31 yrs old

I write to you on the evening of my 31st birthday, here on the coast of California in a little time machine town called Santa Cruz. I just finished eating 2 crab cakes at a restaurant called Stagnaro Bros Seafood, front house run mostly by hispanic people. The little speakers in the restaurant muttered barbershop quartet tunes. There was an elderly couple in the booth in front of me, discussing the seasoning in their lobster rolls at the pace of their steady retirement.

I’m actually writing this in my hotel room at the Dream Inn, on the 9th floor after being upgraded for my birthday. I have a view of the wharf and the horizon of the ocean. Also… somebody wrote happy birthday on the sand in large enough size to see from my balcony, but it’s not labelled for me specifically. Do people just come here for their birthdays? I asked the front desk, and they said in an under-enthused tone “We have a sandman that does things sometimes. Maybe he did that .. !” 

Okay.

It made me smile. I’ll take it as sweetness.

The last time I had a hotel room next to the ocean like this, I was 26 years old in Honolulu and making out with some dancer I had met once in LA. We were on the balcony of our hotel room, all the while my best friend was I-drank-too-much sleeping inside. He definitely was enjoying it more than I was, but at that time I didn’t know how to say no to mediocre experiences. 

Okay back to my birthday. I’m here in Santa Cruz on my own. Prior to my crab-cake moment, I had walked barefoot on the beach for some time as the sun set. So much of the last few years have been this reorientation of who I’m supposed to be—as an artist or just in my career. I’ve been searching for ways to clarify the busyness of wondering who I’m meant to be. On that walk, I though to myself “I’ll just tell the ocean what I really want — that I really want to be the most amazing singer-songwriter dancer storyteller!!” 

I turned to the ocean and I readied myself to begin my monologue, “You know what I really want… I want to—“ and then the waves crashed and I just fell silent. It just didn’t make sense sense to profess my dreams to the vastness of the ocean. 

I thought about Mary Oliver’s poem “I Go Down To The Shore”

I go down to the shore in the morning

and depending on the hour the waves

are rolling in or moving out,

and I say, oh, I am miserable,

what shall—what should I do? And the sea says

in its lovely voice:

Excuse me, I have work to do.

I understood the sentiment first I read it years ago, but today I felt like I had written that poem myself. I just stood there in silence, listening to the bass-mid-high overtones of the ocean blaring its song to me, no space and no need for my little worries.

I then proceeded to the wharf, which by the way I learned is the longest wharf on the American coast. So cool. Little ole’ Santa Cruz sporting the longest thang. Haha. I walked to the end of the wharf, which took about 15 minutes and sat at one of the benches. While I was walking, the horizon was pinking from the sunset. The gradient was like that I had seen on desktop screensavers, and I thought once again about how technology imitates nature but somehow never succeeds at copying nature’s mysterious way of simply existing to exist.

It took many minutes for me to settle into stillness on that bench. You know that “edge” that people like to take off from a glass of wine? It had been with me for the last few days. I sat still on that bench, waiting for nothing as couples and families rotated in the spots around me, and then just as the sky began to darken to a navy blue, it hit me — my family loves me. I spend so much time thinking about what I wish they’d do for me I hardly notice what they already do, and how steadfastly they show up for me. I mean, I don’t think we can just think our way into noticing our loved ones. Then we'd be doing that much more. What I do believe is that the ocean held me in this moment, wiped the edge off for me, lifted my chin a bit, and said “Look. What you’ve always been looking for.”

I’m actually really loved, and by many. I thought about all my recent lovers gone wrong. The last one I fell in love with after one week. By week two I began feeling like his wife and wanted to have children. (Cue Sherie Rene Scott belting “I want to be your wiiiiiiife ! ! !”) The thing really didn’t end well. I think we lasted for three weeks, and then I had to end things over the phone with him while he was in a desert in Namibia. 

We ended things because he was kind of the avoidant-attchment type.. and I’m often the anxious-attached type. God, I felt such a girl. Those first 2 weeks the only song I could practice was Corinne Bailey Rae’s “Hey, I Won’t Break Your Heart”. The love was real — but I really could not withstand the absence of communication. And it took some days to see the yellow flag… then see it closer… and then to feel the true, heartbreaking weight of incompatibility. I don’t know what it takes to learn what kind of treatment one deserves, but I’m glad life led to the point where I could tell him that I wanted more than what he was offering.

But even him — he did love me. He just couldn’t … / we just couldn’t figure it out.

All the boys loved me! They truly did, at least the ones I named out loud on that wharf. I love those boys who loved me, the ones who took their turns trying to mend the wound of having feared men all my life… or maybe just the wound that is the impossible suffering of being alive.

[Cue Sondheim’s “Being Alive”]

Someone you have to let in

Someone whose feelings you spare

Someone who, like it or not

Will want you to share

A little, a lot

Someone to crowd you with love

Someone to force you to care

Someone to make you come through

Who'll always be there

As frightened as you of being alive

I’ve been listening to a lot of musical theater. Starting my 30s strong baby! The thing I like about musical theater is that these performing artists are SO spectacular at singing live — they’re probably some of the best live singers out there. It’s not contemporary recording artist skillfulness because that’s another branch of the singing artform, but the diction and the belting and the dynamic vocal embodiment of character and intention. Damn!!! Now, I don’t watch every show because I’m quite picky about composers. (I stan JRB, Sondheim, Guettel, Schwartz, and Smalls, currently). I got to hand it to them, the way these composers so distinctly use harmony to compel a narrative arc. I MEAN ! ! 

Recently I’ve taken an interest in acting. I took my first Meisner technique course last November. It was a stellar experience. It actually made me realize I know much more about acting than I let myself believe. I know so much about presence, listening, and motivation-into-action from being a dancer. And this journey of singing every day and feeling my voice as it happens…that trust in my voice is evolving…the trust to say what I want to say how I want to say it. I’m going to continue taking acting class and I already have so much more to say about it, but I want to write about that another time.

I’m nearing the end of my 3 course room service dinner (Endive Salad, Grilled Octopus, Mushroom Campinelle - Thanks Edward!) and I told myself I’d go to the beach one more time to end my birthday.

I wish there could be a way translate this deep feeling of peace I found today, about simply ‘being’. I’m so ‘becoming’ obsessed… everything seems to be about what’s going to happen, who I’m gonna be, what kind of artist I’m meant to become.

For my birthday I also asked all of my closest friends to write me letters so I could read them in front a firepit and the ocean. All of them were beautiful, in their own special unique snowflake way. I felt like all my friends had lined up one by one to just make monologue speeches about how they loved me and what they wished for me. 

One letter feels particularly pertinent, from my friend Diego, who basically said “in the past two decades and from all the artists I’ve met, I actually see talent in you.” This, by the way, you could say to any artist and it would make them cry. I mean, I know I cried. That’s not the point of me bringing this up, though. Because while it did feel good to be acknowledged for something I don’t always believe, he made a greater point later in the letter. After detailing beautifully what he admires in me and my ways, he remarked, “we all make choices and we stick by their consequences and that takes talent... I can tell you that you’ve made choices and you’ve stuck by them — and this is a reason to celebrate.” 

Diego ?! What ? My darling, genius writer friend. Thank you.

Thank you for illuminating this truth, that we have choice or what we do has some kind of meaning, that my life or this life or our lives are worth celebrating. Honestly, I don’t always feel like it’s a choice to pick up the guitar or to sing or to register for an acting class. I just feel it’s a calling. I follow it. I thank God that I have people who help make this all happen. I don’t know if it’s up to me that I have this talent of choosing art every day or that I myself would call it talent. I just can’t stop. 

And back to the simplicity of ‘being’ and how this fits with our decisions. I think about something a mentor of mine, Ami Shulman, told me about desire, that when we are inside desire, we cannot judge ourselves. Desire has no goals or attachment to outcome. Desire is fully present with sensation.

I think if I have done anything right, and I still can hardly claim this as just my doing, but I will say it — I think I have chosen to believe that I deserve to live the life that I want. And that I will do everything I can to honor myself in this way. 

I used to think that this was selfish, but the more I follow this pursuit, the more I see the waves crash around me, the more I see that my own joy is worthwhile for this world too.

Happy birthday to me.

Love,

Jason