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Home, Relationships

Lessons From My Mom

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As the only girl and the youngest child, I will admit I was spoiled for a good share of my life.  I looked up to my mother as a child and, in my teens, while most of my girlfriends “hated” or fought with their moms, my mom and I were friends.  Yes, of course we had our fights and tiffs, just like many mothers and daughters, but that is not what stuck out about our relationship.

I was fortunate to learn at such a young age how important a good relationship with my mother was.  Not only do I enjoy doing our one-on-one mother-daughter things, but I have learned so much about life just by watching my mother interact with the world around her. She didn’t just sit me down and talk at me, she showed me. I learned by observing her capability, attitude, and reactions.  I’m not even sure she knows the qualities she has shown me: like her kindness, her work ethic, and putting others first, to name a few. Most people see these in my mother just by talking to her. And while she did pass down to me a few unwanted qualities, such as compulsively re-checking everything is unplugged multiple times before leaving the house, she has passed down an uncountable amount of good qualities that made me the person I am today.

She and my father taught me the importance of a good work ethic. They both worked so hard, and carried multiple jobs, just to give everything they earned to my brothers and me. I look back at my childhood and how I made friends with the kids, who would get picked on, or ones with learning disabilities, or ones from bad homes, because my mother encouraged me to love and appreciate every person. I watched her kindness shine through as I saw how she cared for others above herself. It was her who taught me to love and befriend the unloved and friendless. People can tell you over and over how important these qualities are, but it isn’t until you see them first-hand that you know why they’re so important.

As I grow, my relationship with my mother grows too. When I was younger, I couldn’t exactly appreciate what she had done for me and the rest of our family.  I couldn’t see how special the relationship between my parents was. They showed me what a beautiful relationship looks like and how to keep it strong for over 35 years.  While I am not a mother yet, I’ve learned so many things to prepare me for motherhood and I know what I want my relationship with my daughter to look like. My dad used to work over nights, so my mom had a queen bed all to herself and she would occasionally let me sneak in to have a girls’ sleepover.  As a child it was one of my favorite things, and when I grew up we would still have the occasional girls’ night sleepover together.

When I was a teenager, I thought I knew everything, obviously. I couldn’t have been more wrong and eventually, like (most) of us do, I grew out of that and came to realize that my parents were right about pretty much everything.

The older I get, I earn more respect for my mother and all mothers out there.  I cannot think it is an easy job to take on.  There may be many parenting books on the shelves, but nothing can tell you an exact formula on how to be a perfect mother, or how to make a perfect child.  Often times, we put the blame on our mothers, but for most of us, being the child is the easy part, being the mother is what is difficult.  My mom always trusted me and had faith that I would make good decisions.  My curfew as a teen was usually 1 AM and my mother always said it was because she trusted me and the people I was with.  She treated me with respect because she knew me, and that she and my father instilled in me the qualities I needed to make good decisions.  My friends also grew close to my parents, so close in fact that they would call her mom (or “ma” as we say in New York), and they would confide in her. Not only did she take care of my family and friends, but also the numerous pets I begged and pleaded for—the ones I promised I would look after and clean-up for.

It has become harder now that I live across the country from my parents—I look back on all the things that I didn’t necessarily take for granted, but didn’t realize how important they were to me.  How the simple things are the things I enjoyed the most. Like sitting in the afternoon and having a cup of coffee with my mom while watching House Hunters. Or watching “our shows” together at night.  It’s difficult to no longer have those moments in my life on a regular basis, but it also makes them more precious.  To me the little things in life mean the most and when I sit alone on the couch, across the country, I wish my mom was sitting next to me.

So I raise a glass to all the amazing mothers out there raising and instilling their highest qualities in us and preparing us for children of our own. Who teach us how to make a mean cup of coffee, killer eggplant parm, and amazing meatballs and still always have the recipes on hand for whenever we call to tell them we’ve lost it… again.  It scares me how quickly life seems to pass by, but what I’ve come to learn from both my parents is that no matter what we have thought about family before, it is the most important thing and we have to appreciate it while it’s here.

Photo by Remi Coin

Photo by Remi Coin

Sports

My Dark Confession: I Don’t Like Sports

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This is complicated. I have a lot of feelings I need to sort out. It’s not that I don’t like the world of sports, the idea of sports, or their cultural weight. Such high-stakes drama! Years of practice and dedication, all for this one moment! The agony of loss! The thrill of a comeback!

There’s a reason a good deal of my favorite movies as a child were sports movies (do not buy me tequila shots and ask me to recite The Mighty Ducks front-to-back unless that’s exactly what you want to happen). But for some reason, even though I’ll spend two weeks of my life cloistered away binge-watching Friday Night Lights, I glaze over like I haven’t slept in days the minute someone turns on the TV for the actual, for-real, big game. I feel like this webcomic accurately conveys what this experience is like for me:

via VectorBelly

And God help me if I’m in a social situation where every single person around me suddenly feels the urge to weigh in on Sunday’s playoff game and I have nothing to say except, “Yeah, they were like… really throwing the ball a lot, huh?” That’s my cue to whip out my phone and hope BuzzFeed has just tweeted a new list of “Dogs Who Forgot How to Dog.”

I really wish I had a sport that I cared about, or was at least marginally excited about. It can get lonely in here, in my non-sportsing head. But I think it’s safe to say that, aside from the Olympics—which I consider a much more cinematically-adjacent drama-fest than your typical NBA season (Read: Tonya and Nancy, even 20 years later)—it’s just not going to happen for me. I recently voiced this concern to the guy in my life, and he promptly took it upon himself to instill in me a passion for basketball (or at least, an understanding of the game and why someone—i.e. him—might find it exhilarating). This resulted in a lot of pause-and-rewind during crucial moments in the games, followed by “OMGWTFBBQ LIZ WERE YOU WATCHING? DID YOU SEE THIS THING?”

“Oh you mean… that? Where he’s jumping? I saw that.”

We would then watch the shot approximately 3-4 more times until he was convinced that my enthrallment with the moment matched his own. I really do applaud his efforts. But it just hasn’t worked. He still rewinds all the shots, but now we both know he’s just doing it for his own enjoyment.

Upon finding out about my lack of enthusiasm for sporting events, people often ask me if I ever played sports as a kid. No, not really, unless you count my eighteen months of gymnastics classes (I fractured a vertebrae roleplaying My Little Pony one day and was forced to hang up my leotard and retire at the ripe old age of nine), my brief horseback riding stint (won one ribbon at a horse show, got thrown by a horse the next week, and quit the week after—literally did not get back on the horse), or the semester of field hockey I played in high school (I benched myself a lot—my old back injury was particularly unruly that year… maybe). Point being, it just wasn’t for me. I was a drama club kid, through and through.

My mom, thankfully, was sympathetic and padded my extracurricular schedule with art and creative writing classes. Her only caveat was that I had to take a dance class twice a year so I wasn’t just sitting on my ass eating Twinkies writing Sabrina The Teenage Witch spec scripts all day. I remember the day that a parent of one of my peers said to my mom (in front of me, I might add), “Aren’t you worried she won’t have any people skills because she never learned to be a team player? Sports help with that, you know. She should play volleyball.” I’ll admit that I sometimes think back to that moment on days when I’m feeling particularly socially inept and wonder if she was indeed correct. But you know what, lady? I did learn to be a team player, thank you very much! Putting on a play with other kids, learning to suck it up when your BFF got the lead role instead of you, and being loving and supportive towards that guy with stage fright or that girl who’s totally tone deaf—every one of these scenarios is one hell of a team-building exercise for a ten-year-old.

So, have I managed to lead a functional life despite the absence of sports? Yeah, I think so!

Is it socially uneasy every now and then? Sure, but that’s what “Dogs Who Forgot How to Dog” is for.

I think, by now, everyone forgives me for my incurable disinterest, and more importantly, I forgive myself. I’m not going to spend my time trying and failing to be keen on something I obviously have never really cared about. That’s just how it’s gonna be, folks.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I think there’s an unfinished Sabrina spec on a floppy disk somewhere calling my name. GAME TIME.

Photo by Michelle White

Photo by Michelle White

Sports

Demystifying Figure Skating

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When I was five years old I became obsessed with figure skating. Not just mesmerized or fascinated, but outright obsessed. I watched it every chance I got on television and imagined throwing myself into the air to spin like the skaters I idolized. I even used my slippers to glide across the kitchen floor, pretending I was skating on ice.

My parents were pretty entertained by this and when my obsession didn’t go away after a few weeks, they enrolled me in skating classes at the local ice rink. I’m pretty sure they thought I’d get bored with it and move on after a few sessions. But instead I turned out to be an avid skater, rarely ever falling, and skipping right past the tots intro class that required you to wear a helmet and skate with an orange safety cone.

For the next few years I skated every winter (it was a seasonal rink) and did fairly well, that is until I hit the moves that required me to have a fair amount of (read: any) coordination.

I skated on and off until I was twelve, when a not-so-great injury made me realize that I was not built to throw myself into the air and never would be. I moved on to other interests but I still hold a love for the sport that captured my attention when I was little.

So to help those who are new to this wonderful sport (yes, it’s a sport, don’t you dare argue with me), here are a few keys elements you’ll be looking at when watching the skating unfold.

1) Jumps

Ah, yes, throwing yourself blindly into the air and then landing on a thin piece of metal on a slippery surface. No big deal, right? There are six types of jumps – the toe loop, the Lutz, the flip, the Salchow the loop, and the Axel – often in double and triple form (if not quads, which is INSANE) because that’s how many rotations they have to get through in the air before landing. To get an idea of what these look like and for more detail on what each of them are, check out this awesome article from The Wire with gifs of each of them. They then have to land on the appropriate edge of their skate (inside or outside, depending on which way they’re going) and they better not even dare to land on two feet or man are they screwed in points.

2) Spins

There are a six core spins you will see and hear about in the Olympics, all of which require so much speed that many of the skaters become blurs before your eyes –  the scratch, the flying, the sit, the Biellmann, the layback (my favorite), and the camel. Check out this handy guide, with GIFs, that compliments The Wire’s article. All of these require a solid center, much flexibility, and an enormous amount of power and core strength to keep the speed up. These spins often have variations as well – like switching feet, picking up speed mid-spin, and even occasionally combining spins – in order to get more points for difficulty. On top of it, they are seen as more artistic than jumps, and therefore must be graceful in order to also be seen as effective. It’s no easy task.

3) All those other random moves they do

A lot of other moves are seen more for artistic movement. Some don’t have official names, and most of that is dance-like stuff, but there are a few I can quickly introduce you to.

Spiral – nonsensically, this is the move where the skater puts her leg high into the air behind her (or sometimes in front of her if she’s a pretzel) and glides. It’s actually a lot easier than it looks (didn’t think I’d say that, eh?) but requires massive amounts of flexibility and balance.

Lunge – this is exactly as it sounds. The skater puts his leg down onto the ice and drags it behind him, usually for just a second or two because it will slow him down. This requires a strong center of gravity, let me tell you, or you’ll end up in the most uncomfortable half-split of your life. I may or may not be speaking from experience.

Crossovers – oh, these things suck. These things are what did me in early in my years of lessons because I was so clumsy. The concept is that you cross one foot over the other, either forwards or backwards, and it helps you gain speed—plus it looks nice. They do these constantly while skating. Look for them next time you watch and you won’t be able to un-see them again.

There you go – your basics to the language of figure skating. If you’re still hungry for more terminology, check out the United States Figure Skating Association’s glossary of terms – it’s comprehensive and very useful. Now go pop some popcorn and settle into your couch while you watch these skaters fling themselves into the air, spin at high speeds and generally do things that seem unsafe for the population at large. And then watch them cry as they get their scores. It’s the next great American pastime – only with ice, blades, and absolutely no padding, because padding is for amateurs.

Photo by Sara Slattery

Photo by Sara Slattery

Relationships

“You’re not my daughter anymore.”

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“You’re not my daughter anymore.”

“Okay.”
“I am not your father.”
“Okay.”
“Do not try to contact me or your grandparents.”
“Okay.”
“Maybe someday we can have a relationship again, but not as father and daughter.”
“Okay.”

I had a wonderful childhood. My brother and I got good grades, played sports, never got in trouble. We were “good kids.” I don’t have many bad memories or scars that I’ve carried with me, that is, until my parents told us they were getting a divorce. We had no idea it was coming. It didn’t seem like my parents were fighting. The way it happened was so matter-of-fact. Two houses, two Christmases, two TVs; two of everything. It sounded fine: we would spend half our time with mom and half with dad, and we were all pretty okay with it. I wish I’d known then how not okay it really was.

After the divorce, my father got more involved at our Episcopalian church.  We had always been religious: my brother and I went to Sunday school; we were in the youth group led by my father. But, when the church allowed female priests and then accepted homosexuals, my father decided we were leaving. We went back to our previous non-denominational fundamentalist church and things at home got more religion focused.  We noticed my dad’s behavior changing but nothing too weird.

My brother and I were now teenagers and I was in high school. Teenagers are moody, teenagers have emotions, they like to ask questions, mostly hard questions. This was not okay with my father. He tried to deal with our “insolence” by having more household rules, more chores, and more “family meetings.”

He started bad-mouthing my mom, telling us that she was a terrible person and that she was evil.  He blamed her for leaving him and claimed she was having an affair with another man. He hated her and now we could see it. (My mom told us later that she had been dealing with this for a long time but had tried not to bring us into it.)

He was so angry; he called social services and claimed my mom was forcing us to get drunk because we were allowed to have wine with dinner despite being under-aged. (But “have wine with dinner” actually only meant special occasions where we could basically have one sip if we wanted.) We were called to the counselor’s office to talk to a Social Worker; which was mortifying. He was furious when nothing came of it, and called the cops. When they explained that responsible alcohol consumption supervised by a parent or guardian in the home is not something the police deal with, my dad tried to make us swear to God we would never drink again. I swore to not drink till I was 21.

Around the same time, my dad had started dating a woman from our church. I’m not going to deny that my brother and I were hostile and not as welcoming as we could have been—she said she wasn’t trying to replace our mother, but it was very hard to not feel guilty doing things with her and not our Mom.

Then, my father proposed. We were not okay with it. Things had already been so tense between all of us in the house, we felt like an addition to the family would only make it worse. When she broke off their engagement, my dad told us it was our fault, that we had not been nice to her. But we had never been mean to her. Looking back though, maybe we were cold and we hadn’t sought out any interaction with her specifically. My dad felt we weren’t trying hard enough. But we thought that their relationship was moving too fast and we were struggling to adjust.

They did eventually get married. And that’s when the rules really took off: my stepmother didn’t work and had sleeping problems so I was grounded for washing the dishes before I left for school because it was too loud. The next week I was grounded for leaving a dirty knife in the kitchen sink in the morning. Our bedroom doors had to remain open at all times, but their door was shut and locked and they rarely interacted with us except at family meetings or scheduled activities. My brother and I had to have our laundry done before we went to our mother’s house, but we couldn’t do laundry together because it was inappropriate for him to see my underclothes.

So my brother and I began leading double lives: trying to be Christian angels in one house and regular kids in another. I tried to be the “good” daughter my father wanted, but his rules kept changing. It seemed no matter how hard I tried to do everything right, I would always make a mistake. This led to curfews and check-in calls and extra Bible study at home as punishment.

Not long after they got married, my father and stepmother started watching an evangelical minister on TV instead of going to church. My brother and I were not comfortable with watching a TV minister, but my father informed us that the hierarchy was: “God, me, your stepmother, you”—since he was closest to God, we had to do what he said. I believed in God, I knew what Christianity was. It was forgiveness and love and sharing the gift of salvation. What my father was living was not Christianity to me.

We started getting depressed. My father was telling us we were sinners, not true Christians, because we kept making mistakes and never seemed to learn. My mom ran as much defense as she could. And she was amazingly supportive; really, we couldn’t wait to go to her house and escape from my dad’s. We could see that what my dad was doing was wrong, but we were “good kids,” and we certainly didn’t want to lose our dad. He loved us after all, and we loved him, so we went along. And, yet, he knew we didn’t really believe the things he believed and it was getting harder and harder to fake it. But I couldn’t find a way to articulate this to him.

My dad and I finally went to a Christian counselor that he had picked.  I let it all out. I told my dad how hurt I was, how he never thought of our side and never considered that maybe we had our own ideas or relationships with God that he wasn’t a part of. I asked him to be more understanding and not take out his anger at my mom on us. The counselor agreed with me. He told my dad to work on being more forgiving and patient with us. My dad was convinced it was a complete waste of time and that the counselor was obviously a quack. We never went to counseling again.

The dysfunction in our relationship finally came to a head at the end of my senior year. I had asked my mom to chaperone my last field trip but it was on a day my dad had custody. The day before the trip, I mentioned that my mom was chaperoning and my dad lost it. He said that this was the “last straw.” He called my mom and made her cancel. He made me ask my teacher if he could go instead. He didn’t care that he had never chaperoned anything before and that it was special to me that my mom chaperone this last one. He accused me of always choosing my mom over him.  He was probably right.

As High School drew to a close, I was accepted into a private college across the country. My dad disapproved of me going to an “expensive” school—really he disapproved of me going to college altogether. He believed I should get married immediately, start having kids and be the perfect Christian wife. I didn’t have everything figured out but I was pretty sure I wasn’t interested in that path. After the chaperoning incident, he told me that I had to move out the day after graduation. I didn’t fight him. I didn’t say anything really. What else was there to say?  I couldn’t handle the confrontation anymore.

My dad and stepmom didn’t come to my high school graduation. My stepmom felt I had betrayed them. The following day, I moved out. They made me leave anything they had ever given me as gifts.

I didn’t see them again until the end of that summer, my dad took my brother and me to the park to say goodbye. He hugged me and wished me well and I cried, unsure about the future. This was the last time I saw my father.

The night before I left for college, he called me. He told me he never should have hugged me when he said goodbye to me. He told me I was not the kind of person he could call his daughter. To this day, a lot of that conversation is fuzzy. I think I was in shock. All I could say was “Okay.” He hung up and I just sat there.

I was sad, I was angry, I felt betrayed, but more than anything, I couldn’t believe that a religion really meant more to him than family. After a few days, I was relieved. I had been living in fear and stress and anxiety for years. Now I was free.

Wouldn’t it be great if the story just ended there, with me feeling free? It doesn’t. The mental abuse stuck with me. I didn’t drink again till I was 21 because I was afraid my dad would find out and then we would never be able to reconcile. In hindsight, I was more damaged than I could admit.

A few years ago, my stepmother sent me an email. She said the hurt had gone on long enough and that she hoped we could put it all behind us. I assume this was due to some sermon that struck a chord. I replied that I agreed and was willing to start over but that since my dad had ended our relationship, I had to hear from him that that was what he wanted.  I never heard back from either of them.

But the wound had been reopened, so I decided that I would take the first step. I wrote my dad an email. I said I was sorry for the way things ended, that we both made mistakes and that I would be willing to start a new relationship.

His response was one sentence: “How have you changed your life so that what happened before will not happen again?”

I deleted the email.

I had—have—regrets. I lost my father. He didn’t see me graduate from college. He didn’t walk me down the aisle when I got married. He won’t meet his future grandchildren. They won’t have a grandfather. I lost half of my family. And I foolishly hoped for a long time that he would see that he had made a mistake.

Two years ago I found out that my grandmother had passed away. I should have found out about my grandmother’s death from my father, I should have had the opportunity to go to her funeral, to mourn her, but I didn’t. Because I didn’t even learn of her death until months after it happened, when, by chance, my now husband Googled her name.

That was what finally sealed it for me. There is no hope for a relationship with my dad. I don’t have delusions anymore. There is only regret left. And pity. I pity the person who does not forgive, the person who cannot love their family because of things they have cherry picked from their religion, the person who lives in fear of change and hates everything that challenges them. I don’t hate him or myself, or anyone involved in the situation. I value the family I have and the family I have gained marrying my husband. Last year, my mom walked me down the aisle and it was perfect.

I hope he is happy somewhere, wherever they live now. I hope my grandfather, if he is still alive, is well cared for. And even though I don’t have any desire to see him again, I hope that my dad forgives my brother and me someday. I have forgiven him.

Photo by Remi Coin

Photo by Remi Coin

Career

That Time I Killed my Childhood Dream for the Sake of my Sanity

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As a kid, I was blessed with a hyperactive imagination and a dramatic sense of destiny.  These are both helpful once you’re older and trying to be assertive in your creativity… but if you’re at a stage in your life when you’re obligated to take an afternoon nap, it makes you a tiny lunatic.  I believed in Santa until I was prepubescent (who cares what other people said, I had the logic worked out), and nobody could prove that dragons didn’t actually exist so I inverse-propertied that shit and stubbornly held out (we just haven’t been looking in the right places).  This was just the more fantastical stuff—you can only imagine how I was about anything over which I actually thought I had control.

Photo Submitted by Emmy Yu

I started acting in films when I was 5.   Ask me some other time, and I can go into the details of how bittersweetly intoxicating it was—the intricacies of how quickly and willingly any child ruled by wild, hungry imagination would slip under that wave of magical make-believe.  For now though, let’s just suffice to say that set life was pretty sweet.  There was free food always, someone announced my presence over walkie-talkie whenever I was anywhere, and working meant having my face on all the monitors.  I fucking loooved it.  (I’m a Capricorn.  You know who else was a Capricorn?  Stalin.)  Point being, when I realized that this was something that I was getting paid to do and technically could get paid to do for the rest of my life and, therefore, not need to do anything else but this all the freaking time… well, I was in.

I turned 6. And chose what I (thought I) would do for the rest of my life.

It’s fascinating how attached you can become to even the most trivial choice.  You embrace it because it gives definition to that messy, inscrutable concept of “self” you have in your mind.  You lock it down in front of you so you can trace the shape of it with your eyes and claim that this is you.  It’s incredibly satisfying… until, of course, it’s not.  Heavy-hitters like Fight Club and Mad Men explore the “not” in a way that I can’t even attempt, but from my basic understanding of it, you either 1) start hating the shape you’re seeing or 2) someone (maybe everyone) starts telling you “Hey, you’re wrong.  That’s not you at all.”  And you’re expected to just let go.

The second was what happened to me and, honestly, it became clear pretty early on that I would not have a future in acting.  But this was the choice I had made—not a trivial one in the slightest—and I was so very deeply attached.  I closed my eyes to the (mostly well-intentioned, for the record) Dead End Ahead messages I was getting.

I turned 10, I turned 11, I turned 12.

It’s difficult for me to step into this next part.  Even with the time I’ve had to soften the light and mute the volume, I try not to dwell on the memories of this time because it’s so easy to linger and ask unheard, unanswerable questions.  To keep it brief, the auditions were torture.  The stifling hush of cattle-call waiting rooms, where I spent at least 45 minutes for every 5 I actually auditioned.  The canned “thank you” responses that I carefully memorized, word for word, so later I could pick them apart, turn them over in my fingers and see if they meant something else. The dwindling callbacks.  The incredible silence from the phone—undeniably the most judgmental silence I have ever experienced.

I turned 17.

I don’t believe that I was an unusually intense child; it was just an atypical context for someone of that age to find herself in.  So, with the logic of my years, I decided that this whole experience couldn’t simply be something that was just happening to me—it had to be as melodramatic as “destiny.”  How on earth could anyone expect me to let go?  It had been molded into my identity for as long as I could remember and, no, it wasn’t even a significant time investment out of my year anymore—much less my day to day—but it was part of me.  You may as well have asked me to hack my arms off.

I can make jokes about it now (armless kids are funny, guys) but really, I struggled with it.  So I gave myself a cheat and went off to film school that fall to study writing and directing.  I packed your usuals—you know: clothes, new laptop, headshots, kitchenware.  I gave myself a little hope.  I wasn’t letting go of acting entirely—I would just come back to it later, and everything I had ever known about myself would still be true.  Everything I had ever insisted to be true would be true.

Photo Submitted by Emmy Yu

Photo Submitted by Emmy Yu

There’s no dramatic, climactic ending to this story.  There was no eureka! moment when I suddenly said, “Hey, get over it,” and then I did.  College and post-grad life led to a natural diminishment in the time and energy I put into keeping acting on my mind.  Admittedly, at the time, this was a transition I ignored because it was too painful to accept.  Better to cover it up with dismissive jokes about “my acting days of yore.”  Even now, I find myself fighting my panicked instinct to minimize the significance—to look it in the eye, this darling, childish fantasy of mine, and say that acting was just a phase I went through.  But I’ve also wised up to the fact that this is a kind of denial—the emotional equivalent of smiling after you’ve knocked your own teeth out.

Somewhere between ages 5 and 18, I missed the memo that there is always a gap between who you are and who you want to be, and sometimes that gap is unbridgeable.  Acknowledging reality—that this thing I once thought was an everlasting part of my life would actually end up as a montage in my head—was a terribly painful but necessary step in growing up.  And I’m not even sure how it happened but I can say that it did.  I stopped paying my SAG/AFTRA dues.  I don’t even remember where my headshots are stored.

The concept of “letting go” is a horrible, shrieking abomination—one of life’s unfortunate staples that will hold you down beneath the surface of all your expectations, breathless, drowning in your impotence.  What’s worse is that your instinct to fight it will cause you just as much pain—the lengths to which you will go so you can trick and manipulate yourself into thinking that it’s done or that it didn’t matter.  If you find yourself there, be honest with yourself but be gentle, too.  Be okay with the fact that you had hoped for something you couldn’t control and it ultimately disappointed you.  Paolo Coelho said “Everything will be okay in the end.  If it’s not okay, then it’s not the end.”  The end comes when you least expect it and will be much easier than you ever imagined.  You won’t even feel relief because you will have already floated on.

And if that’s too flowery to digest, just think of it as forcing yourself to throw up after a night of hard drinking.