322 Miles to Contentment

By Kyleigh Taylor

August 6, 2018

It’s 8:30 in the morning and I am sitting in the driver’s seat of a 12 foot moving truck parked on the street in front of the Budget of Allston. It was already 79 degrees when I went on a run three hours prior, and, not having showered, my sweat has dried to a white dusting on my calves and arms. Unfortunately I’m only getting saltier because at this moment, while Bostonians zip past me on Cambridge Street on their average Tuesday morning commute, I am crying.

That’s an understatement.

I am keening. Clothes-clenching, hiccup-ridden, eyes-slammed-shut and is-she-going-to-dislocate-her-jaw keening. And I still have two apartments to pack up, four state lines to cross, and three hundred and twenty two miles to go. 

Present Day

As I finish the first draft of this piece, I am pulling into South Station, Boston, on a Greyhound bus for my first visit back since I moved. It’s unusually warm for early March in New England (thanks, climate change), but the city is as pristine as always (Bostonions, do you know how good you have it?) and the breeze coming in from the harbor is intoxicating. Standing in front of the train terminal clock at the familiar intersection of Atlantic Avenue and Summer Street, I am a heart-flopping whirl of emotions: both giddy with excitement and somber with nostalgia. I hadn’t realized how much I missed it. But I also hadn’t realized how happy I am that I left. 

I didn’t have to go. No one had forced me to leave the city I had called home for eight years, and I hadn’t been particularly unhappy. But leaving had been inevitable. It had been inevitable because I could only last so long sitting on my couch and pretending I could simply summon fulfillment and contentment without putting in the work.

Adult life in Boston was not something I had ever truly desired for myself. I moved there for college and simply stayed because it was the easiest thing to do at the time. My career (you know, those three different jobs at which I was piecemeal developing the skills I hoped to propel me on the track I really wanted, don’t we love that gig economy?) was at a standstill. I could stay in my lane, keep working hard, and sure, some promotions would probably come my way, maybe opportunities at different organizations. Good things come to those who wait, and all that jazz, right?  Wrong. I was tired of biding my time, and I began preparing for a change. 

When did I know it was time to move on? When did I finally decide? WeIl, it wasn’t really a decision. I never asked for anyone’s opinion. I made no pros and cons lists. As I said, leaving had been inevitable. It felt like every year I was hitting a dead end and each new one had me considering taking the leap and moving to Chicago (where I had a support system)... or maybe San Francisco (people I meet always guess I’m from there?)… no wait! Minneapolis (a fast-growing regional theater scene).  Finally, an opportunity arose in which my partner was offered a spot in a master’s program, and there was never any question as to whether I’d stay in Boston. No more dead ends for me, I thought! So here I am in Philadelphia. 

The process has not been easy. I gave up a couple of steady paychecks (one of which included all the benefits) to hourly pay and inconsistent income again, dug into my savings until there was almost nothing left, and worked the worst job I have ever had for six miserable months. All of which exasperated pre-existing mental health conditions for which I no longer had that health insurance to help address. I know, it sounds like a lot of fun.

But honestly, in the long (year and a half) run, it was worth it, as I knew it would be. About nine months after moving and a lot of work, my life finally began to come together in the ways for which I had been waiting. Contentment is going to mean something different for everyone, but for me it means waking up in the morning to a cup of coffee and a good book, looking forward to my work, learning something new from colleagues who challenge me daily, and ending my day in a home I adore with the partner I love. I could have waited for all that to grace me in Boston, but it benefited me to take the chance on a new city, a new community, when it was offered. I have professional and personal goals that I am actively accomplishing, I can take stock of my own progress, and, at least for now, I’m not hitting any of those discouraging dead ends. 

So if I was so sure that making this move was the right thing to find happiness and fulfillment, why was I shuddering, sobbing, and snotting that 90 degree August morning while my partner sat quietly next to me, without condescension or exasperation, occasionally squeezing my hand. Well, I was pee-my-pants terrified to drive a moving truck across George Washington Bridge, duh.  If only there had been a banishing spell for sending the contents of our apartments those three hundred and twenty two miles, that I would have taken. 

Kyleigh works in front of house operations for theatrical venues and has keys to a lot of the most historic ones in Philadelphia. Her job generally consists of patiently listening to patrons of the arts complain about the temperatures in 150 year old buildings. She can also safely evacuate 2,500 people in under seven minutes. When not conducting post-show chats with the theater ghosts, she's either training for her next marathon or at home with a book and a cocktail.

Time To Wander

By Mimi Phan

When my mind drifts, I catch myself thinking about you, Cactus Man. When I find a pretty flower, or learn about the monarch butterflies, when I go to the nursery to buy milkweeds or see a golden barrel, my mind wanders to you.

My mind starts on a night in early 2019, a time of so much change in my life.  After returning to Los Angeles from an 8 month stint in New York, an unrequited cross country romance and a failed career change, I found myself alone watching Blue Planet looking for refuge from my unsatisfying world by learning about the mysteries of another.  My awe towards this underwater habitat reminded me that there are so many things in our world we don’t know about. It reminded me of how I felt after seeing totality during the 2016 solar eclipse, a moment when the New Moon comes between the Sun and the Earth and casts its shadow on our world.  An experience that recalls the image of ‘the pale blue dot’, a photograph taken of the Earth by the Voyager 1 at the behest of Carl Sagan only to reveal that in comparison to the vastness of the Cosmos, the Earth was just one blue pixel. After these reflections, I knew the only thing I needed to figure out was how to experience totality again. I knew that when July 2, 2019 at 4:38 PM came around, I would be in Chile experiencing two minutes and twenty-five seconds of pure otherworldly bliss.

As life goes, our good moments are only seen in contrast to our mistakes, and, fortunately on this one, I made plenty of them.  It started with the loss of several plane tickets because of missed connections and schedule changes. I invited a woman I knew from work to join me and she invited her friend.  We had a great time dancing to funk for miles through the Elqui Valley, until she pulled me away from my two minutes and thirty-five seconds of bliss to watch her video timelapse of our reactions from a few minutes before.  Until, once we arrived from a long drive from Vicuña to Valparaíso, she blew up at us because her friend and I were getting along and she felt left out. Until, once we returned to Santiago the night before my departure flight, they got into a screaming match at the hostel two hours before our fine dining reservation at Boragó.

Travel wasn’t perfect, but I made sure to get the two things I wanted out of the trip: another taste of totality and a 20 course meal from the best restaurant in Chile.  After their fight, I took only one of them to the restaurant. When we entered that large open space of grey walls and dried flowers, where through the glass windows we saw a pig roasting above flames against Chile’s night sky, there was only one other person in the restaurant: a man, sitting alone, donning a tie dye shirt. I wondered to myself, “what is this hippie doing in a nice ass restaurant like this?” then spent the rest of the night enjoying my meal.

The next day, I spent the few hours before my flight buying six bottles of wine and trying to figure out how to bring it all back to Los Angeles.  As someone who only travels with a carry on, it was rare for me to stand in the check in line before boarding. As I waited, a vaguely familiar man in a blue button up shirt, a backpacker’s pack, and a green duffel walked up to the business class line beside me.  At the gate, I found an empty seat and sat down. And there, one seat away from me, was you Cactus Man. It’s you that asked me, “were you at Boragó last night?” as I sat beside you, recalling how I called you a hippie, wearing the same exact outfit I wore the night before.  

We talked about the food at the restaurant. The solar eclipse in Chile.  The solar eclipse from 2016. Why we were there. Where we had been. Plants. Cactus. Roberto Bolaño. The Three Body Problem. I showed you the leaves I pressed. You showed me pictures of Copiapoa. We learned that we were both on the same exact flight, all the way back to Los Angeles.  We talked until we boarded. We met at baggage claim in Mexico City. In Los Angeles, we sent each other pictures of our plants in bloom. We talked about life. We kissed in the parking lot of the Hollywood Bowl until security told us to move our car. We kissed for an hour outside the gate of my house. We cuddled. We talked about our feelings. We talked about staying open with each other despite our vulnerabilities, despite what ever happened to us before. We listened.

My friend tells me that when you meet someone, don’t fall for their big stories.  Their stories cloud your judgment. Their stories suck you in. Their stories dissolve the weight of their actions by tying them to a life event that explains why they couldn’t be there for you.  When my mind wanders, I realize that I not only fell for your big story, but I also fell for the big story I told myself about us: that our serendipitous meeting meant something beyond the experiences we had together. That our connection all the way across the world translated to our connection at home.  When I listened to that big story, it became my crutch. It reminded me that as much as I wanted to lean into the vulnerability and experience joy, there was still fear on either side. I feared that despite our connections, something still wasn't right.  

My thoughts always end with an echo of something you said to me during our last phone call: that maybe we could check in at some future date. But like the monarch butterflies that migrated through Highland Park last year in a swarm of beautiful orange sunshine, unless the effort goes both ways, unless we make the effort to plant those native Southern California milkweeds, unless we give space for that transformation, for the metamorphosis of one phase to the next, some things in life are for a reason, a season, or a lifetime.  

Mimi Phan really does think that everyone should plant Southern California Milkweeds to save the Monarch Butterflies and that seeing a solar eclipse is one of the most humbling experiences in her life.

www.mimitphan.com

The Autobiography of Olive Parker

By Alexandra Lenihan

When I turned 27, I made a pact with myself. 

I decided that while I was 27, I was only allowed to wear red nail polish. If I ran out of red nail polish or I got sick of red nail polish, I had to wear either clear nail polish or no nail polish. If I wanted to wear pink or blue or sparkles, I would have to wait until I was 28. What a thrilling adventure!

At that time, my life was kind of a shit show. Pretty much everything I’d ever identified with was shifting under my feet. My father had just died, I lived 3000 miles away from my family, I was falling in love and coming out of the closet, and I was contemplating whether the career I’d been pining for since I was 12 was what I *actually wanted.* 

You guys know those phases when you’re like, “Yes, I’d love to listen to a podcast where one celebrity talks to another celebrity about their morning routine grounds them! I’d love to listen to 50!” That’s where I was. Looking for clues on how to make my life stable, while also becoming glamorous, and worthy of being interviewed. Looking for a roadmap on how to become who I was meant to be. That is when I discovered who that person was. Her name is Olive Parker. 

“Who is Olive Parker?”, you might be thinking. The truth is, you already know, and yet… you don’t. 

 Olive Parker is a magazine writer/photographer/painter/activist. She’s beautiful but always a little disheveled. She always just got married, bought a house, and published her second memoir (“This one feels so much more me, right down to the cover!”) She gets paid to write feminist essays for Refinery29, and she’s working on a collaborative docu-series with Netflix about… something. She is inexplicably connected and unexpectedly casual (“I looked around at this Oscar’s afterparty and thought, where the hell is the bar?’ ”) She reveals during her interview (yes, she’s being interviewed, on a podcast, right now, somewhere) that she has an undergraduate literature degree from Sarah Lawrence, where she minored in poetry and interpretive dance. She made the dress she’s wearing, but she doesn’t sew much anymore (“I’ve got my hands in so many delicious projects right now! Something had to take a back seat!”) She is from “the Boston area,” but she was born in the Netherlands, and she only wears red nail polish. 

Ok, fine. She’s not a real person. She’s the amalgamation that my brain created in response to people like her I see online. Still, real or imagined, Olive Parker had the life I was meant for, and red nail polish was going to take my life and make it hers. Red nail polish was going to turn me into her. In doing so, red nail poish was going to solve my problems, reveal my goals, revive my confidence, and make my life make sense again. 

I started using my time wondering what Olive would do, what she would wear, what her quick retort would be, and, above all, how I could eat her and replace her. I would move into her house, marry her partner, write her third book and suck down all her organic grapes. What a dream. My future was now! 

Flash forward to: now. I’m 28 and change. Did I become Olive Parker? Did my red nail polish serve as a magical portal into the kind of life for which only Gwenyth Paltrow would dare to dream? 

No. 

The results: I got tired of red, then tired of nail polish. Then my cuticles went to shit. What a thrilling adventure. 

I don’t want to, like, mansplain this to you guys, because it probably seems super duper obvious to you, so think of the rest of this essay as me explaining this to.. Me. 

I honestly thought that wearing only red nail polish was going to change my life. I guess I thought that it would make me feel powerful. Or.. business-y. Or rich or successful or like Emma Watson. And then if I felt that way, I thought I’d actually do things that a rich, successful, Emma-Watson-y person would do. 

But, I didn’t. I didn’t all of a sudden become a person who makes different decisions. I didn’t learn the rules of magazine writing by osmosis and I didn’t magically become successful because I decided to feel like a successful (read: financially stable) person. I, instead, kept doing things the way I normally did them because I hadn’t actually tried to learn anything new. I hadn’t set any new goals, read any new books, or even googled “how do I write for a magazine.” What I had done was change my nail color. 

Sure, now, I see the lack of logic. I do! I’m reading this essay too! Heck, I’m writing it! I see it, and I see you seeing it. But I’m not embarrassed. Because, who among us has never thought that feeling like someone else can turn us into someone else? Is it so crazy that I fell for the quick, easily marketable, beautifully Instagrammable idea that “this random small thing will drastically change your life I mean look at what it did for Reese Witherspoon!”? Weren’t we told that if we just believed in ourselves, we could do anything, be anyone, turn into Olive Parker, wear her vintage cowboy boots and steal her Anthropologie coffee mugs? 

It took wearing red nail polish for a year for me to realize that there would need to be more involved. Chalk it up to a failed experiment at best, a rude awakening at worst. 

Next time, I’m going to try something more drastic. Something that has at least 10 steps, and rules that are anything but arbitrary. 

(Because I already tried the “drastic haircut” thing, and that didn’t really work either.)

Alexandra Lenihan just illustrated THIS BOOK. It contains over 70 drawings by her, and over 150 poems by Grant Chemidlin. She thinks you should check it out. She is also the owner and creator of len.10.10, the editor-in-chief of this blog, and the person who draws all the cartoons.

Walt Disney Made Me a Horny Codependent!

By Sadie Blasucci

Feminism and modern love have picked apart most Disney princes, and labeled them “problematic” by now. I’m not saying I’m ahead of my time or in any way better than you, but actually, I am. Since the young age of 6, when I obsessed over the animated classic “Beauty and the Beast,” I knew, years before you did, to ignore the prince entirely. I saw past the prince- “I had my sights set on that one. Him, he’s the one- the lucky guy I’m going to marry!” (so sorry for the lyric abuse)…But I’m talking about Gaston, you know, the bad guy in the story. He had that voice, that bod, and that way of delightfully belittling everyone around him. He didn’t really care about Belle’s feelings, per se, but he NEEDED her. Oh, he needed her so bad, he rallied an entire village into a mob to hunt and kill the one she actually loved, just so he could have her! *heart emojis*

This prepubescent attraction, and honest respect for his egg eating abilities, took a new shape as I aged into the horny, (mostly) straight girl I am today. Turns out, I’ve dated multiple men who bear a striking physical resemblance to him. I should take this moment to clarify, this trend was accidental. Also, while I’m clearing things up, please note: I’m not one of those people who worships in the House of Disney. I like Disney the way I like karaoke, because it's fun/ nostalgic. I don’t live for it like some of you freaks (no judgement). This life-altering correlation between Gaston and my love life was discovered in retrospect. One day I was looking back, admiring the hotness of some people I’ve landed (confidence CAN get you anything, ladies) and realized… “he looked like Gaston… So did he… And that one… so hot… wait, did they all kind of act like Gaston too?!”

Do you know what it’s like to realize that you’ve been sleeping with knock-off animated villains? Well, it was jarring and required going through all stages of grief. Under examination, the list was mostly Gaston personalities, the occasional Jafar, and the rare Shere Khan type. For those of you who don’t know these references, I discovered, pretty much all at once, that I was romantically attached to, almost exclusively, dickheads. Also misogynists. Albeit, light Misogynists. (A Misogynist Lite™️= not full blown “grab em by the pussy” misogynist, but more like a “does Kavanaugh deserve to lose his job though?!?” one). The kind of man to say things like: “women get their power from their hair. Never cut it.” or “I, like, respect chicks,” or “I can hear guys’ voices in the background. Why are there guys there!!?” (all real quotes)

The urge to name real names at this moment is strong. Mostly because they are exactly what you think they would be. Names like CHAD. (Sorry Chad). But this isn’t about them- It’s about me! Me and my apparent conditioning to confuse care-taking and self sacrifice, with romance. Not everyone I’ve dated sucked nor were they all lumberjack-esque, but the trend was undeniable. Where did this villain-chasing behavior come from? Did it have anything to do with extremely unstable childhood or very strict religious upbringing? Literally, we will never know… No matter where it came from, this information hit hard as an adult and felt like something I shouldn’t want, but did. 

One subconscious reaction to this self discovery was seeking definitive noncommittal relationships. I think the logic was: If we didn’t actually bond, then I wouldn’t actually ruin myself trying to take care of them (spoiler: I found a way). One night, I was explaining to some hottie (probably named Bryan, or Hunter, or Blake) that I didn’t want to be serious with him and the words came out of my mouth “I don’t want that. I want a break. I need a break from putting my life on pause to absorb and take care of someone else.” I had only sort of heard what I said (#rawhonesty) when this simple, buff Bryan said to me “Well, yeah, you shouldn’t do that anyway. That probably has more to do with your past unhealthy relationships than you and I.” Ok, ouch. Also, you’ve never been more attractive? 

But, Hunter actually had a point. Pausing and sacrificing my career, friendships, wellbeing, and life to kowtow to someone else’s needs was objectively unhealthy. I had thought I was being helpful and good. I had thought love felt like eagerly putting myself in emotionally and even physically dangerous situations. I was drawn to people who would let me do this, even if they didn’t initially seek to. Google will tell you this is called codependence, but I prefer to call it Street-Car-Named-Desire-Marlon-Brando-Style-Romance. The time, energy, driving, tears, support, research, driving, listening, driving, shopping, cooking, DRIVING IN LA TRAFFIC, all for people I never let care about me. Not only would none of them offer to drive to me (LOL, fuckers), my feelings never came up. We could date for weeks, I could be by their side through their real crises, and they wouldn’t know how many siblings I have, or what my friends’ names were. Here, I played accomplice since I thought they didn’t need to know me. To me, they needed someone to help them and I needed them to let me try. 

After that conversation with Nate, or whatever his name was, I slowly made some changes. And like applying liquid eyeliner, I overcorrected, again and again. I’d meet someone new and attempt cold/ aloof and then with someone else I’d be inappropriately vulnerable/ open. This time period was/ is a shit show where I mostly look like a dumbidiot, thus I will glaze over it. 

It is a strange feeling, trying to move on from a pattern that had been harmful but so soothing. Burrowing myself in someone’s worst qualities seemed mutually beneficial and had been my home. I’d be lying if I said I’ve never deeply missed it or these men. But over time, a million things influenced me stepping away from being less of a mom to selfish boiz and start being more of a mom to myself. Chief among these things are my impressively loving and safe and beautiful friendships (probably all codependent but, let me have this). So here I am, completely past all that and utterly repaired! Just living/laughing/loving with my soulmate and partner Shia LeBeouf, and our 3 rescue dogs, Edith, Oatmeal, and Stedman… 

...Or I’m just a combination of all these past selves, checking my comforting yet destructive impulses while attempting to follow my more loving instincts. Because “there is more than this provincial life,” ya know??  None of the changes are at all comfortable or flattering, but I do feel different. If only Chad could see me now! But he won’t because I do well avoiding hot misogynists and I cut my hair, anyway, so he wouldn’t be down. 

Sadie Blasucci is a writer/performer in LA (read: poor but talented), and dreams of one day affording several large Taschen books. Her solo show Forced Intimacy previews in March 2020 and consists of stories about sexuality from before, and since, leaving the Mormon Church-- because, honestly, she is tired of answering individual questions about it. Find her on Instagram @sadielane and know that she doesn't mind if you eventually mute or unfollow from overwhelm-- she gets it.