Let’s Do the Time Warp — Again: Triggers & Quantum Physics
Karma slammed me face first onto the New York City sidewalk.
To my right, the lights from Broadway sparkled through the rain just beyond Theater 71, where an hour earlier I performed “A Great Mother” to a live and livestreaming audience.
But, to be honest, I’d seen the fall coming all week — seen myself limping in the red heels I planned to wear in the performance.
Please wait until after the show, I had whispered to the image.
As you wish, the image had whispered back.
It was my fault, though. The scales weighing my karmic balance had tipped too far in my direction lately: too much good luck and too much good news.
Or maybe too much Chardonnay?
I hadn’t really drank much of anything in four months, so maybe two glasses tipped that balance a bit, too.
Whatever it was, my knee bled, my shoulder throbbed, and my cheek purpled with each step my husband helped me take on our way back to the hotel.
* * * * * * * *
Although technically the show was off-off Broadway, I was ecstatic because it was closer than I ever imagined I’d be to that famed street when when I was cast in Listen To Your Mother New York City — thousands of miles from my home in Tahoe and a million miles from the life I wrote about for the show.
Or so I thought.
Let’s do the time warp — again.
I wrote about being twelve, and I’m fifty-one now. That’s a lot of years in between, so why did speaking the story out loud make it feel so present tense? What trick of quantum physics is it that flings us back in a flash to the smell of her perfume or to the song on the radio we loved singing together?
For me, that’s how trauma rears it’s ugly head. It hides, cowers, tucks itself into a corner and waits
— until I think I’m over it.
Waits
— until I think I’m fine.
Waits
— until I think it’s okay to listen to classic rock, to walk through a perfume department, to let him cook hamburger in our kitchen, to drive past the yellow house now painted red, to love and be loved, to have a baby, and to think I’m doing okay.
Then BAM!**POW!**SMACK!**
A metal grate punches my face, a tree root busts my good shoulder, and a rock smashes my kneecap — leaving me splayed out on a slick city sidewalk in a white coat pollacked in gravel and mulch and wondering if I’ll ever really be okay?
For three months leading up to the show, I’d written the essay from my heart, my gut, and the dark places of my childhood I’d hidden from the light.
Now the twinkling ones from Broadway reflected in the puddles around me, a murky and muddy reminder not to forget my place.
The image didn’t whisper this time:
Well, well, who do we have here?
How do you feel now?
Still think you’re special?
You’re nobody.
You’re nothing.
Shame on you.
* * * * *
“Are you okay?” My husband asked, interrupting the voice.
“Yah,” I said, letting him pick me off the ground and lean on him, the way he’s done for twenty-eight years since we met.
Limping toward our hotel, I saw a sign.
An actual sign — ten feet long with with her name in huge cursive letters.
I pointed. “Can you fucking believe that?” Then laughed so hard at the irony of it all that I peed my fancy pants (not surprising if you know me).
At the hotel, I called my sister who didn’t agree with my theory about karma. “You did this to yourself,” she said. “You had to balance the hurt you think you caused by telling that story tonight.”
In the bathroom, I rubbed hotel ice over my cheek — the mix of bruised purples reminding me of so many mornings after — and I knew my sister was right.
Memories reflected the trauma deflected, and the performance brought them all back up — the hurt I’d swallowed but never digested because we’re not supposed to if we want to heal. We have to bring it up to see it, to face it, and to let it go.
Because that is how we get to live happily, ever after.
But not before some self-flagellation to pay the penance I decided would reset the karmic balance that telling my truth had thrown out of whack.
Icing the bruises and popping Ibuprofen the past month since the show, I’ve thought about how I worked hard to forgive the monsters but haven’t forgiven myself — even though I posted a cute quote from Pinterest that it’s a good idea.
My little sister reminded me that I can’t go kicking my own ass every time I tell the story I’ve written in BRIGHT EYES. If I do, I’ll be in a puddle somewhere in a cream-colored jacket, waiting to be lifted up and limped to my next book signing or speaking engagement instead of celebrating that my dreams have finally come true.
Time to give myself the Grace I’ve given others.
The Amazing kind.
To save a wretch like me.
Write on.
xoxox With love to the cast of LTYM NYC and to my husband for all the lifting, limping, and laughing.
