I started this post a few weeks ago, with the italicized part below.
Right now, I want to be snuggled in my bed watching Judging Amy and pretending it is 2003, and I want to be having dinner at a busy restaurant in New York with a friend.
I want to be completely done with my school semester and I am a bit anxious about how I will handle seven weeks of unstructured time.
I want my house to be beautifully decorated for Christmas and I want to resist the trappings of materialism. (Also, I want to feel like said decorations were a result of loving personal effort that I put in, and I want to snap my finger and have it be done.)
I want to gather with my huge, sometimes overwhelming, family and I want to embrace a rare opportunity to celebrate the holiday quietly, in my own home. (I also want to honor my husband’s Jewish traditions and his inherent nature not to care much about any of this, and I want him to want to decorate with me, to share the same childlike wonder I do at a room lit only by a Christmas tree.)
I want to use “time off” to make progress toward ambitious career goals and I want to do nothing but watch movies for 12 hours a day.
I want to fix every problem I read about in the newspaper and heal every hurt I know my loved ones are experiencing, and I want to curl up in a ball and tell myself “It’s okay. This year has been hard for you too. Just rest.”
My husband and I have been watching The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, and there’s an episode where the young 1950s housewife-comedienne signs her first autograph. It reminded me of the time I signed my first (only) autograph. 30 years ago, I was cast in the lead role of a community theater production of the Nutcracker. This particular production was more like a musical and less like a ballet, hence I, not being a dancer of any sort, was able to play the role of Maria (aka “Clara”). I was 13 and in the 7th grade and the male lead, playing the role of the Nutcracker, was my 7th grade homeroom and science teacher.
I was thrilled when I got the part. Though I had participated in theater camps and various activities in my very small town for years by that point, I had not expected to be cast in a lead role. It was a dream come true. I loved the camaraderie amongst the cast, the fun of rehearsals, and the chance to be part of something so…Christmas-y.
Obviously, 3 decades on, the details are fuzzy, but these are the memories that stand out to me now:
- When I had been younger, a friend of my parents’ loved to tease me about my distaste for lima beans. After the first performance of the Nutcracker, I arrived at school to find a can of that gross vegetable on my desk with a bow and a card that said “Expect a whole case when you get to Broadway.”
- Remember how I said that my co-star was my 7th grade teacher? You know how middle school girls can sometimes do that awful thing where they pick one girl to ostracize and pick on and generally make feel like absolute shit for somewhere between a few days and an entire school year? I can’t say for sure that the two were related, but let’s just say I became that girl just as the show was finishing, and it lasted for months.
- One night, I was eating dinner with my parents at a Chinese restaurant and a man with a little girl of 3 or 4 years old approached us and said they’d seen me in the show. He nudged his daughter and she handed me a piece of paper and a pen and asked me to sign it. Swoon.
- A local television network did a news story about the show. The director was a lovely woman who cared deeply about disability rights and I was aware that she’d made a very intentional effort with this particular show to include people of many abilities. What hadn’t occurred to me at age 13 was how I fit into that picture until I watched the news story and she said excitedly “Our lead actress is legally blind in one eye.” This is true. I had a hemangioma birthmark when I was born that grew to cover most of one side of my face and made it impossible for me to open my left eye for a period of time as an infant. This precluded proper vision development and left me cross-eyed on that side. The birthmark, which was bright red and puffy when I was a baby, shrank over time with the help of some surgeries, but when I was in 7th grade it was still quite visible and my eye was still crossed. I wasn’t just legally blind in that eye (which means almost nothing, by the way – one good eye has been completely sufficient for me), but I looked different as well. Even as I recall the story now, I feel a burning sense of embarrassment about the role that may have played in my getting the part.
There’s something about that combination of memories that felt really useful to me as I’ve reflected on the past year and it’s this: Nothing is one thing. Being in that play was an experience I treasure, AND it has some painful memories associated with it. 2020 was a disproportionately shitty year. AND there were a lot of beautiful things as well, some of which I hope are still in gestation as we make our bleary-eyed way into what is still a very uncertain future.
I like the New Year holiday. I love the idea of fresh starts and new energy. I am less enthused this year than most. I know that we have a long way to go with pandemic recovery and I feel a bit bruised by all I went through this year – there are a lot of parts of me that feel more tender than strong. But the shift of even that one little digit on the calendar still feels meaningful. In binary systems terms, 0 represents “off” or “no flow of electricity” and 1 represents “on” or the presence of electrical flow. There’s energy in that idea I think I’ll try to hold onto
Thank you for reading this year. I didn’t post as much as I intended, but many of you sent me so many kind words when I did. It means the world to me. And I hope that the new year comes at you gently, with a little more breathing room for things to be what they are, never one thing, but with beauty just the same.