1) I’ve been reading a lot of Madeleine L’Engle’s non-fiction lately. And by a lot, I mean I think I’ve read two of her books in the last 10 days or so and I’ve started on a third (obsessive personality + kindred spirit, what can I say?) I came across this passage on Sunday and it was just exactly what I needed to hear. (Does this ever happen to you? You’re inexplicably drawn to something and it makes no sense and then later it hits you square between the eyes and then you wonder why you can’t ever learn to just trust that your heart pulls in the right direction?)(Just me, then?)

From Circle of Quiet, by Madeleine L’Engle. “My husband is my most ruthless critic. Tallis runs him a close second. Sometimes he will say, ‘It’s been said better before.’  Of course. It’s all been said better before. If I thought I had to say it better than anybody else, I’d never start. Better or worse is immaterial. The thing is that it has to be said; by me; ontologically. We each have to say it, to say it our own way. Not of our own will, but as it comes out through us. Good or bad, great or little: that isn’t what human creation is about. It is that we have to try; to put it down in pigment, or words, or musical notations, or we die.”

2) Chimamanda Adichie: The danger of a single story  I listened to this TED talk yesterday (another of my obsessions! TED talks!)(yes, it appears I’ve become one of those people who reads non-fiction and listens to talks on the weekend aka my past self’s definition of a horribly boring grown-up)(Dear past self, if it helps soothe your disappointment, I also went to Cirque du Soleil! And made hot cocoa on the stove for movie night with the neighbors! And ate a lot of raw cookie dough, salmonella be damned!)  

Anyways, this was the perfect andidote to what I was feeling in the face of the very singluar ”Looters with Machetes” story currently coming out of Haiti. You should listen to it.

My one heirloom sat in the living room of my childhood home – a hope chest (for my dowry!)(actual dowry Steve received from my mother: endless supply of worries about if his coat is warm enough for the weather) that has been passed down to the first woman in each generation in my family. When I was younger, it always looked like just another old thing in a house full of old things, and I was 13 before I discovered that it held much more exciting treasures – my mother’s old vinyl collection.

My mama and I opened the chest one rainy day, pulling out John Denver and Joni Mitchell and the Moody Blues, her waxing poetic about parties in her apartment in Boston, where they sat on pillows for lack of furniture and drank bottles of wine and played loud games of Pit and listened to record after record late into the night.

We kept some of the records out and many of my Saturday afternoon sleep-ins were interrupted by the first hisses of Ladies of the Canyon cranked all the way up. I’d stumble out and give my mom a bleary-eyed glare and she’d chirp Oh, is it too loud? Sorry about that, well now that you’re up….

I loved the depth and rawness of the music that came out of our speakers, the range of tone, but most of all I loved that it sounded so real, like actual people were singing and playing instruments – tiny gaffes and all. You can laugh, but as a child of the auto-tune generation, this was a revelation.

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All I want to do is shoot with old cameras. I’m obsessed. I triptumble around – head shoved down into patchworked black tubes, strangers peering discreetly, trying to figure out if I’m crazy…Is that some sort of metal detector? Why are you taking pictures of the ground?

Even photographers often don’t understand – there’s so much great technology out there, why would I tie my own hands by working with equipment that was last hot in 1950 and a method that is unwieldy at best and impossible at worst? Where everything is backwards, and I have to stand on a chair to get a straight on shot and where light leaks in and getting perfect exposure is a comedy of errors?

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This Christmas while back in the Midwest, I sat cross-legged at my hope chest again. My Mom hadn’t been through her records in years and each one made her gasp as she remembered where she got it, where she listened to it, who it reminded her of. We sat with piles strewn about the floor and she sighed and said, you don’t understand, this is my LIFE.

Steve and I boxed them up greedily.

At my in-laws, we sat in the basement, going through box after box. My father-in-law has been a collector for most of his life and we didn’t even make it through all of his boxes — it was too much for one trip — and he said, take whatever you want, take them all, I just want them listened to.

We found a map to his old girlfriend’s house drawn on the White Album.

Steve kept freaking out about the music – oh, THIS album, ohmygod, I cannot wait to listen to this. And I was excited too, but mostly I just could not get over the photographs on the album covers. This Mason Proffit album, in particular. This photo really struck me (I can’t find the back, but you’ll have to trust me, it makes it even more awesome) and man, if you put that photo on flickr now and asked for feedback, you would hear things looks like some of the faces are blacked out – maybe use a fill light next time? and this is really nice, but could use some sharpening and why is there so much noise, try running noiseware? The people who give this kind of feedback mean well – they’re telling you the things that are wrong with the photo and trying to make it better, trying to help you perfect your art.

And that’s what I was doing for so long, listening to that feedback (both internal and external), striving to take more perfect photographs – sharper, more saturated, composition lined up right along the grid of threes.

I did this despite all evidence that everything I truly love is deeply flawed.

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Our new turntable arrived yesterday. Our neighbor rescued it from the FedEx guy and hollered over our fence. She came over and I connected cords and we drank wine and there was a knock at the door from another neighbor who had wandered over after hearing rumors that we had records and then another and we finally got it all set up and put on the Moody Blues.

We sat around until late into the night, opening albums, discovering hilarious line notes and other treasures, listening to the pops and hisses of record after record.

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I’ve thought a lot over the last year about the kind of art that I love, the kind that I want to create, the kind I want to leave with the world. And here’s what I’ve realized – the art that speaks to me often does so through its flaws. I love the blurred faces and the hard grain and the faded coloring of that Mason Proffit photograph. They are technical imperfections, but they are also what make it interesting.

This is a rather difficult revelation to have in the age when HDR and hyper-saturation and unnatural sharpness and other means of perfecting nature are what a lot of people think make a photograph good.

But I’ve slowly stopped caring so much about how things will be perceived, stopped trying so hard to make my photographs perfect and focusing on making them more interesting, and started seeing their flaws as my stamp – proof that a human participated in the creation of this art, that this is what makes it mine.

And I’ve finally started making art that I’m proud of.

The day after our wedding I was so tired. I would try to formulate thoughts and instead my brain would squint and just spit out TIIIIIRED. I don’t think I have ever been so worn out. So naturally, after a last brunch with our friends and family, we had to pack and get on a plane to Costa Rica.

The red-eye plane ride was like some kind of nightmare come to life. So tired I think I might fall over! and yet! stuck in an aisle seat where I cannot! actually! sleep! I was uncomfortable and increasingly cranky. Steve, in between his long bouts of restful sleep (have I ever been so jealous of his ability to sleep anywhere? no, no I have not), kept assuring me that we would be there soon and I could just sleep on the way to the hotel and then take as long a nap as I wanted. See, we decided very early on that we would be renting a car for this trip, seeing as we’d be traveling during rainy season and had read that Costa Rica’s roads become something of a water park ride during rainy season. Renting a manual was so very much cheaper than an automatic, and as a manual aficionado, I knew it would be much more fun to drive.

Our conversation about it went something like this:

Steve: So it looks like we should get a manual, it’s so much cheaper.

Sierra: Sounds good to me! Wait, can you drive a stick?

Steve: Pretty much, I should probably practice before we go though, but I’ll be just fine.

Sierra: Okay!

Cue: Very tired newlyweds climbing into the car at the San Jose Thrifty rental.  I melt into the passenger seat and buckle my seat belt, delirious at the thought of reclining. And WHAM! A jerk and a stall. I give Steve a look. He grins sheepishly and restarts. WHAM! STALL! Still grinning. My eyebrow arches higher. WHAM!

Very slowly I say, You. Told. Me. You. Could. Drive. Stick.

Steve: Well I thought that I could, I mean, I’d practiced a few times before and then Morgan and I went out in her car last week and I figured that it’s not THAT HARD so I would pick it up really easily.

Me: Pick it up! Driving a stick is not something that you pick up in a foreign country! The highway is right there! You cannot get out of the parking lot!

Steve: Maybe I could practice here and get it.

Me: You want me to teach you how to drive stick in the Thrifty parking lot in Costa Rica? So you can get on the biggest highway in the country and then drive for 5 hours?

Steve: Worth a shot.

And so we practice. And he stalls. And I explain and show him and he stalls. Because it’s really difficult to learn in the best of circumstances and this is pretty much the worst. I am slowly coming to terms with the fact that even though my head is stuffed with cotton, I am about to drive for 5 hours in a country that doesn’t believe in turn signals. I want to cry. Instead I turn to him and say, We’re only two days in and I already want to take your head off! Apparently this is the funniest thing I could have ever said and Steve, in his slap-happy state bursts out laughing. We’re sitting in a Denny’s parking lot and he’s hugging the steering wheel, laughing so hard he can barely breathe and I say It’s not funny! I am really tired! and this makes him laugh even harder and before I know it I’m laughing too and then neither of us can stop and when one of us tries the other starts up again and everyone is staring at us like we have absolutely lost our minds.

I get in the driver’s seat and thread my way on to the highway and it juts off in three directions and we don’t know where we’re going and can’t find anything on the map.  And we go the wrong way and I make a killer three point turn on a gravel hill without hitting anyone and we stop to get gas and the Cheetos taste funny and I am so tired I can’t see straight so I pull off the road and we recline the seats to nap in the hot sun. I curl around my travel pillow and say You make me crazy, you know and he says, I know, but you love me.

And I do.

I have a confession to make. Early this year I started to get pretty bored, photographically speaking. Part of it was that I was so busy with all the crazy wedding hooplah and just didn’t have time to shoot, but part of it was a pretty blah reaction to the work that I was doing and the work that I was viewing. It felt like every time I would sign on flickr, the thing that was “most interesting” pretty much always seemed like something out of Alice in Wonderland – super-saturated, unnaturally sharp, composed exactly on the 3-3-3 grid and everything just felt sort of done. I have nothing against Photoshop or enhancing images (at all. obviously.) but I just couldn’t seem to take any photographs that I felt were interesting on their own accord. I tried all the things I usually do to break out of an artistic rut and nothing seemed to work.

Then somewhere I stumbled upon the acronym “ttv” and feel promptly in love with the image attached. It was the opposite of most of what I was seeing (and creating) – square cropped, textured, fuzzy, light vignetting at the edges. Imperfect. Haunting. I ran to google, bought an old Kodak Duaflex II from ebay that same day and began my arduous journey with through the viewfinder shooting.

The format was a huge challenge at first. The set up is beyond unwieldy, all of my instincts were backwards (literally backwards, it flips the image around), focusing is hit or miss and I had to get well above my subject just to shoot at eye level. I was dragging chairs and climbing trees and standing on my tip-toes on perilous stacks of whatever was around.

None of the “rules” I had unwittingly subscribed to applied and so I didn’t use them. I had to let go of getting the perfect shot and learn to just be thankful if it was in focus. It’s pretty impossible to expose correctly and light leaks in everywhere. It sounds sort of masochistic when I write it out like that, but it doesn’t feel that way -  it feels like I’m really CREATING again – that I’m making something beautiful, not just clicking a button.

I’ve shared some of my early photos here before, but what I haven’t shared is that since I started, it’s pretty much all I want to do. I hemmed and hawed before deciding that yes, I would be taking an old camera and beat up cardboard tube with me to Costa Rica on our honeymoon. And so I wandered around the country looking like this.

My cardboard tube is destroyed thanks to all the sand and water and wear and quite a few people came up to me wondering if I was crazy (Excuse me, but I just have to know, why are you taking pictures of the sand for 20 minutes??) but the photos I’ve brought back spark something in me.

And it feels just lovely.

(Don’t worry Mom, I also took some “normal” photos).

1) That I do, in fact, discriminate.

People have been asking me what our “colors” are and about six months ago I was so over trying to actually answer this question and so I started saying “I don’t discriminate,” which has gotten me nothing but confused looks but it cracks me up every time so I keep saying it but then yesterday I realized that I do, in fact, discriminate, as we have no pink or purple in our wedding. Aqua, yes. Sunflower, yes. Peacock blue, clover, red, about five shades of orange, yes. But no pink or purple. I am color-prejudiced! Who knew?

2) That my marriage is not your marriage. 

Marriage is one of the most intensely personal journeys imaginable and is also incredibly universal. Everyone has their own ideas about what it means, and what it should look like and how to “do it right” that they are more than happy to share with you. As soon as we were engaged, very well-meaning people came out of the woodwork and began unpacking their ideas about what our wedding and marriage HAD to look like – many of which quite frankly terrified me.

This pressure got to me for a few months until one day it hit me that duh, this is just like every other stage I’ll cross in life. People will judge and will think I’m doing it all wrong and it just really doesn’t matter. Our marriage is just our relationship – no one is going to kidnap me after the wedding and pour me into some scary wife-mold.

Instead we made a point to use these kinds of statements and expectations as discussion points to unpack what we DO want our marriage to look like – what our expectations are, what if anything we think will change…these conversations have been the best part of planning our wedding.

3) That “for the wedding” is a magical phrase.

Let’s look at the following scenario.

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Me: Well I can’t really come to the bar because I was planning on making a cake stand with this platter I found at the thrift store.
Other person: ….. Um. Okay.
Me: Sigh.

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Me: Well I can’t really come to the bar because I was planning on making a cake stand for the wedding with this platter I found at the thrift store.
Other person: Wow that’s so cool!! How much fun!
Me: I KNOW, RIGHT!?!?!

4) That the details matter, except for when they don’t.

Planning a wedding has been a hilarious clash of various aspects of my personality. On the one hand, we have my artist side who is rather obsessed with aesthetics and has very strong opinions on how things should go but not match and takes immense delight in creating and stumbling upon beautiful vignettes and feels strongly that the little things in life should be noticed and relished.

And on the other we have my…well….lazy very, very laid-back bohemian side, which basically says who cares what color the linens are? We’d rather be at the beach than meeting with any vendors… and anyways the party will happen because our friends and family are a blast, we’ll be blissful and surrounded by so much love, we’ll end up married and nothing else matters very much.

And then! bringing up the rear – my total Type-A side, which loves lists and crossing things off of them (why yes, you can be lazy and neurotic all at the same time – it’s a great way to drive yourself slowly crazy), who makes lists of lists and has about 3,490 google documents and is still pretty sure 2 weeks out that there’s a bunch of things she’s forgetting (this is the side that regularly emails Steve things like “WHO IS PICKING UP THE CAKES!?!?!!”).

Then you throw my lovely partner into the mix. I cannot stress enough how incredibly involved Steve has been through this whole process (especially in the making-things-happen arena), but he pretty much cares about three things and three things only:

Me, at the very beginning of planning: What are your priorities for the wedding?
Steve: (short pause) Good food, lots of alcohol, great music.
Me: Succinct! Nothing else?
Steve: I also want a really cool ring and to go somewhere awesome for the honeymoon and to finally be married to you.
Me: Fair enough, dude.

So we pretty much planned the wedding backwards (at least, backwards according to the migraine-inducing knot.com, which, I kid you not, insisted that I should have figured out how I was going to wear my hair SIX MONTHS OUT or I would be VERY VERY BEHIND), wherein we focused on the things that we decided really DID matter to us (a ceremony that was deeply personal / creating a warm and intimate atmosphere for our guests / spending quality time with our friends and family / good food / a great dance party / killer photography) and didn’t really worry about the details, and then the perfect details sort of just appeared along the way as I was going about my life and I was like hey, thanks life! or they didn’t and we were like ehhh who needs that anyways and now we have a vaguely cohesive event planned and no idea how that really happened….ta-da!

5) That this is exactly right.

Exactly.

26 before 26

1. Launch an online portfolio – www.heyitssierra.com/portfolio
2. Take a Spanish class with Steve
3. Write 10 9 8 7 6 5 love letters longhand, snail-mail them
4. Find an old card catalog, alter it – This is now an old record player and the altering will commence in the next couple of weeks! DONE!
5. Conceive/create a ttv photography series
6. Read Infinite Jest – Decided to wait and do this on the Infinite Summer Schedule this summer, as my partner in crime never got it together….
7. Set up an Etsy shop – Something even more fun in the works, but it’s not ready yet!
8. Plan a camping trip with friends
9. Set up automatic charity contributions
10. Begin an artistic collaboration – In the works, but not ready yet!
11. Learn to properly poach an egg
12. See an active volcano
13. Write an artist’s statement, re-write it, mean it
14. Drinks at the Den, show at the Fox DONE!
15. Walk across the Golden Gate Bridge, alone
16. Visit Vancouver with girlfriends
17. Create a mixed-media piece
18. Go see the Raiders play
19. Host a monthly Sunday potluck dinner Okay, so I only did this once. Bah. Will do better this year!
20. Pickle something
21. Go to Nightlife at the California Academy of Science
22. Wreck a journal
23. Join the darkroom studio – Going to do this in the winter when it’s gray and depressing out.
24. Say marriage vows DONE!
25. Do 10 real push-ups in a row – Steve witnessed!
26. Submit work to a gallery/show

Dear Sara,

When you were dying – in the very short spaces where I let myself really know that you were – I thought I knew when I would miss you. And I was right – I miss you today, on the anniversary of your death, on my birthday, on yours. I miss you whenever I see Ewan McGregor. When I’m home and drive by Puccini’s and when I go to the drugstore to stock up on candy before a movie. Whenever someone says that they hated Moulin Rouge with a roll of their eyes (in my head I always imagine your exasperated response).  Whenever I want to talk about the complexities of family. I will miss you dearly when I marry and in weak moments I let myself imagine you there, grinning at me.

But I never could have known this.

I never really call myself an artist. And by never really, I mean that I don’t – ever. I’ve thought a lot about why in this past year. How easily I bestow the label on others. How it feels like something that I can’t claim, without risking the dreaded omg-who-does-she-think-she-is.  Why I care who people think I am. If I should. I try to push myself, to find my voice, to say what I need to say, but I do so quietly and behind-the-scenes, leaving things uncreated and unsaid and unpublished.

I remember how it felt when you called me an artist.  You threw it out so casually and so often, ignoring the way my eyes widened in protest, in please-don’t-tell-them-that.  You did so long before I even found my medium. When I was sitting next to you at Herron, trying so hard to transfer what was in my head onto the paper, trying and failing to bend the colors to my will. You always made it look so effortless and I humped along and I never understood how I got to be a part of this “we.” This we who were artists, who created things. You were an artist and you looked the way artists should look and you talked the way artists should talk. Everything was altered under your touch – your hair a daily sculpture, your car a political statement, your skirts shortened, your jeans tattered.  I was the opposite of an artist — cerebral, a reader who parted my hair in the middle and wore prairie skirts and made lists and got lost in my own head.

But when I came over you would have two canvasses gessoed and you’d haul out your paints and we’d sit in the front yard and I would say what should I paint? And you would say, whatever you want to paint! You always said this while already painting. And so I would paint because when someone hands you all the tools and sits beside you, what else are you going to do?

Your paintings were always vibrant and full and sometimes tortured, though I’m not sure you ever saw them that way. You painted the things you knew and the things you wished you knew and the things you were trying to teach yourself. I remember when you brought your painting of Che into school – the one that said “A true revolutionary is guided by a great feeling of love” –  everyone one loved it and no one knew quite what it meant. And I thought well no, sometimes revolutionaries are guided by thirst for power or struggle over the control of resources or plain blood sport. But I looked at your painting and I wanted to believe it. That was the power that your art had.

My paintings were horrible by anyone’s estimation. They lacked all detail or nuance or cohesion. They were often quite thick because I just layered paint over paint, hoping that it would turn into something worth seeing. I worried about wasting your paint because nothing ever came of it but it never bothered you. I wished I had something to say, that I was sure like you.

You called me an artist to my face and I’d say oh I’m no artist. And you’d scrunch your nose and say Sierra, of course you are, you make art, don’t you? And I’d say I guess so, but in my head I knew that I wasn’t. There were other requirements and I didn’t fill any of them. And now, when we’re out and I hear friends tell someone she’s a photographer, and they look at me head-cocked, I rush to add oh it’s just a hobby or yeah, I take pictures. I see you just over their shoulder, shaking your head.

I know it’s not just a hobby. Because I see beauty everywhere, and sadness too. Because I have things I need to say. Because when I don’t make time to create, something essential in me withers. I realize now that you were feeding this before I even knew I was hungry and in these moments when I inch closer to naming myself I miss you so deeply it feels like I might break.

Love, Sierra

So I mentioned in my last post that I got a Holga and have been shooting film. It’s part of a super short toy camera workshop I’m taking at the Art Studio in Berkeley (because what’s the patented Sierra way for dealing with being overwhelmed? why throwing another thing on the pile of course! It’s cool, you can steal it, I won’t sue).

I had this grand theory that I’m somehow inferior as a photographer because I’ve only ever shot digitally and am self-taught and in order to understand the true nature of the art, I needed to dive back into the roots and gain some solid technical grounding and slave away in the dark room before I could get a real appreciation of the medium, etc…woe is me artsy whine whine whine etc…

But that all sounded kind of boring and like it would take a long time, so I thought instead I would take this toy camera class and get a quick primer in the darkroom to see if film photography was worth pursuing.

Enter: Holga.  To non-camera-enthusiasts, let me explain the joy that is the Holga. It’s basically a total piece of shit camera that sometimes doesn’t even work and breaks and light leaks in from everywhere and has crazy vignetting and has a lens that’s made of plastic and it costs about $25. (Hint: if your Holga isn’t “working” the right way aka leaking light and being crappy, you’re supposed to drop it a few times and hope that it comes around).

So if you’re like my mom, you’re now asking so ummm why would anyone want to shoot with that? Especially when you have a semi-nice SLR? Well, because sometimes the stars align and you can eek out quite lovely, ethereal images (or so I’ve been told). Or because you really like a challenge. Or because you’re kind of bored with perfectly crisp, photoshopped-to-the-hilt images being heralded as the future of the art and think that they often lose something essential along the way. Or because you want to harken back to a time when it was about the moment, and nothing could just be “corrected later.” Aka you’re feeling quite smugly nostalgic for a time you didn’t even live through. Also, you sound like kind of a snob. Just sayin’.

So I got my Holga and learned how to load film and off we went to L.A. for the weekend. I didn’t even bring my other camera because I didn’t want to tempt myself. I shot 12 pictures on the trip, frustrated at my inability to control anything, hoping the exposure was close, guessing at where the lens was even really pointing (it has a viewfinder, but don’t let it fool you, it’s actually just a hole and has nothing to do with where the actual lens is looking). I kind of hated it, but I also kind of loved it because it made me really edit what I shot, and I eagerly anticipated my little photo-zygotes.

If my life were a movie, the story would end like this: girl learns to let go of control, shoots images recklessly, is rewarded with fantastic photos that tap into the essence of what it means to be alive, turns away from soul-deadening modern trappings and rediscovers her creative, whimsical roots.

Of course, in that scenario, the heroine probably would’ve managed to tape up her film properly.

But of course I didn’t and it unrolled in the light and ahhhhhh half of it gone in a flash! Then later, when I’m trying to put it on the spool in the dark, I drop it and step on it, but I don’t tell anyone because a girl can only take so much humiliation and I figure if a giant shoe print shows up on my negative, I will just write an artist’s statement saying I did it on purpose to showcase the messy process by which ‘real’ art is created and submit it to a gallery. I decide this will win me awards and then I will get to be the next Annie Liebowitz except without all the photoshopped Vanity Fair covers because I will keep it authentic.

I develop it anyways because hey it’s a class and what else am I supposed to do and find myself thinking of all the useful things I could be doing as I pour chemical after chemical through funnels and agitate, agitate, agitate the film.

I squeegee off the negatives and look at the giant black boxes that make up most of our trip to L.A. and I wish I had brought my other camera so I could have that great shot I took of the road side fruit stand. I think that while my style tends towards the nostalgic and the whimsical, perhaps my equipment should…..not.

Three of the pictures actually show up, having managed to avoid the treacherous light and am glad that one of them was this one with the giant white plastic dog, which I was excited about and thought could be great in black and white because it was a white on white scene in real life and would be all shadow & texture in film.

Yesterday, I’m back in the dark room, learning how to print and I print the dog and when it appears like magic in the developer solution I fall in love a little bit and decide I actually adore the fine film grain and the vignetting and maybe even the image and I leave clutching a 7 x 7 square and think at least I can blog this.

But of course I can’t really blog it because when I try to scan it (using our not-so-lovely work scanner), it loses all it’s lovely detail and soft eeriness and becomes the super dark, grainy mess you see above because I’m basically making a photocopy of it. And then I think about all the work I just did to get one stupid photo and how it looks like a shell of its actual self and isn’t even worth posting but I’ve spent all this time on it and I want to scream a little bit but instead I sit down and write this post.

When I’m done writing, I find myself on ebay and steal a beat up Anscoflex out from under someone in the last 20 seconds of an auction ($12 shipped!). Now I have another delicious, rusty piece of junk on its way (sorry again, Steve) and frankly, I really cannot wait.

At work, I made tea and thought about how they all said it would never happen, that it could not be done.

How they said it right up until it was, until we did.

On my walk, I tried to see if I could mouth President Barack Obama without breaking into a grin before the last a.

Zipping over the bay, I watched the sun sink below the hills of Marin, the light fade behind the buildings of San Francisco and thought about how heavy this is, the first step on a very long road stretching out before us.

How everything is the same, except for that.

Forty years go by with someone laying in your bed
Forty years of things you say you wish you’d never said
How hard would it have been to say some kinder words instead

As I’ve been reflecting on the past year, and all the tremendous loss and love that it offered up, this is what I keep returning to: the incredible power in the words that I choose to speak, the lasting effects of how I choose to treat people. I believe strongly that the most effective way to cut down unfairness or apathy or rudeness or meanness is to refuse to respond in kind. The rub of course is that in those moments, it’s actually incredibly difficult to be the first to soften your voice or go for the laugh in an argument, to refrain from rolling your eyes, to bite back the sarcasm and let the vulnerability slip through instead.

I think that my struggle to keep my heart open and kind while also setting boundaries and standing tall will probably be lifelong, but when I revisit the memories I created with my friends who are no longer here, every disagreement seems so minor. So unworthy of harsh words or animosity. Every single one. It’s given me a fresh perspective, a reminder that life is short and sometimes brutal. That nothing is more important than holding on to the kindred souls that I have been lucky enough to stumble across. That no amount of pride or ego or good old-fashioned stubbornness could ever be more satisfying than choosing kindness.