changed by endless online banter and diatribes, t-shirts, bumper stickers, etc. are slim to fuckin’ none. So hush.  Go do something more productive, like volunteering and being as selfless as you are with your vote.

Me?  I’m plotting my campaign for 2016. Since world domination is clearly just one rageful tweet away. Governing an entire country can’t be that damn hard.

Rosie.