Baths

As Thoreau went into the woods, I am going to Nome to learn to live deliberately. I lost myself in California. For a terrifying series of months, I became a person who I didn’t know and who I never want to meet again. Every time I stepped into the shower, I hunched over, wanting to take a bath, when for years I had taken baths only when sick. Finally, one day, I did take a bath. Folding to my knees, I switched the water from showerhead to faucet, and cradling myself into the tiniest packet of flesh I could, I prayed as water rose above my ears, Dear God let it wash over me and let me escape. Just for a little while. Let me leave this person who has become a stranger to me: angry, defensive, isolated, a 180 of the person I knew in college.

Part of the stress came from working a six-day, 85-hour week, week after week after month after month, a schedule leaving no time for reflection, outside work relationships, outside interests, or conscious time spent not working. But I was doing the work I had dreamed of doing with beautiful, ever-inspiring people. And I was learning, every day, about theatre, leadership, and business. I was also learning that it was possible to be so miserable for such a sustained period.

The worst part about being miserable is making the people around you less happy than they would have been had you not been around. It’s unacceptable and shitty, and inside you repents a constant apology for your presence.

But I was always around people. There is no solitude in theatre, and as an introvert that meant I was tired, permanently. Physically, emotionally, mentally, spiritually tired with no time for recharge and no space to process why I had disappeared beyond my own recognition. A fellow introvert once said solitude is to her more important than food. I would have not eaten for a week just to have not seen or heard a single person for a day.

With every interaction draining a little more of my extinguished energy, every person became a threat. Once when walking into a coffee shop, a stranger turned to me and started speaking, and I jumped backwards, alarm blaring, screaming inside, “What do you want!? You want to take something from me. My time, my energy, my money. I have nothing left to give but myself, and I don’t even know who that person is anymore. So back off!” I don’t remember what he said.

I had slipped past my own recognition, and I had no one to bring me back to myself. For thousands of miles people only knew the stranger who had arrived in California a few months ago. They didn’t know the person I had called myself, the person who I remembered as a friend, the person who in my memory radiated life’s light. I needed someone who knew me. I needed someone to slap me across the face, look me in the eyes, and say, “This is who you are. Right here. You. All those wonderful things inside you are not lost. There is still hope and kindness and friendship and laughter inside you to give to others.” But how could these people pull me back to someone they had never met?

To that point in life I had identified myself through my actions and my relationships. I was a student. I was a director. I was a daughter. I was a sister. I was a friend. But those signposts were for a geography  I no longer inhabited. I was no longer a student, the role defining my existence since age five. I no longer recognized myself in the mirror of theatre, my driving action, the fire I thought eternal, the animation of my inner passions and earthly purpose. My family was a voice on the phone, and friends were facebook pictures. Who was I if I could no longer point to what I did or who surrounded me and say, “That’s me.”

What was I? Who was I? I don’t know. But I discovered a self, my self, a deeper self that existed beyond those constructions. Is it a heart? A soul? God? DNA? Faith? “The animating spirit,” a phrase my high school English teacher used to describe what can only be seen in absence when looking into the eye of a supermarket fish lying in ice? I don’t know what it is, but beneath the thousand layers of my past, my dreams, my actions, my labels, my names, my possessions, my words, my thoughts, my relationships, my skin, all I had read, all I had seen, all people had told me, all I had told myself, all the prayers I had ever said, I found a self, not something that beats or pricks light, but something that endures, something I contain that no being can touch or take or possess.

From that center, I slowly began the process of deconstructing my self-imposed isolation, reconstructing my identity, and grasping the open palms that had been held out to me all along.