isaegizi

[isaegizi]

Santa Fe

There is a warmth, an earthiness to Santa Fe. 

It is beautiful but dusty, piled with old memories that simultaneously ground you with stability but also weigh on you. 

There are dreams here but they are in need of being dusted off and polished. They require deeper exploration. They are less for following and more for digging. 

The people are rough in a trustworthy sort of way. You can rely on them to be rougher, partly because they lack the outer shimmer of applied sophistication. They are less glamorous and more weathered, but real. They are calling you home, to your heart, inward, to find a center. 

It is calling you by your true name, and reminding you of what you already know. 

Things may not appear as clearly or as simply or easily, but they are there waiting for you to discover them and pack them in your dusty toolkit to take with you through the next set of steps.

[isaegizi]

Salt Lake City

He gives you excitement and butterflies. He is a muse for you, but your anxiety is inflamed when you are near him and make any attempts at relying on him. This is no fault of his own, it is just your dynamic. It is passionate, alive, and inspiring, but it is also unsteady and you’ve learned by now that it cannot provide lasting happiness. This does not mean that being close to him is a negative thing...it is simply not sustainable. He has only ever shown you kindness, but he is, as he himself warned you, too narcissistic to ever provide the kind of reciprocity you seek. He introduced a beautiful place to you, a place within himself and in the wondrous city that surrounds him. He has shown you the darker side of beauty, and you are allowed to appreciate it for all the balance it has taught you.

There is a crispness, a coolness to the beauty you find in Salt Lake City. You can taste it in the name. You can feel it in all the people you meet here. This is partly why it is such an addicting and attractive location for your work. This is partly why you are so drawn to the lake itself. The coolness is refreshing. It is unfamiliar but so aesthetically pleasing that you find the discomfort intoxicating. It calls you forth, it demands your air, your breath, your wings, and it begs you to rise above it to take in as much of its regality as you can possibly bear, no matter what the risk. It may end like Icarus, but the feeling of soaring is too tempting not to try. 

[isaegizi]

Letter from Idaho

03/14/16

I’ve been thinking about you a lot on this trip. We passed an area in Idaho today with many tumbleweeds clumped together at the edge of the roadside fence. A few were blowing about in the flat distance. Talia was talking about the way they spread their seeds, and how they dry up and sever themselves from their original bush, tumbling farther and farther away to perpetuate their species. I feel like a tumbleweed sometimes. Though I don't want to dry up the connections I form in the places I settle, it feels natural to cut ties and wander and recreate better versions of myself in a variety of locations. Taking root in more than one place is less binding than picking a spot and staying through all different weather patterns and other surrounding changes. Is this freedom or a fear of commitment?

I am tired of trying to forgive myself or justify my actions, constantly learning to be gentle with my own flaws. I just want to live. I have not felt this alive in months. The sprawling landscapes with sudden snow-capped mountains, mist settling amid their slopes, and the overwhelming variety of wildlife that bounds across the road before us have awakened a part of me that was dormant for most of college. I must learn to nurture this part of myself while tending to my love for another, because this balance has always been a struggle for me. This is where my urgency to sever like a tumbleweed stems from.

The air in Clearwater National Forest as we entered Idaho took me back to years of hiking through the Eastern woods of Massachusetts and Canada; all our childhood explorations. The water in the Loschas River was sparkling in the sun as we crossed a bowed bridge to find the Jerry Johnson hot springs. There were pools of warm water trickling by the trail we hiked, allowing for so many small green lily pads, moss, and ferns to grow happily just across from the raging, freezing river. How can everything make so much more sense in a world of natural phenomena I know nothing about? And what is that sense of relief I get from the sweetness of these small organisms finding their way in this tiny, hidden, untouched piece of the planet? They hold no power over my own life or the decisions I make in it, but they do remind me that simplicity is an option.

Do you remember holding me during my late-night existential crises, musing at length about simplicity? Those thick philosophy text books on your bed kept us warm with their weight while you procrastinated leaving our cave to reignite your flimsy pilot light. Your views seemed extreme to me back then, your conviction was intimidating for a mind like mine that still craved conflict and complications. You made sense of things through black and white while I lost myself in the grey over and over again, begging you to join me in the fog. It was in those green spring woods, nearly six months after you let me go, that I finally understood why you were never going to be able to convince me before I was ready. When I asked for space I thought I wanted adventure, but I’ve discovered in these adventures that our end was actually the catalyst I needed to discover the exact simplicity you described.

Simplicity is a life style, a state of mind, and yet it cannot be achieved so easily as to just say “I will strive for simplicity.” It has to unfold naturally, until one day you wake up and realize simplicity surrounds you. That’s what happened when I found myself amid all these beautiful beings in the woods. It was not that I found simplicity but that simplicity finally showed itself to me. I think it is because of you that I was able to recognize it.

[isaegizi]

Now is the Color White - a portrait

She danced in that white dress as though it was made of air. As though someone had drawn it onto her body and then forgot to lift the pen from the paper when they flipped the page. This was how she had always existed, like an unfinished idea inspired within some lonely artist's mind. Originally his cause for breath, she would have later been shuffled to a padlocked palace of masterpieces, hidden in a dusty corner of his mind where only thoughts too great to complete belonged. I loved her more than that artist ever could, for I saw her as all that she was already and embraced the thrilling possibility of more to be revealed, while her creator could feel nothing but guilt when reminded of her missing pieces.

We used to stare at the ocean with tears in our eyes, knowing we couldn’t hope to understand the world we inhabited. She was the only one who accepted what that felt like then. “Be in the now” the rest of them said, a youthful sparkle still shining in their eyes. I preferred the quiet wisdom that burned steadily in hers. I wondered how we could ever attempt to be anything else? We were nothing but Now, a concoction of memories that informed every decision we’d made. She taught me that gratitude and acknowledgement of the unrealized unknown could coexist without contradiction.

I’ve often thought since then of how Now is like the color white. It’s like the dress she wore on that warm spring evening. The moments defining us refract like all the colors of the rainbow to shed a clear, bright light on who we have become. They extend beyond the single second it takes to wind around our bodies in a glowing silk cocoon and shelter us from Time itself.

I used to wake from nightmares only to find her green sea eyes staring back at me, smiling through the faint blue of early morning. She would whisper to my nose and graze it with her own. The warmth of her skin on mine was enough to spark a small forest fire inside my belly, which grew and grew every hour we spent holding each other tightly in place while our minds danced together across the borders of yesterday, today, and tomorrow. As the sun rose so did the flames, up through my lungs and throat and mouth until I could think of nothing other than kissing her. I didn’t dare while she slept again with that soft pink smile on her face. The fire would have to crackle inside a little longer, and I would have to grow a little braver on my own while she explored other worlds that I would never be able to enter.

[isaegizi]

Grief

An excerpt monologue from my play Last Chance Cocktail: 

Grief is a strange beast, isn’t it? No one can really put a finger on how it works, but it comes back to visit A LOT. Like an overbearing in-law who can’t get enough of our awkward hospitality. We can tell it to fuck off in every way known to man but it just doesn’t seem to get the message.

I read in a pamphlet somewhere…or it might have been a video…I remember there was a cute animation or illustration or something…. anyway it said that psychologists have started looking at grief not as a process to “get over”, but more as a messy bubble of scribbles that form around us. They build up endlessly throughout our lives, and we just have to adapt to see through them. Kind of an overwhelming image, right? BUT, now that they’re framing it like this, they’re also developing better ways to treat people struggling with it…something stupid about building outer bubbles with stronger membranes. I don’t know.

I think I’d rather look at it like “baggage”. Just actual, classic, good old baggage. And you can either choose to keep it all jumbled inside a big suitcase or you can fold it neatly and know where to find certain items when they need closer examination. Or just a really good wash every once in a while.

Sorry I’m rambling about this. It’s all sort of the same idea I guess. I just don’t want you to feel you have to “move on”. There is no deadline. I still miss him all the time. I know I don’t talk about him as much anymore, because I still want to live my life, but I do. And you can talk about him too. I think he’d probably love that.

[isaegizi]

First Impressions in a #MeToo Era LA

I wrote this piece as a rare and lengthy attempt at honest self-expression through social media last year during the Me Too explosion.  A friend who works on an Alaska-based zine called Selkie contacted me soon after I posted, asking if they could publish it in their next issue. It’s the first piece of writing I got to see in the printed pages of a larger community effort, but it’s also a piece I return to from time to time in order to reflect on my own mindset during a specific time in the ongoing process of my getting to know LA and the very exclusive industry that thrives here:  

Ok, so let's talk about Hollywood. More specifically, let’s talk about the hurricane of Harvey articles that have been circulating our news feeds over the past few weeks.

Before I get into specifics, I feel I should acknowledge that this is and has been happening everywhere, in all fields, in all occupations, households, public spaces, and within personal and professional relationships since the beginning of time. But in Hollywood, because there is a flaw in the very design of the entertainment industry, the issue of sexual harassment floats around unnoticed and untouched like a high class celebrity wearing bedazzled sunglasses whom everyone notices but is too afraid to call out. Because entertainment is for pleasure, and because most of the people calling the shots in this industry are men, being a Hollywood actress is like walking thru a minefield of daily sexual advances, both within the audition room and outside. The industry is set up for actors to be looked at. Actresses are taught how to display themselves under the massive spotlight of the male gaze, whether we want to or not. Here, you walk into an audition and there's a room (usually) full of sweaty, impatient men who crowd around you to shake your hand and turn a camera towards you and you immediately become hyper aware of how much smaller than them every part of you is. Everything they say about your headshot and resume you have to process through a "is this sketchy?" filter in your brain before deciding how to react.

But because all of that behavior is expected, and there is a formula you can follow through all your interactions in that room, most women approach the audition scenario mentally and emotionally prepared. The part that nobody can really explain to you before coming out here is that it’s the people and situations that creep up on you out in the wild that are the most disturbing and difficult to navigate.

When I first moved to LA I got a job working for a man in the industry. It felt good, normal, everything you'd expect of a personal assistant job...plus some massages. No big deal though. I was asked early on not to tell anyone what exactly I did for him; this was framed as being purely for privacy reasons. However, I did tell my closest friends and family about it and they all urged me to either get out or at least be on high alert. My mother had told me so many times before moving here not to be "seduced" by the glamour that some people would use to their advantage, and I truly believed I had heeded the advice. I also knew I needed to make a living, and that this was an opportunity to make valuable connections. So I justified what was being asked of me at my job, and every time I went in that room to give my boss his massage I told myself this was my choice, I was in power, and that I had told him it was all ok for me. But this is the scary thing about sexual advances: more often than not, they are masked and hidden from plain sight. You can justify every little sign, you can counteract your friends' warnings with rational explanations for all of the alarming behavior.

It took me two months to finally reach a breaking point. One night, during a massage, he made a move that sent a wave of panic through me. I got that weird zoom-out feeling, when your brain leaves your body and has to detach from the situation at hand in order to confirm whether or not it’s actually happening. Every couple seconds I would hear one voice in my head pop up and ask “is this ok?!”, and another would whisper in response “Shh, yes, stay calm, don’t overreact, everything is fine”. I went home feeling shaky and drained. I started dreading going to work. I got a knot in my stomach every time I knew I was going to see him. Finally, I decided to confront him about it, since he had always been adamant about an “open communication policy” between us.

And of course, he was prepared with all of his rational explanations. Suddenly, mid-conversation, I had become an over-emotional, inexperienced, naive little actress in LA, taking advantage of him and the "gift" he was giving me. In his view, he was the most generous employer I would probably find in this city, he was offering to bring me on set and meet people who could change my career (something he never got around to, by the way), he had never asked for anything unreasonable, and so how could I be this ungrateful? That conversation ended with me apologizing and telling him I was nothing but grateful for everything he had given me. He then told me to think about whether I wanted this job, and that he wouldn't take it personally if I decided it was something I couldn't handle. He used the words “young”, “sensitive”, “new”, “inexperienced”, “smart”…etc. He told me he was a “huge fan” of mine and would never want to fire me, but in the days that followed he treated me with a cold shoulder and ceased all attempts at maintaining a human relationship of any kind. Suddenly he didn’t care how my day was, suddenly he didn’t have patience for the time it was taking me to complete a side project for him. Suddenly, open communication went out the window. I left the job after taking about a week to process the mindfuck that had just happened to me.

Several months later, I still sometimes catch myself feeling guilty, questioning whether it was all in my head. Whether I left a great job because I let myself imagine the worst about his intentions. Whether I could have composed myself better, whether I could have left things on better terms. And then I remember the hand. I remember that hand, guiding me up his inner thigh, lingering just a little too long on my arm while I tried my best to avoid the alarm bells in my head.

I know I shouldn’t be, but I am ashamed. I am ashamed every time I see the billboards for his show as I drive home from whatever odd-job I've picked up since leaving him. I'm ashamed when I remember I left a project unfinished with him because after our goodbye I didn't want to think about him anymore. I’m ashamed that when people asked me about it I pretended it wasn't as big of a deal as it was to me. I'm ashamed that it took me two months to accept what I had walked into. But this shame is exactly why I decided I wanted to share my story. I know others are feeling it all around me. In her recent video about naming her sexual assaulters, Evan Rachel Woods raised the point that these kinds of stories come out in waves because there is safety in numbers. The silence does nothing. The internet needs to blow up with stories like this, so we can see just how many of us there are, and so that more and more of us can feel comfortable and safe enough to emerge from the shadows. We have a duty to each other to create the perfect storm, to kick up some dust, to open the flood gates and raise awareness to its highest possible tide. Because let’s face it: despite what the news chooses to cover or uncover, it is not just Harvey, and it is not just Hollywood. It is everywhere, and it is a very, very real problem.

[isaegizi]

Begin Again

Well it’s my 24th birthday and I’ve decided it’s time to start sending the various thoughts I’ve put to paper (and screen) out into some world beyond my own private notebooks and forgotten hard drive files. 

I’ve always loved writing. It’s been an incredibly calming and cathartic practice  throughout my life to write stories, scripts, and songs, yet I’ve never identified solely as a writer. It’s often difficult to trust that everything will translate accurately when I put my thoughts into words, presenting them as neatly packaged concepts to consciousnesses outside my own. But I’m forgoing that anxiety for now, allowing myself to simply share what I have written and what I will surely continue to write, be it random musings, poems, songs, short stories, or something else entirely that reveals itself to me...my main intention here is to relax into knowing I’m expanding and have found a larger space for these little creations to exist.