Never Walked In High Heels

Through Fire and Friendship

By the time the phone was ringing on the other end of the line I questioned whether or not he ever wanted to hear from me again. It had been two years to the day since we last spoke and that conversation had not ended well. “Come back,” he had said to me. “Move to New York and…” for him the answers seemed so easy. To me they sounded trite. I screamed, he pushed back, and then nothing. That conversation was over and we went our separate ways.

The sound of an American telephone ringing its single long ring sounded foreign to me now. I had dialed the long-remembered number with a shaky hand after reading the news. His entire house had burned to the ground seven days before from being struck by lightening. And while no one was home on that fateful night, including his two dogs, nothing could be saved from the rubble. I called him out of gut reaction, thinking of his home and the beautiful things in it. In my younger days he had always seemed to me to be The Great Gatsby himself, with the exact home and life I had wanted. Yet, when he had invited me to do just that two years ago I had rejected him furiously, in a justified rage which burned out of control and smoldered for far too long. And now I hadn’t wanted his life for quite some time. I had my own. I am happy now, in London. Each day I find that my roots get deeper here, making me more and more stable in a town I am certain, for now at least, is my home. I had burned bridges with him to stay here. Now I wondered if he would let me swim back to meet him at the very least.

I wasn’t expecting him to pick up. He’s the type of man you always have to try a hundred and sixty seven times to get ahold of until it happens. I gasped his name and he shouted mine. And then the line went dead. Did he really hate me that much or had Skype failed me yet again? A screen popped up on my computer asking me a simple question: “Please tell us how you would rate your call?”

AWFUL. MISERABLE. I want to hunt down the moron who invented Skype this very moment and rip out his toenails after chucking my iMac into the River Thames. Somehow this wasn’t an option. I clicked cancel and redialed.

He picked up and said my  name first this time.

“Tell me what I can do to help you.”

“Nothing. Wait. No. Call me at this exact same time tomorrow.”

“Okay,” I said reaching for my phone and wondering what meeting I had to cancel to make this call.

“Oh and, I’m sorry I have been such a crummy friend lately.”

“Me too.” We hung up. I couldn’t remember who forgave who.

“We are rebuilding,” he told me confidently. “It’ll take years to get it back to where it was, but we want to do it. I feel obligated in a way. It was such a lovely house and just added so much to the town.” I knew he was right. The home had most likely been featured in a plethora of home and garden magazines in the past two years. He had always loved opening his home up to people. I could tell this is what he was missing the most. “And when its all done we’ll have the biggest party you can imagine.” I already knew I wanted to be there.

He and I spoke for over an hour, which, for a man fielding calls from insurance people while trying to rebuild his life, is a very long time. I told him of my own fires over the past years, more metaphorical than his, perhaps, but every bit as searing. Two years ago he caught me at the front end of it. These fires were far from being put out but at least, for now they seemed to be under control.

“It sounds to me as if there is more than one way to burn a house,” his voice had changed dramatically. He was right. My own fires had forced me to stay here. Even when he could not comprehend it, I had to stay in London. I could not go ‘home.’ There was no home to go back to anymore. It is true, once you leave home, you can’t go back again.

There was the ash and rubble of the past several years. There were times of playing the fiddle while the flames raged on because there was nothing left to do. From all of this I had stumbled out, changed and transformed into a woman rather than the teenage girl he met thirteen years before. A few short years ago I thought fires shouldn’t happen. Now I’m a bit better at calmly walking through them without getting as burned. My friend had missed a good many of these fires over the past two years, even though they had been burning long before that. Maybe if he had been around the flames wouldn’t have gotten so high and enveloped me as much. But then again, without it all burning down, I wouldn’t have to get up out of the ashes and rebuild either. Without that, I wouldn’t be able to off my strength as a grown woman. Now that we had reconnected after two years I was his equal. And when everything goes up in smoke around you, sometimes what you need most is a friend who has also gone through the rubble and made it out the other side.

“It sounds as if you are exactly where you belong.” The silence was deafening on my end as I let these words sink it. This was what I longed to hear him say these past two years. It was all over. This fire had been smothered, the rubble cleared, and out of the ashes and destruction from two years ago came a new and stronger friendship, made purer by the flames.

“Let me know know if I can do anything for you.” Things were winding down and I just wanted to reach out and hold him in whatever way I could.

“I think you just did,” was all he said.

I hung up telling Skype that my call was ‘excellent with no problems.’ Walking into my room, I opened my window and looked over at Canary Wharf on a clear summer’s afternoon. I could feel my dress flapping at my ankles in the breeze. I think for my friend purified things were already appearing in the rubble after the fire. Our phone call was one of them and a redeemed friendship was another. They are small in the face of catastrophe, but they are glints and gleams of treasures  to come. What mattered was, after the fires, we both knew that there were some things worth the effort of digging out.

“You are a very very brave young woman,” she said turning towards me and placing one hand on her walker for stability. We were on a pedestrian island in the middle of Trafalgar Square, making it halfway across the street before the light changed color. For me it was because I had arrived at the crosswalk towards the end of the green cycle that I had gotten only partway across the street. I had seen this woman edging across long before I myself had reached the crosswalk and, due to her age and gait, only had made it this far.

“Not as brave as you,” I replied, smiling at her gumption. If there is one intersections which distresses me above any of the others in London it is Trafalgar Square. Here, cars guide their way through a maze which resembles a bowl of spaghetti more than an intersection. For every crosswalk there is at least one pedestrian island which warns you that crossing in one go may be difficult for some. Indeed, the lights a choreographed in such a way that it almost takes a study in geometric principles to work out how the lights can be timed in your favor. And, to top it all off, being one of the most famous and photographed squares in the world means that when you are there, you feel like one is at the centre of the universe and everyone in all galaxies both known and unknown is watching you attempt to cross from one end of the square to the other in some sort of existential trek, metaphorically symbolizing the frailty of human efforts in the attempt to strive for meaning.

Or a least that’s my perception. My friends think I’m nuts and offer the advice “when you see the green guy go, when you see the red guy stop.” Thanks.

Suffice it to say, I wouldn’t let my grandmother cross Trafalgar Square alone. And the idea of anyone else over the age of seventy five doing so made me very nervous. I edged forward to offer assistance. Maybe she could hold on to the back of my chair to gain support to cross the street. Even when one is dependent on everyone else, it is still impossible to squash the reflex to help someone else in need when you see it.

“In my day, young women like you barely even left the four walls of their home unless they were heading for a shelter during an evacuation. Good for you.” I froze.

In London, it is impossible for me to look into the face of an older person without wondering if they had been around during World War II. Unlike the majority of working age Londoners, those from the generation who survived the Blitz still look you in the eye. And every once in a while, I catch a fierce gleam inside of the person, without exchanging any dialogue which says “I have seen parts of this city reduced to rubble. I have seen it built back up again. I know that life is filled with both pain and joy.”

This was a woman who had survived much in London, her eyes asserted it. Which is why I was shocked that she would ever call me ‘brave.’ A person who had watched her country be attack by enemy fire when victory wasn’t certain surely cannot begin to find courage in a young woman crossing the street on a sunny day, holding a patent leather bag with one hand and getting ready to dial her iphone with the other.

When local heroes are interviewed we hear them say over and over “I was just doing what anyone else would’ve done in my position.” And perhaps heroism, at it’s root is not about what you do when the stakes are high, but rather what you do when there isn’t much of a choice. Live or die. Fight or roll over. Go out or be a shut in. Cross the street or stay stagnant. In extreme situations, there really are just two options. And more often than not “heroes” are the ones who choose the more desirable option rather than facing destruction.

If two women on opposite ends of the age spectrum can meet at a crosswalk and admire the drive for life in the other, then the best things in this world are both inexplicable and universal. I don’t feel particularly brave just because I choose to cross the street, even in Trafalgar Square. In my mind it’s what everyone does, so I do it too. And maybe those who saw bombs falling on London, who waited it St. Paul’s Cathedral with buckets of water to put out fires, and who rebuilt their lives choosing to keep pushing hope, did so because there was little other option. At our core, we want to keep straining away for more life.

The light turned green in Trafalgar Square, and everyone around us started crossing the street, making it natural for her and I to do likewise. We were on our separate ways again.

Most creative people will often say that they want to give up their profession for something more sensible. All armature dramatics aside, I often find myself debating on whether my career as an actress and writer will ever really be worthwhile. This is especially the case if you know you can do something with your life—anything in fact—you set your mind to. At my age, I am still young enough to go to law school or do a plethora of other things if I set my mind to them. I am often reminded that God tells us to wait and to trust him, which is a combination that contains two of the hardest things for me to do in my life. The combination is excruciating, and it seems that if I took things into my own control, everything would and should happen much faster.

Last week I found myself having such a day. With the assortment of facebook, twitter, and other necessities of the modern age, I am able to share in my friends milestones and see the lovely pictures that show up as a result—the weddings, the births, the job promotions—none of which have shown up in my life as of yet, and in many ways, I feel that my road stretches on and on before me without a single bend in it or any sign to act as a marker for how far I’ve come or how far I have yet to go. Still waiting for so much that I want to accomplish, often overshadows the massive amount that I already have.

When you first meet Jeremy you aren’t quite sure if he is an actual person or a character attempting to be a human being. He was a guest teacher in one of my acting classes last week—he creates the figure of a sort of man-clown, who dresses in a green hat and vest with a suit coat and a handkerchief. The sort of outfits that people used to wear all the time, but now when the entire ensemble is put together, looks vaguely comical. He goes about the country teaching that to create anything one must be willing to take risks. The risk of failure and then come to the realization that there is security in failing, especially when one hits rock bottom—for then there is then no where else to go, which can be any more diminutive and where the ground offers no padding but plenty of support. After a brief lecture, he took off his hat which in the style of David Larible, seemed to have a mind and style of a movie all its own. His hat came alive rolling across his shoulder, beckoning from the floor to pay attention to him, and finally in a brief moment of risk itself through it into us the class and challenged us to make it land on his single finger as he stood on a chair. I was not amused and for that matter neither was the rest of the class walking around the room which seems to be a favored activity among any and all acting teachers, was something that I found exhausting on that particular day. I didn’t want to train anymore perhaps if I did train to be an actor nothing would become of it. So, while the rest of the class attempted in vain to land the mysterious and seemingly rebellious hat on Jeremy’s finger I meandered around—not wanting to perform in the least. He rest of the class soon got fed up with the game and began tossing the hat back and forth to each other as much as attempting to take aim at the target.

Perhaps now is an appropriate time to say that I can’t throw anything. My aim is terrible and more often then not I am unable to let go of the object that I’m attempting to toss, so it falls to the floor. Even my dog knows this fact and when we attempt to play fetch together, he picks up the ball and throws it himself after my vain attempt to create some distance from the object has failed. Then after throwing it himself, he retrieves the ball and hands it over to me so that I may have another try. When I used to play competitive basketball, I was known as a “defensive player.” If ever I was in possession of the ball, one could be assured that something was completely wrong.

As the girls tossed the hat back and forth, I found not a familiar face in the entire class this being are very first time of meeting together. Whenever I am in the company of strangers I feel, compelled to justify my existence—to illustrate that I am every bit as capable in achieving my goals and keeping up with the best of them—but the need to justify oneself never leads to creativity. One of these strange and unknown students eventually tossed the hat to me and I quickly began to belittle myself. How nice I thought to myself, they wanted to attempt to include the crippled girl. I knew that attempting to land the hat on my teacher’s finger was completely out of the question, and so without thinking, I simply tossed it aside.

As I watched to see just how measly my throw had been, I saw the hat land squarely on the target.

By the time I got home that evening the shock of it still had not managed to wear off. It was an unbelievable and in many was inexplicable experience. Despite all this, it offered me encouragement. As cliché as this perhaps is to say, it is often when we take one small step backwards from our dreams to truly examine what we want and how far we are willing to go for it—one step away to attempt to gain some distance and perspective—it is then that we are able to perform are best. It is in taking this step in the seemingly wrong direction that we release ourselves from trying to justify ourselves and set free the creative forces, which are ultimately uncontrollable.

On that particular day, reaching my target in the little sense allowed me to reach for my dreams in the metaphorical sense. After all, the hat with my deficiency in aim and leverage could have landed anywhere in the room, and even though I was not thinking of it, it dropped off exactly where it needed to be.

Being single and someone who professes a Christian faith is indeed very strange, particularly if you’re willing to open the doors of your life to let in so called “church people” and all of the aggravations that they bring about. For a majority of such people, they assume that when two individuals of the opposite sex get together all they wanna’ do is jump one another like rabbits. Over and over I’ve been given lectures on keeping the door open when there’s a man in my home, not pursuing the company of boys when its late at night. All of which I have found exceptionally demeaning as well as harmful, for one thing, friendships between the sexes become extremely limited.

This is especially true if a woman who follows Christ seeks to be friends with a male who is not a Christian. Church people too often quote the famous passage, “What does the righteous have to do with the wicked?” Swearing up and down that such friendships, no matter how innocent they may seem to me can only lead to trouble. But, in all of this well intentioned advice given by ministers, lay people, friends who accompany me to church, and even some people that stick their nose into my business without invitation, I can’t help but ask…What do you do when a person who swears there is no God, proves themselves (perhaps over the course of years) to be more faithful and Christ-like than the boys at church. Ideally, of course, as they answer, the conditions shouldn’t be this way. Men who follow God should be the best of the best because they are following the best. Ideally the church would take care of its own, but most of us, myself included, stop looking for ideals when we realize that we don’t operate in an ideal world.

Since moving to London I’ve had declared communists take me to black tie dinners, an atheist adapt my bathroom to suit my needs, agnostics build me ramps and cook me meals and my tires pumped and rotated by men who swear up and down that God is dead. I even went through a phase where my laundry was done by a nihilist (fortunately he believed in clean clothes if nothing else). I have yet to run into Christians who dedicate themselves to making sure that I am happy and things in my home are running adequately as these men have. In fact it is hard to remember ever seeing a man from the church, who swears up and down to be a Christian showing any level of commitment and protectiveness as that I’ve seen from those outside of the church over the past few years.

It may perhaps do the church some good to realize that God’s family is as dysfunctional as the rest of the world. People who disagree are either in denial to themselves or flat out deceitful. Religious organizations teach that there are two kinds of people… The good (those that believe in God), and the bad (those that don’t). I can name at least ten women, now older, who thought that they were marrying the ideal Christian since their fiance was accepted to seminary and who wanted to be a pastor or a Christian counselor only to discover that the man they married was limp-wristed and did little except depend on the stability of their soon to be wife. Even though all faiths and views choose to fence themselves in with false perceptions saying, “If we are with likeminded people, everything will be much easier.” The truth is, we are no better than anyone else because of who we are, but because somebody bothered to love us when we were unlovable.

I have a difficult time encouraging the young women I mentor, or anyone else for that matter, to pursue any form of exclusive relationship. This is especially true when I am treated so well by people who the church teaches should be considered “them” and not “us.” It is these people who routinely show me a bigger God than any man who resides within the four walls of a religious establishment has yet to do. The relationship with such friends remind me that if the creator that I believe in is all powerful, he should be able to show His glory through all people. Not just those that we deem as “tolerable.”

One of the earlier Sunday school lessons I remember ever being taught, was the story of the good Samaritan. The point of the story is not that this man stopped to help someone who was suffering on the side of the road when two other people refused to do so. The point of the story is actually that this man was not a man of faith and was not obligated by his religion to do so. Above all else, God loves to scandalize and to teach us that our ways and the boxes that we think the world ought to operate within, don’t fit within His view of the world. Thus, even the person who is the most atheistic in his focus can prove to be an invaluable friend. A great person, and an unexpected hand in meeting our needs when those whose should rise to the occasion, refuse to do so.

I particularly worry about my generation when it comes to reflections on suffering and doing so with grace and dignity. We are quick to prescribe drugs and change our general health regimens in order to avoid suffering. Why shouldn’t we, if it can be avoided, what’s the point in prolonging it when such pain can be stopped. But it seems as if my generation has a Victorian-like opposition to admitting that the world will always be less than ideal, that our bodies break down and eventually we all have to shuffle off this mortal coil. Indeed, the last great taboo is something we all face in the privacy of our own bedrooms, at our weakest moments. Perhaps, in living our lives, whether in denial or admission to the inevitable, we do find for ourselves exactly how our lives will end.

“There used to be books written on how to die well,” I heard the man on my internet radio broadcast recite over and over. I thought back through an exercise I spent my time doing in drama school for several months in which our movement teacher would ask us to walk around the room assuming a historical persona and then at certain points giving us additional information about that historical setting. Over and over regardless of the precise point in time, we heard that every family was much more effected by death than we are today. At some points, 30% of all women dying in childbirth and little to no security or regulatory systems imposed on corporations, government or personal safety standards, death was always one slip away.

Today death, illness and weakness seem to be the last society taboo. I can walk into a room and say to my girlfriends, let me tell you about my ex-boyfriend and the intimate details of our relationship and nobody raises and eye. If I take the same group of people and say “I want to tell you about how my grandmother died,” the entire room falls silent. We don’t know about suffering and death the way our predecessors did. Most of us can go our entire lives without seeing a dead body and those that we do see at an open casket funeral are made up to look more like figurines than the cold truth of the decomposition of the human body. We are strangers to suffering, assuming that those in need would be better off if the experts took care of them and also assuming that we have little to offer ourselves.

The idea today of a book being written on how to die well seems absurd. One may only walk through their local Barnes & Noble to see that the self help book aisle preach the opposite effect. Guaranteeing love, energy and longevity that will last far beyond what our grandparents dreamed of. In this world, even with all the medical advances that have occurred in the past one hundred years, dying is still guaranteed. But that doesn’t mean any of us bother to know how to be good at it.

Christians especially used to be known as individuals who knew how to suffer and die well. Its true that nobody wants to suffer. But we assume that somehow something has been taken from us, stolen even, if we do so. Its not fair. Certain people can go their entire life without getting a tumor. Why did one take my friend in her mid-30s? We say to ourselves that we don’t deserve suffering and it seems the more faithful we are, the more adamantly we insist that we are good people that have absolutely no reason to suffer. The problem is, the best of us who walked on this earth thousands of years ago, never said there would be no suffering. They just insisted that paradise would come not now, but later.

After my own suffering, even in my youth (and I’m sure it will go on until I die) I have discovered that I am no stoic. I cannot throw back my hands when I’m in pain and say “That’s the way the world is, I may as well succumb to it.” We as human beings combat suffering because the world should not be suffering, because we realize that the world is not perfect. We do have an idea of what the perfect world would be. One that has no life long illnesses, aches, frustrations or injustices. It is because this world has so many blemishes that we can imagine what life would be like without them rather than being naive to such imperfections in the first place. Those who care to admit that suffering is universal and inevitable in life, do so at a benefit to themselves. The human condition is vulnerability. There is no exception to this rule.

I’ve heard that everyone else knows this fact, however it was indeed news to me. Winston Churchill managed to lose every public election he ever ran in, ultimately of course he grew to be one of the greatest leaders of the UK in all of history. We hear stories of such great people failing over and over, falling flat on their face and at one time or another an object as simple as the lightbulb would never have come into reality, we sit in awe dumbfounded, and to be fair, never actually believing that such great men would be capable of such great and consistent failures. In our heart of hearts many of us say, “After a while of not getting what I was reaching for, I myself would give up.” This is a statement that I hear over and over as I pass over rejection slips in the mail or don’t get a callback that I feel I particularly deserved. The truth is, I can’t give up my dreams, nobody can. Such stories of great men refusing to give up on their’s only supports the drive. If I gave up I would always wonder, what if?

Often we forget the value of preparing, a willingness to be sharpened as tools, ready when we are called upon, for insisting on being prepared for when that day comes. Many years of work, when thankless and filled with little to no success, we forget that in our world that is driven purely on the basis of results and end gains, its that the preparation in many ways is more important than the achievement itself. The act of sharpening a knife over and over again, even when there are weeks or years when its use is not necessary insures that in the end our efforts will not be laid to waste, and in many ways, that preparation will prove more important than our willingness to cut.

Over and over I’ve heard within acting classes as well as when working on my own writing at home that creating works is a ratio of 10% inspiration and 90% luck. The timing of getting ready equals always sharpening those pencils and creating work that may or may not be called upon. So that when your day comes, you are the best tool possible in an industry that has a distinctive need. People tell me over and over that there will never be a use for an actor with a disability, but they forget that the world said the same thing about airplanes, actors of different races, female writers, about a million unforeseen occurrences, which ultimately had to have happened in order for progress not only to be made but also measurable. New needs arise when we are in desperate times or even when we are simply challenged by those days that are going well. Often times it takes years of failures for a person to be able to fulfill that new need exactly when it is needed. More importantly, it indeed takes decades of failures to be able to stand down an abysmal situation, such as a country at war or the night taking over one’s life, and therein refuse to back down from the challenge that seemed self-evident.

I think of these things often as I walk to various classes wondering if my investments in training and education will ever reap a dividend and even, quite possibly mean a profit, I work in an industry that in many ways doesn’t want change. Doesn’t want people to rock the boat, but in many ways this is of course, every industry. Arts and entertainment is no different in seeking stability than banking and law practice. Maybe the day when my vision of the world will be fulfilled will not come in my lifetime, but I know that the best things in the world are built on the backs of people failing and discovering that even amongst these failures there is a grit and determination that is more helpful than such minor successes along the way. The world was made better by those insisting that failure did not necessarily mean game over. These are the men I think of on my way to class day in and day out. I am reminded of them as I prepare for more exercises and move to face the new day, or as Abraham Lincoln (another man to never win a public election) said, “I will prepare, and someday my chance will come.”

Communion Sunday brings out the OCD in me. Ever since I was little I would dread the first Sunday of the month in church. It was literally disaster waiting to happen. First there were plates stacked on top of each other filled with the worlds tiniest glasses filled to the brim with grape juice or wine, both of which stain horribly. My mother wouldn’t let me bring a container of salt with me to church as a precautionary measure, despite all of Christ’s allusions to us being ‘the salt of the earth.’ Then our church raised enough money to buy new carpeting for the sanctuary, thus also raising the stakes for the severe consequences of dropping that which was to be symbolic of the blood of Christ. As if that wasn’t enough tension, our elders never could get the knack of passing the plates along the pews. Inevitably the men would have to do something which resembled the Electric Slide down the aisle as they never knew which pew would end up with which plate next. Often two plates of bread would be coming at you from opposite sides and created a cosmological traffic jam.

I once visited my friend’s church and discovered that Catholics all drank out of the same cup. This, of course only added to my obsessive compulsive disorder. Communion Sunday was an enormous risk. Who was stupid enough to think this was a good idea?

The more I am involved in a church, the more I find myself looking to God and saying “How on earth did you ever think this was a good plan?” Just about every philosophical outlook on the world has some serious problem with the topic of free will. For those who believe in an all knowing, all loving and all powerful deity the issue is particularly sticky. We all want a deus ex machina to swoop down in a blaze of glory and fix it all when we are in a crisis. We want a god who is a very visible superhero, complete with tights and Jimmy Olsen taking photographic evidence. Even those of us who are absolute atheists would very much like to see a world which is a vast improvement on this one.

For the followers of Christ, free will in a fallen world is counterintuitive. The fact that one can freely come to the table and drink the wine which Christ gives us even when we are bumbling fools compared to our Host is shocking. What’s even more ironic to our ears is that God uses us, though we are responsible for spilling wine and forgetting which way the bread needs to be passed to take care of each other. As any guest at a dinner party will attest, there is little worse than embarrassing your host, even if it is by inadvertently dropping the wine on a beautiful new rug.

God would rather work through us and run the risk of us spilling his blood and passing his body around the wrong way than swooping in and doing everything through force. Our fumbling ways of messing up how things ought to be, misjudging what is needed to make the world truly better, even refusing to acknowledge who invited us into the banqueting hall in the first place, are exactly the actions of the type of misfits He’s always had in mind to create a perfect kingdom. To Him, it was better to risk it all and have our choice to partake in the dinner be made in freedom, than to sit down and force feed us a meal which was supposed to be celebratory.

As soon as I walk into a church and see the wine and the bread on the communion table, it takes all of my energy to not run the other direction. I worry about the plate falling, or myself choking on a piece of bread, knocking over a glass of wine or drinking at the wrong time. For a meal with the greatest cost, I confess that I am too concerned about the manners and customs to enjoy that which has been prepared especially for me. Thus making me more ungracious than the guest who, in a moment of joyful abandon, commits the worst faux pas.

“Don’t you dare let them get you down.” I am disappointed again and as always, armies of defense come to my aid whenever I am in danger of being defeated. Mostly I am thankful. These people who believe in me for some strange reason tell me to keep going and not focus on my defeats, but inevitably I do and inevitably these are the times I wish I felt absolutely nothing. I wish I were incapable of feeling. “Chin up” they say, “Don’t let them hurt you” and they encourage me to develop a thick skin as well as a resilience and resistance to those preventing me from chasing my dreams.

I have met people who have lost the ability to be hurt and I do admire them. I once met an actor with a severe birth defect who, after being rejected for years from different drama schools and training schemes, finally built his own as well as his own theatre company specifically for disabled people, both within the artist and production side as well as a disabled only audience. He is thought by many to be a great success and someone whom I should aspire to be. But when I met him I immediately saw that he is someone I could not hold up as a role model because of all of his rejection resulted in his attempts to shield himself and grow a strong exoskeleton. His anger not only is illustrated of his resilience, but also succumbed to bordering on hatefulness towards able bodied people. His is a story of frustration and having nothing but an uphill battle unaided by his extreme ideals and, this is the part that seems inevitable, resentment.

That protective layer of course stops the pain to some degree and inevitably rejection after rejection for years on end often causes all humility to go out the window. But in the case of a creative person, such is an extremely bad idea.

One of my all time favorite quotes by C.S Lewis is “I do not doubt that whatever misery God permits will be for our good, unless by rebellious will, we convert it to evil.” As difficult as such a philosophy may be to swallow, he does have an interesting point that our rejections and the injustices we face ultimately are in our hands to decide whether or not it can be used for our benefit or it will only be used to cause ourselves harm. What we do with such rejection, whether or not it makes us feel self-righteous or change our tactics makes us want to pack in and go home or simply fight all the more harder. It’s ultimately our decision.

Last night I was asked to a meeting for a particular program that I have been trying to get into for years. It was a FAQ session and at one point I raised my hand and asked what someone waiting to get into the program, hoping and willing to wait, should do during that time in which patience seems such and impossible virtue. The man at the front smiled and said, “Enjoy the journey.” To be honest I’m not enjoying the journey of years of rejection. After years of the same philosophy over and over, I don’t think it’s possible to enjoy it and I can’t help but feel a little smug when he looked me in the eye knowing about my years of frustration and, close range, delivered his thoughts. But I am learning on the journey. Learning about myself, humility, perseverance, the willingness to go on, the dedication it takes to accomplish my dream, and above all else I am doing my best to learn how to remain open to the pain. If I do not accept pain and if I turn away from it, it will only hinder my ability as an artist.

Self defense is ultimately a reflex. It’s in our nature to defend ourselves and not turn the other cheek in order to grow from rejection or even the red lights we get on the way to the destinations we know we belong. One has to allow learning from the pains and aches. This means having to feel at peace while scared of failure. Perhaps it is the greatest among us who fail, some such as Thomas Edison, we learn about because after his failures, came successes and perhaps there have been other great people who were at the top of their game that we never even hear of. But I do know that the greatest among us never fall victim to impatience or bitterness. They choose, often in defiance, when the entire world begs them not to, to keep their heart open avoid resentment, bitterness, and sarcasm. And in hardened places of the heart, they open themselves up for even more pain knowing that in the end it will heal over strangely and beautifully.

“I’m glad I don’t have to worry about any of that”, she began overconfidently. We were in the middle of a conversation about heaven and hell, faith, the afterlife, and the overall meaning of life. A friend who does everything possible not to think about these issues, finally stated not only her denial, but also her relief that these issues would never be a concern. She would never grow old, she would never have questions that for many remain unanswered regardless of having the best intentions to figure it all out in this life.

Many people I know often spend enormous amounts of energy swearing up and down that we are here by some sort of cosmic accident. A billion years ago something mutated and a couple thousand after that, something else mutated and so on and so forth so that there was a vast domino effect that actually took all of time thus far to create the world as we know it. Had the most miniscule thing gone wrong, we might not be here and overall they are okay with that. With age and penury suddenly people are faced with the limitations of human condition. All of the answers they clung close to throughout life, be it the idea that it doesn’t really matter or it matters only so long as we are capable of doing what we want, explodes in their face and they quickly begin to question the structure on which they built their life because their own physical structure is failing them. It is important that this usually comes at some point when they are often faced with the fact that their bodies, mind, their life as a whole, is going to fall short. In short, it’s when my friends get slapped in the face with the idea that they are human and not above breaking down physically or spiritually that the cosmos comes into question. Often I think it would be great not to have to be confronted with one’s own weaknesses until I was much older. To be able to go through most of life being perfectly capable of accomplishing exactly what I want, whether it’s running upstairs to get the book I forgot on my way out the door or running a marathon in order to raise money for breast cancer. Often I think it would be great not to be aware of all the conditions that I have become extremely aware of through having friends suffer through them. Most people in high school don’t know what any number of ailments or disabilities are and quite frankly they shouldn’t have to. Wouldn’t it be wonderful, I always thought, to be like everyone else and not know that the struggle exists until I am a ripe old seventy something, retired, and living out my life exactly as an old person should. Watching my older friends (and sometimes, unfortunately, friends my own age) have that sudden flash of recognition in which they see for the first time that life is not as easy as they pre-supposed it was often causes my stomach to turn and myself want to cry out for them coming to the knowledge that I’ve always had and losing a sort of naivety and innocence that goes alongside Nietzche’s ubermensch inevitably when they lose this presumption, my friends begin to wonder if this is all there is in life, if we are just here by chance and if that’s all that matters.

For someone who has always been acutely aware of their weakness, who’s never had another option except for knowing the overwhelming truth, there is of course an advantage to this situation. Endurance and perseverance in a world that is made for perfectly able bodied people when the idea of perfection is extremely unrealistic for just about everybody in existence is absurd. Being in a state of physical adversity forces you to see the world as much bigger than yourself. It means that having to struggle more than most, you are forced to establish security beyond yourself knowing that, at any moment, you could become more dependent than you were the day before. It means not putting faith only in your own abilities, and it means knowing that there must be something greater than yourself no matter what that thing may be.

There are advantages and disadvantages of course to having what is considered the full capacity of a human being and losing it later in life and never having it to begin with. But as I watch my friends struggle with their own mortality, in many ways I am grateful for not having to do the same and being forced to ask the questions that are inevitable in life but always make everyone, regardless of age, extremely uncomfortable to have to ask. I am no one’s idea of a perfect human specimen, but I hope I am a richer human being for it.

I never grew up believing in Santa. My parents decided that perpetuating the belief in a man in a red suit coming down the chimney was the equivalent of lying to one’s child. (more strength here, you can’t equivocate the natural conclusion) A certain neighbor of mine had the opposite upbringing. He insists to this day that he believed in Santa Claus until he was twelve years old. When evidence began to point to the contrary, he would do everything possible to deny it and he says he can still remember the day when beyond a shadow of a doubt he was confronted with the truth and could go no further.

I find this story not just adorable but also amusing. This is a man who has now grown up to be a complete atheist, but in his youth insisted over and over in the reality of a figure who is completely unfounded in any truth. Today he claims my view of God is likewise. Perhaps it is the change between my friend when he was age eleven and today, he is thirty seven, that I find so captivating. One thing I do wish my parents, who always asserted that there was nothing redeemable about father Christmas, understood is that for a young person; a belief in Santa Claus exercises his faith muscles. The idea that a man could live who would love everyone and give of himself all year does seem absurd to all of us, regardless of this man choosing to wear a red suit or a crown of thorns. In short, someone who constantly gives is seen to be too good to be true.

In the upper highways that wind around Wisconsin, there was a farm that we would pass routinely. Every year it had a very large wooden cutout of Santa kneeling at the manger and taking his hat off out of respect for the baby Jesus. I remember this decoration vividly as the one that stood out, out of the thousands I saw each year. Looking back I realize it shows that even our fantasies point to a single man of peace.

In many ways, not having the opportunity to believe in Santa Claus didn’t matter. I grew up in a school that was mostly Jewish and had absolutely no use for Father Christmas. When I was older, it was my beliefs that seems fanciful to them rather my peers belief in Santa seeming like wishful thinking to me. Sticking to ones’ beliefs and inevitably tests faith so that we know that if it is something we truly believe or something we were taught. Often times, this stubbornness and belief in beings and ideas despite all the evidence against us separates things into two categories; both too good to be true and those that are so good they must be true.