Fractals: unending patterns.
Pressure.
Is this the place of dreams?
Of work?
The place of nothing?
~~~
Why are you here?
Oh, I’m sorry.
No, it’s okay, it’s okay!
Oh, okay
~~~
This is the prologue.
~~~
Yesterday I read a friend’s new play in which the line the problem is not serious, appeared many times.
~~~
Abbas Kiarostami said something like making a film should be like having an eyelash fall out.
Like, that it’s nothing. Or. Everything, and nothing. It’s a hard concept to grasp, that you could be that lighthearted about something as serious as making a film. Letting go of an eyelash.
I directed a short film a few years ago. It was work, but in an easy way. Until it came time to finish.
There is an appropriate amount of guilt to feel about unfinished projects, but I’m not sure what that is.
*Working through it*
*Refusing to let it break my stride*
Enough about film for now.
I learned the expression break my stride from a friend, when she was telling me how she wouldn’t let something that had happened to her do that. I let things break my stride so easily! The smallest things.
~~~
There’s this other thing I’m interested in, which is a guy I know that does not seem to experience self-loathing. I can’t tell if that’s a moral failing.
Is self-loathing something only women experience?
There are always exceptions to generalizations about large categories like gender, race, and ethnicity but when you’re making generalizations you’re not referring to the exceptions.
Spending time with him makes me feel less self-loathing. That process could be energy vampirism.
~~~
My pelvis is tight. Not in a good way.
~~~
Years ago, a fellow actor who is also a brown person raised in the American South, named Jasmine, looked at me very directly after I said something casually self-lacerating, and sympathetically said: pain-body. This was in 2017 in San Fransisco. We were there to do a workshop of a play called Testmatch. Confounding and uplifting things came out of Jasmine. In rehearsal she expressed intense gratitude after our first read-through, in an extremely heartfelt way. Gratitude for the representation. Up to that point we had only heard one another speak in the accent of our characters. Her natural voice surprised me. I’ll never forget the day a few of us were having a meal, and Jasmine asked the playwright directly if we were all going to be cast in the actual production. I had never witnessed such a transgression of the standard etiquette. I think it changed my brain.
We spent two weeks getting to know each other, walking around Tenderloin, hanging out in our hotel (it was called DIVA), smoking j’s, reading each other’s work, jumping on the occasional trolley, and working on Testmatch, a brilliant play, with a brilliant team at A.C.T. We played Indian characters, which she was and I was not. I am not Indian (I’m Iranian). Ultimately I wasn’t asked to play the part, ostensibly because of the non-ethnic-line-up but maybe for another reason.
Later back in New York, she sent me a video of Eckhart Tolle describing pain-body. Essentially it’s the physicalized experience of inner pain. He guides you to imagine you’re holding your pain in your arms, and it leads to a huge emotional release because you experience the sheer pain minus the neurosis. Just, hurt. And it’s like ow. This is what I’m dealing with? F***!
This could be described as the start of my healing journey. Learning I had the capacity to feel pain as opposed to avoid it at all costs (high costs!). I watched a lot of videos, from various people, some powerful, some kooky, some both, to learn about how to help myself. Finally, years later, I got into good therapy through a school my cousin recommended. She said that good, affordable psychoanalysis was one of the few things New York still had to offer.
My analyst is an impressive dresser and very sharp. Her name is Anais.
I have enjoyed our sessions and
I
think
I’m
g
r
o w i n
g?
A couple years after meeting Jasmine I worked with an actor I had admired a lot. We connected over some self-help videos we both watched. He’s a bit of a star, so it was affirming to know we were into the same soft shit. He recommended Iyanla: Fix My Life, which was highly kooky and very healing. Seeing how she would hold her guests and often guide them to wild, heaving sob-sessions reminded me of how Jasmine had held me and let me cry. I tried to describe Jasmine to him, as I have done with almost every person I’ve gotten to know since I met her.
~~~
A guy is playing basketball. We can hear his rubbery sneakers squeak on the gym floor. She’s watching him.
I’m going to make a zig zag with my body to the back and front of the stage because—?
~~~
Men don’t seem to have the same harsh self-analysis, ongoing, as women do. Some women might not have it as much, but they operate with masculine energy. To be otherwise is to be a bitch. Not like in a how-dare-you-call-me-a-bitch-I’m-just-being-assertive sense, but in an I-am-aware-of-the-world-therefore-I’m-not-acting-happy-because-it-would-be-simply-nonsensical-to-do-so-so-you-think-I’m-a-bitch kind of way.
~~~
Peculiarities about life-living that almost make it not worth it: random body pain. Shame. Self-doubt. Inability to see things through. Uneasy feeling of change. Need to assess. Compress. Comparison. Interruptions. Desire. Desire, which burns. Desire is a burden for some. Inferiority. Aging, which became a hassle surprisingly early in life. Like 24?
~~~
What’s your name?
Uh, Chet.
Chet? Your name is Chet
~~~
(He starts to end his game and she runs into the dressing room to hide and listen for him)
~~~
Like, I’m smart. I figured out how to appear cool as a cucumber, but inside I’m burnin’ up. The panic button is … on. Or being pressed you know. It’s like, down.
~~~
I find myself trying to convince people that I’m doing useful things, even though a lot of the time I’m staring into space, thinking about my spine. That is not useful, except in the sense that I’m not doing harm. Unless the AC is running. Which it is.
I have transcended chronic pain through relaxed concentration. It’s required a lot of unapologetic stillness which has caused some burned bridges, hopefully not beyond repair.
Durational stillness.
Before I felt that my insides were partially rotten. My soundtrack of my inner life was an Evanescence song.
~~~
I have a friend who is an Arab lesbian (she happens to feature heavily in my first Substack). She is a sex positive person, which I talk about in the post. I asked her if she thinks something good happens in the world when we come.
Yes! she said.
I accused her of not considering the question really, I said that that was just her stock response as an empowered SWANA lesbian.
She rolled her eyes sweetly.
~~~
I told Anais I thought I had a higher-than-average sex drive early on in life. She asked what made it so. Then I had to talk about it. She’s always asking good questions.
~~~
Let sex do the thinging.
You mean the thinking?
No.
~~~
Does sex have to be gay to be good? I don’t mean good like enjoyable I mean good like not toxic. Am I just gay? The person I want to be wouldn’t have those questions. They would just know. But … I yam what I yam. Winona Ryder says that line in Jim Jarmusch’s Night on Earth. She was always having heavy-hitting existential conversations in 90’s movies.
In an early episode of Esther Perel’s podcast Where Do We Begin? A couple struggled with sex and they came to discover that she blamed the patriarchy on him, thus she shut him out sexually, even though he was a chill guy.
~~~
We have the same colors on our flags, my Palestinian friend said to my Iranian friend.
There’s no black on our flag, he replied.
~~~
You deserve to follow your dreams.
You haven’t seen my dreams.
~~~
The lines below are from an experiment I occasionally do in which I try to ‘write from my pelvis.’ I’ve had chronic pain in my pelvic area for many years, as well as around my heart (straightforward). I have not yet done a free write ‘from my heart’, but I should. Here’s the pelvis one:
I’m fucking sad. Lost. out . I miss him im’ ad tis ongoing sadness. I'm sublimating it to these other things like I’m not beautiful. Why do I need to come? Synthesis. Synthesis of body. He’d ... I was alive and it got … but that was in the past and the past can slip away just like that. Where doesn’t—like, I think I have to shuffle through a lot of this nonsense, this garbage before I can imagine something. I have so much crap in my head that needs to come out. Oh- This is garbage.
Some
thing salient
this way comes.
Fabrication
There was always some girl I’d look at who would would make me feel inferior. It’s not that I’d want to be her, exactly, but I’d be preoccupied by her. Her experience. I’d imagine—be sure—that she did not feel pain like I did, and her ability to transcend that placed her above me, objectively. It became a preoccupation. Why was fate cruel?
Come to find out, suffering is its own sacred romance.
End of experiment.
Some girl.
Jealousy has caught me by surprise. Dealing with it has been an unbecoming process not just because of its dark, shadowy nature, but for the seemingly inappropriate age at which I am going through it. How many awkward phases must I experience?
Transition fatigue.
It is a privilege to heal. My family members, who are not from here, find the concept ‘healing’ bogus for the most part. I find that comical and old-world-charming for the most part, but I’d be lying if I said I didn’t have some resentment about the excessive resistance I had for such a long time to seeking help (typing the words ‘seeking help’ was comically difficult!) from anyone outside my family.
The lives of most of my family members have had much higher stakes than mine (migration, child-rearing, home-ownership), but I purposely built a small life so that I would have the luxury of healing. Change is healing. Acting gives so many opportunities to change. Maybe I got myself here on purpose.
~~~
I can’t tell you how peaceful it is to sit here. What is the possibility of feeling this way all the time, like different—?
You can see the veil, why put yourself behind it? What are you afraid of seeing?
~~~
You say you want to be alone when clearly that’s not true.
You have the luxury of pretending to want to be along- alone.