Still and still . . .

Technically, what I’m doing is not ashraming.

First of all, ashram is not a verb, although I’ve made it one (the way I did with pretzel, as in do NOT pretzelize yourself to please someone else. It never works).

Second of all, an ashram is a place where one goes to find seclusion in order to undertake close spiritual study, often including yoga and meditation practice. I did not go to such a place. I stayed home, which is why my friend Kim refers to it as "homeshram." But I did meditate during homeshram. Not daily. Just once with a group.

But the overall Lizshram plan was most definitely to undertake close study. Of myself. Of how I'm doing. Of what I need in order to be okay. To make this so, I unplugged from Facebook and emails and chose not to see anyone socially for a week. I wanted time to write, paint, think, cry, and maybe even finally hang the one piece of art my fire did not consume.

The piece survived my fire because it was in Toronto. I had been storing it with extended family while at grad school but wasn't able to retrieve it when I later moved to Montreal because it wouldn't fit it into my packed-to-the-gills truck. It never occurred to me that the quarter-inch thick (i.e FLAT) art work leaning against the back wall of the extended family member's garage, which is the size of most people’s houses, would be a big deal. It wasn't. It was a HUGE deal to him. And since I couldn't get it out of his garage because I had no money to transport it, he took matters into his own hands and simply gave it to his son, who was too young at the time to see why this was tantamount to theft. I can write about this now because the issue did finally get resolved and the love was restored all around.

The art piece – a blurry image of what looks like two figures standing on a beach, the tension between them palpable and moving – was made by a divorcing friend who gave it to me after I gave her refuge in my home before she was deported back to England. When my own so-called life partnership ended, I got the piece in my own so-called divorce. So, as you can imagine, having something of such symbolic import then taken from me by my family caused a lot of heartache. Feeling helpless, I decided to get all Buddhist on my own ass and told myself it was better the piece hang on a wall than languish in a garage. But, the truth is, mostly what I thought was, How could they?

Today, however, I realize that this so-called theft saved my art from burning in my fire. The fact is, sometimes we don’t see the reason behind things for years and years. That’s why I have learned to wait things out a little longer.

It also reminded me that there's always more than a few ways to tell a story. When I’m overwhelmed, I tell it like a horror movie or a soap opera. When I have had enough time to feel, cry, and heal, my heart opens and I become more grateful, which makes my stories more generous.

The last few weeks have been overwhelming. And I’ve been angry. Correction, the last few months. Since Andy died. And before that, too. Facing the thought of re-building after my fire often sent me to my bed for days of weeping, movie watching, and popcorn scarfing. In contrast, Andy’s death didn’t make me cry for months on end. Or even weeks. In fact, after the first few tears, it stopped them altogether. His death has been so big that I have gone numb.

So much so I can still barely look at his pictures, although I did recently force myself to tape a pic of Andy in his plane to my wall because I was convinced I’d paint my way through the numbness. But I can no more paint him than I can look at him.

I think of Andy more now than when he was alive. Correction, I think more about our childhood, during which time I became myself through him. I am putting emphasis on our childhood because anything that belongs to my childhood belongs to Andy as much as it belongs to me. Andy formed my thoughts and ideas. He was my teacher, my tormentor, my refuge, my other half. With barely two years between us, it never occurred to me that he was anything other than my own brain and beating heart.

When we were around 9 and 11, Andy hatched a plan to get up at 5 am so that we could go exploring our gated community in Manila. We’d walk around the well-kept streets lined with Spanish-style houses, also walled and gated, with bougainvillea and oleander spilling over concrete or edging between iron gates. I can’t remember what we talked about. It didn't matter. We were a tribe.

On one particular morning when we got home from exploring, Andy put on a record and told me to listen closely to the lyrics. "Billy Don’t be a Hero." When the song ended, I asked Andy to explain it to me. He told me it was about a soldier going off to war. And that he died. I burst into tears. I thought of Andy going to war, and of him dying. What would I do without Andy? He probably laughed. Not mean-spiritedly. Andy was not mean or insensitive. He just didn’t cry his emotions.

A week before ashram, my friend Abi gave me Tracy Emin’s sort-of memoir called, "Strangeland." In it, Tracy traces a trajectory from being the daughter (and twin to a boy who ends up in jail) of an eccentric Turkish businessman who loses his fortune and more-or-less abandons his family, to surviving her childhood with her English mother who is forced to squat in her husband's abandoned house while working a series of terrible jobs in order to care for her kids, to Tracy chain smoking and drinking and fucking her way through her constantly breaking heart, only she breaks it a thousand times more through her own misguided attempts at cauterizing her childhood wounds.

I am not a chain smoker or a drinker or compulsive fucker, but I do have other unhealthy ways of numbing my pain.

Tracy writes about one of her loneliness dreams – (I have those, too!) – in which a boy she loves invites her to go with him to the sea wall in her home town. Tracy is so moved by the wall's beauty she says, “it’s beautiful,” just before the boy plunges a knife into her stomach. As blood pumps into her hand, instead of describing how she feels, she writes, “The sea is begging to disappear.”

[Thank you, Shawna Cooper, for this most evocative pic]

My bed has also begged to disappear. That was a few years ago, long before Andy died. But that thought is no longer possible. Andy has effectively saved my life by losing his. We can’t have another death. Even me.

Tracy wakes from her loneliness dream and says, “The fucking bastard: tricked by my own loneliness, and it fucking knew.”

Yes, loneliness does fucking know – it knows where you live and which doorbell to press and which dark alley to take you down in order to finish the job. It comes looking exactly like the love you crave and then it laughs as it beats your once-beautiful face into something no one could love.

Tracy writes, “Have you ever longed for someone so much, so deeply that you thought you would die? That your heart would just stop beating? I am longing now, but for whom I don’t know. My whole body craves to be held. I am desperate to love and be loved. I want my mind to float into another’s. I want to be set free from despair by the love I feel for another. I want to be physically part of someone. I want to be joined. I want to be open and free to explore every part of them, as though I were exploring myself.”

Yes. Tracy. Yes.

I feel it still, but I fear I also lost the ability to long, to believe, to hope. I have longed so hard for some people that I wonder if have spent not only all my longing on them but my innocence as well – my eye-popping belief in a love that would be transcendent, connected, and divine, while my stupid heart stopped at nothing to give, give, give, and give.

A few weeks ago I remembered how I used to make gifts for people I loved. For a man I once loved, I made a series of shadow boxes with his first book of poetry inside each box. In the first box, the book was pinned to the back wall like a butterfly specimen, and a small key hung on a nail beside it with a locked padlock on the outside of the box. It was called Fetish Object. In the second box, the book was flayed open with each page cut into petal shapes, every two pages glued together with a copper wire in between that helped me shape the petals once the glue had dried, the excess wire curling out from the pages like golden stamens. Transformation. In the last box, the book was again at the back of the box, but in front of it were layers of acetate hanging at intervals, and on which I had photocopied my love letters to him, a kind of palimpsest of love you had to look through to get to the picture of us I had glued to the cover of his book. It was of us dancing at his book launch. Love Letter.

For the next lover, I made a painting of his son.

And the one after that, I made a painting of his daughter.

After that, there was no one I wanted to make anything for.

When I was ten, my mother finally let me get my ears pierced. Andy bought me a pair of earrings from the grocery store just outside our village. Even then I knew I could not wear them and never did. The posts were not made of good-enough metal. The fronts were flat, white plastic discs with green leaves printed on them. I loved them because Andy bought them for me. But I didn't think they were pretty, and that made me cry. Secretly. Almost like I knew I would be punished for that thought.

Later, back in Canada, when we were teenagers, Andy had his best friend make me a pendant in shop class. It was silver, shaped like a telephone. I loved talking on the phone in those days (not anymore). He gave the pendant to me for Christmas. I wore it constantly. I kept the earrings and necklace right to the end.

It occurred to me the other day that my fire spared me anything that would remind me of Andy. Earrings and pendant gone. Not to mention all the love letters from people who once loved me, and all the art books they gave me. The fire made it as if I have never been loved at all. Where is the concrete proof? Andy gone. Letters gone. Dedications gone.

Andy will never stand up for me at my wedding as he did for Justin. This missed "milestone" seems to be not only about how I wanted to impress Andy, to show him that I was capable of succeeding at life (however conventional, and however much I challenge those conventions), but also about how I wanted him to see me joyous, blossoming in the light of a beloved. With their wives and children, it seemed that Andy and Justin now belonged to their own tribe. I wanted to belong with them. But mostly, I wanted Andy to tell a room full of people that he loved me. Yes, that's what it's about: to hear Andy love me. I know he did. But still . . .

Andy will never again spend time thinking about the perfect gift for me. But what does that matter when what is given can so easily be taken away.

I'm almost done my ashram, but I am not sure I am any further along. And that may be because I am not sure where I am going.

But despite it all, I am grateful. Or try very hard to be. Because I don't want to spend whatever time is left feeling bitter, or numb.

I am grateful for the message another Liz Phillips sent me the day before ashram began -- a young woman almost exactly twenty years my junior, who bears my name, who friended me on Facebook for fun, and who wished me well, almost like receiving a message from my younger self.

I am grateful for Dawn, my sister-in-law, my soul sister, who sent me a bouquet of Lisyanthus (pronounced Lizzy-anthus, funnily enough) – flowers that look like A-line organza skirts circa 1920. Dawn, who makes me feel feminine when most of the time I feel like a bull in a china shop.

I am grateful to Cody, my chosen brother, who makes the kind of jokes that Andy did and Justin still does -- perfectly timed, always off colour, ripping the laughter right out of me in spite of myself. Cody, always there when I need him, and most often when I haven't even noticed a train barelling down the tracks. He has restored something I thought I had lost along the way: trust.

I am grateful to Abi for always recommending exactly the right book. But exactly. And at the exact right time. Like she knows what my heart needs and when. "Strangeland" was made for Lizshram.

I am grateful to Zane for Herman Hesse's "Siddhartha," which I also read this week, and which reminded me that in everything there is both sinner and saint, lightness and dark; and that what binds all things and all people, joyous and painful, is love.

I am even grateful to the men who have loved me and left me because I honestly believe they protected me from themselves.

And I am grateful for Shy, who always knows when to crawl into my lap and curl up into a little ball of safety, cracking my chest wide open with a love I am only beginning to learn -- the unconditional love of caring for another being.

I am especially grateful for all the unconditional love that has come my way from my embarrassment of family and friends -- my father, Justin, Jacline, Mark and Tonya, Kim, Lilly, Diana, Rosemary, Freyda, Sara (all the Saras) and all the hundreds of childhood and adulthood friends who have crossed my path to lend me a hand, to give me refuge, to love me no matter what -- my definition of riches and my very reason for living.

A close friend of Dawn’s in Ottawa shared a story with me a few weeks ago about her grieving friend. This friend was told that in the Jewish tradition it is a sin to spend your life with the dead. In other words, you must grieve. But not for too long. Because while you are alive, you are supposed to live. You can't follow the dead to where they have gone. So don't try.

Being a terrible Jew, I have no idea if this really is Jewish folk wisdom. But I am grateful for this story, which I pull out each time I feel the pain of being alive when Andy is not. The thing is, Andy was always the first of us in the family to live -- to really live! I still don't know how to live like he did. But even from where ever he has gone, he's still showing me the way as he lives through Dawn -- who has become as much a part of me as my own brain and my own beating heart.

Elephants

There are two in particular I want to bring into the room. Because if I’ve learned anything from my life as an-experiment-in-trying-to-repress-my-most-neurotic-fears-in-public, it’s that the resulting eczema of the soul is not worth a nanosecond of social acceptability.

[This is from http://www.wandelmaier.com/]

No need to fear that I am about to now reveal something so humiliating that you will feel obliged to be humiliated on my behalf. Nay, the elephants I want to invite into my blog’s game park are not the kind to charge a crowd (although I wish they would, because I could really use the ticket sales right now). The kind of wildlife I’m talkin’ ‘bout are more like freak-show midget pachyderms sourced straight from Lilliput and put on stage at Liz’s Internal Circus of the Neurotic and Insane. To you, this tiny elephant can do as much harm as a fairy pinned to the back of a glass display case.

To me, however, this captive little beast, when hidden behind my curtains, can cause untold damage to the whole backstage area of my psyche.

Elephant #1. Let’s call her Anxiety of Influence, or Annie for short.

Here’s her story: When I was at grad school making my Chuck Close painting adaptations, I had this vision of Chuck’s head encircled in daisies. To say I obsessively thought about painting daisies on my Chuck Close paintings 24/7 is an understatement. If I could have invented more hours in a day in which to think about this, I would have. But I didn’t put the daisies on him because I couldn’t justify it to my peers or committee. And at grad school, you have to justify everything if you want to be taken seriously as an artist. If you can’t theorize it, you’d better not go ahead and just do it, because then something really terrible might happen, but I can’t tell you what because I never found out. I didn’t put flowers on a pair of Chuck Close portraits until the summer before my fall graduation when it seemed safe. They surely couldn’t kick me out at that point.

The only person to see the Daisy Chucks immediately asked to borrow them for his office. He was a prof, and also one of my closest friends at school, a guy my age, but with an art career and a wife and a kid. (That should be beside the point really. But this tiny detail might explain my ensuing bitterness.)

When I finally painted the daisies on the Chucks, instead of making a crown of daisies, as was my original plan, I painted them growing out of his flesh, like a disease, obscuring his face in quite an original way since you’re not really supposed to obscure faces in portraits.


Cut to a year later and this prof/friend, who had been developing a career out of making drawings of brushstrokes from old famous paintings, was suddenly not only now making portraits, but was painting faces obscured by what looked like flowers or snow flakes!

I was outraged. Sickened. Hysterical. But mostly, I was pissed at myself for not putting my own project out there first.

[This is from a wonderful illustrator, Bill Peet, at www.billpeet.net]

The anxiety of influence is no joke, my friends – people really do take your ideas and run with them. And this possibility is so frightening, it’s enough to choke out even the hardiest bud of an idea. But anxiety of influence is also silly because ideas cannot really be owned. (Although I’m guessing a few Americans might argue this point.)

But more to the point, there is no real way to police idea theft anyway (although some Americans think there is). But even if there was, I am far, far, far too lazy to be chasing down idea thieves, and far too vain to wear one of those polyester police uniforms. I have better things to do (and wear). Like wallow in self pity in my coffee-and-egg-stained pajamas while one of my great ideas is made even better by a painter who is far more accomplished. Mostly because he actually bothers to paint. And because he bothers to have shows.

I’ve been turning this story over in my head for a few years now, wondering what to make of it, because the truth is, beyond its value as a self torture device, it actually holds little power. I don’t believe this prof/friend meant to be an asshole. I honestly don’t think he tried to scoop me. I think my paintings, staring at him in all their Liz-infused daisy glory from the wall opposite his desk, simply influenced him. And isn’t influence, if not outright plagiarism, one of the highest forms of flattery?



Why am I dredging all this up? Because I’m back at it. I’m making paintings of men with flowers. And I’m scared. I’m scared that if I don’t do it quick, someone else will do it before me. It seems patently obvious to me that now that I want to make these spectacularly original portraits again, every other painter on the planet is going to want to make portraits of men with flowers, too. And they will likely do it faster, better, and for more money. I just know it.

At art school, no one seemed to express a shred of anxiety when we all sat in one room painting from the same model, even the people on either side of me who had more or less the same view as I did. All the resulting paintings were different because no two people had the same interpretation. Duh! This is one of the biggest clichés of art school, and yet its lesson rarely gets absorbed. Or, maybe every other student did absorb this lesson, just not me. That’s entirely possible. In my better moments, I like to think of myself as a late bloomer. In my worst moments, a complete moron who would rather contemplate fearful thoughts than put some colourful goo on canvas.

[This is from http://floridausaimages.com]

So, I’ve decided to drag Annie, my tiny fear freak, out from behind the curtains and off the stage into the audience where everyone can see her – for free! I can’t keep Annie hidden away in the hopes that no one else breeds a tiny freaky elephant named Fanny or Tammy for their own personal Circuses of the Insane. Because they just might. And I can’t stop them. I invite those people to make their own men-with-flowers paintings and then show them and then sell them. I double dare you. It won't stop me from making mine (today). Because I know that Annie is still my Annie, even if she gets cloned and the clone is named My Annie. My Annie will always be my Annie, my furless fearful friend, until the day I finally kill her.

So, with you all as my witnesses, I’m officially putting a stop to Annie’s tiny marauding parties into the painting retreats of my soul. I am going to do what the Thais did when the Japanese were poised to invade during World War II. They simply let the Japanese in. They called this strategy something like “bending with the wind” (which sounds a lot like a Kama Sutra position I’d like to try, which bring us to our next elephant . . . )




Elephant #2: Anxiety of Spinsterism, or Spinny for short.

Oh, I’m Spinny alright. Or, at least I have been for the last few months, dragging my heart around like an extra limb that requires its own wagon. Remember my insane crush from the last post? Well, let me tell you, insane does not begin to describe the complete annexing of my brain that took place (less like a Thai bending with the wind, and more like a PMSing woman banging on the door of chocolate factory at 3 am. I was helpless.)


Spinny is an elephant on amphetamines on her way to a rave to score some ecstasy. She is so filled with delusions of love that she will do an all-night interpretive dance to prove it. Fear of rejection does not slow Spinny down. Just the opposite. It amps up her drive to locate the right drug that will bring on a two-month-long hallucination of requited love.


In my short-but-heartbreaking time on this planet, I’ve learned a thing or two about myself as Spinny. Such as, delusions are a great pain reliever. So are popcorn, cake and a rom-com movie marathon. But delusions are better because they cost nothing, they won’t make you fat, and you can invent stories ad nauseam without having to worry about what people think of you. And that’s because they all happen behind closed doors, with the eye shades pulled, inside your very own home entertainment system in your head, where you can access every delusional channel imaginable.



My delusions enable me to make up excuses for why a once-but-briefly-interested-in-me man has withdrawn, for instance. Here’s a classic: he’s intimidated by my searing intelligence. Or, he can tell that I will scale his emotional walls faster than the last record-breaking climber of Mount Kilimanjaro. Or, he thinks I’m funnier than he is. Or, he can’t compete with my dog, which is just silly. Because no one should even try to do that. Shy trumps everything.



But I’m tired of these delusions because all they do is stall the inevitable truth: He’s just not into me. And although I really am a whirling dervish of fear of rejection most of the time, the one thing I actually don’t fear is the truth. I only invent stories when I don’t know what’s going on. But I really shouldn’t count on others to just be honest because experience has shown me that people think honesty will hurt your feelings. I don’t know why. It would cause so much less damage if a man could just say, “You know, I like you. You’re OK. But I’m not feeling more than that.” That would be more than fine with me (after I shed a few tears, of course, but I would do that privately so as not to burden the truth teller with my self pity because, at that point, the truth teller would deserve a fucking medal.)

But I can’t control other people. So, I’m going to take matters into my own hands. Spinny, your days are numbered. And I mean that kindly. I know that you wonder why you keep dating men who explain irony to you during movies because they only just got it themselves, or who use the dog-ate-my-essay excuse, even if it does not apply to why he’s rejecting you (any excuse being good enough for you, Spinny), but I honestly believe that these men are wonderful because they keep showing you what you don’t want. And that’s just as important as what you do want.


In the last episode of the last season of 30 Rock, Liz Lemon has a moment of clarity during a YMCA singles dodge ball game she attends in the hopes of finding Mr. Good Enough. Finishing a conversation she started with Jenna the day before, she stops playing dodge ball to inform her hottie opponent (who was not privy to the conversation the day before, but no matter),

“I’ll tell you what I do want. I want someone who will be monogamous, and nice to his mother. And I want someone who likes musicals but knows to just shut his mouth when I’m watching Lost. And I want someone who thinks being really into cars is lame and strip clubs are gross. I want someone who will actually empty the dishwasher instead of just taking forks out as needed, like I do. I want someone with clean hands and feet and beefy forearms like a damn Disney prince. And I want him to genuinely like me, even when I’m old. And that’s what I want.”

Her opponent listens with rapt attention, but that’s because he doesn’t speak a lick of English.

Apart of from Lost and the beefy forearms, neither of which are on my wish list, I’m with Liz. Especially re strip clubs. SUPER GROSS. I'd like to add to her list: I also want a man who is as obsessed with Battlestar Gallactica as I am, and who does not explain irony to me as if it’s as opaque as a brick box sealed in a lead coffin. And I wouldn't mind a man who I think is the dog's ruff, who also likes me back. That would be nice. A tall order, perhaps, but I like to dream big.

[http://www.elephantjokes.co.uk/]

So, there you have it. Two neurotic elephants I am not so much bringing into the room as I am putting out to pasture. Sayonara, my wee fear-filled friends. May you find your tall, green grasses elsewhere.

Having said all that, I know that next month around this time, I will be banging at the door of the nearest chocolate factory at three in the morning, weeping loudly enough for the neighbours to hear – in Buffalo. But I forgive myself already. Because god knows one of the other things I’ve learned about myself in this crazy Sunday Night Movie I call my life: I never kick a girl when she’s down.

Painting is Hard

So is love.

I once thought about collecting all the club-footed things people said to me when beholding one of my paintings. But I didn’t collect them, and I can’t remember them, except for this one, which particularly stings when you fancy yourself a portrait painter: “Faces are hard . . .”

Painting is agony. A friend who is also a painter called me the other day in a total flap because a client wanted to come over to pick up her painting (my friend leaves her sold paintings on her front porch for pick up). But the client also wanted to – gasp! – meet my friend!




I was confused about the problem. What was it? Turns out there was a mix up. My friend was upset because the client actually liked my friend’s paintings and wanted to talk about them. My friend, however, doesn’t like her paintings. The mix up was my friend confusing how she feels about her work with how someone else feels about her work.

I patiently explained to her that clients are like lovers: you don’t get to dictate what they like or why. If they like you (your work), that’s their business, regardless of how much you loath yourself (or your work, which is the same thing). It’s just one of life's little quirks we can’t control.

I remember having an epiphany a few years ago in my therapist’s office as I wailed about not being able to paint like my idol, Jenny Saville. According to moi, I couldn't get the paint thick enough, or the colours clean enough, and my ideas for subject matter were not as beefy and compelling as Jenny's. Ever patient with my disastrous life problems, my therapist offered this shockingly sensible pearl of wisdom: why you don’t you just be the painter you are?



After a decade of painting on and off (mostly off), I have noticed a pattern. It goes something like this:

Day 1 — I’m a fucking genius! This painting is going to ROCK!!
Day 2 — Damn, the colours are getting muddy and the structure is weakening.
Day 3 — Oh my god, I have painted Mr. Potato Head: the dismantled version.
Day 4 — I hate myself.
Day 5 — I still hate myself. I reach for a large bag of Doritos.
Day 6 — I go back into the studio and pull it (and myself) back from the brink.
Day 7 — No time to rest. There’s so much more to do.
Day 8 — I realize everything can be fixed with more paint. Genius!
Day 9, 10, 11 . . . 20 — This 3-day painting is clearly not a 3-day painting.
Day 21 — There is no such thing as a 3-day painting.
Day 22 — I’ll never make a living at this.
Day 23 — Back at my desk, writing communications copy.


Then there was the time I regaled another painter friend with life-threatening adventures in painting failure. How was I to even contemplate living if I didn’t know what to paint? Or, when I figured out my subject matter, how to paint it? This painter friend should rightfully have his own image and alter in my home. He’s my new guru. A gentle man who didn’t have my opportunities for pursuing a graduate degree in painting, he blossomed from an adequate painter into a stellar painter through a process I should know by now because it's the same process for meditation (which I don’t do) and for running (ditto) and for just about everything else one wishes to learn and master. It’s called practice. After ten years of painting consistently, you are bound to improve. After ten years of whining and complaining instead of painting, you are bound to not improve. The math is simple enough for even a math flunky like me to understand.

But the real gift David gave me that day was this. He said, “Liz, it’s just painting. Where’s the harm?”

Recently, I fell in lerve. Woody Allen invents this word in Annie Hall when "love" cannot adequately describe how he feels. For me, I'm not talking about love. Love requires time + a modicum of sanity. But lerve is the only word I have at my disposal right now to describe this loud, perverse, mind-numbing, soul-cracking volcanic eruption that has cast a cloud of ash so thick over my being that any further travels to the Isle of Sanity have been suspended indefinitely. After so much heartbreak in my past, I thought I would never feel this kind of excitement or this level of connection ever again. It’s ridiculous because a) I don’t really know this person very well, so what I’m most likely experiencing is a massive case of projection and b) my unerring divining rod for the wrong person is quivering so violently I can barely hold it in my death grip.

So, I called my painter friend (who hates her work) and admitted my folly, castigating myself for acting like Liz at Twenty, an age at which I had as much sense as, well, as a twenty-year-old who thinks she’s in love. I expected a sound tongue lashing followed by a smart smack to shock me back into my senses. But that’s not what I got. She said, "It’s amazing, really, that J (her partner) and I argue about the same thing and in the same way after twenty years of being together, and after twenty years of therapy that should have made our arguments at least evolve!" Basically, her message was, who the hell knows what wisdom is. But isn’t it wonderful to be alive?

Added to her wisdom is a little from Charlie Kauffman (one of my favourite screen writers). In the film Adaptation, the protagonist, Charlie, is hiding with his (imaginary) twin brother, Donald, in a Florida swamp. They are being tracked by a murderously in-love Meryl Streep (if you want to know why, see the movie). As the brothers crouch behind a log, waist deep in alligator-infested waters, Charlie, crippled with self-loathing, takes this opportunity to ask Donald, awkward, goofy, and vulnerable, about the time in public school when Donald declared his love to a girl and she laughed at him. Charlie wonders why that never seemed to humiliate Donald. Why didn’t it destroy him? Donald patiently explains to Charlie that his love for the girl was his, i.e. even the girl could not take it away from him. How she felt was her business. How he felt was his. And then he gives the most powerful line of the whole movie: you are what you love, not what loves you.


If that’s true, then you get to love no matter how the person or thing at the other end of your love feels about you, i.e. I get to love painting even when painting hates me (which it does. Often). If the object of your love has no idea you exist, you still get to enjoy your butterflies all the same. Just try to squash them. You can't. So you may as well put away the Tums and accept the jitters.

I have a feeling this tsunami of an infatuation will pass and nothing will come of it. But it has accomplished two much-needed metaphorical smacks. A) It dismantled – misguided-belief-by-misguided-belief – all my carefully designed plans for avoiding heartbreak. And, B) It put my belief system back together like a Mr. Picasso Potato Head, making a mockery of perspective in order to show me that life happens in multiple dimensions at once, and never the way you expect. Our lives unfold more like Escher’s hand drawing itself – in the moment, unpredictably, and with its own terrible beauty.

I feel pretty certain I won't land in a soft spot with this wild-ride of a crush who is so hot he could turn volcanic ash to glass, but at least it has given me a chance to practice love, or lerve. At least I have that. And painting.

OH. MY. GOD.

I’m so over myself. I SWEAR!

When I received the most courageous emails from fellow sufferers after my last post – tender, generous, honest messages from people who are not only fighting for their own lives in one way or another, but also bravely staying the course, against all odds in some cases – these amazing souls made me realize two things:

1) I’m not alone (which is not some kind of misery-loves-company stance. In fact, I immediately went into Liz-fix-it mode, wantonly dispensing unsolicited e-therapy so as to heal their pain, if I could.)

And . . .

2) Andy would definitely not be impressed with my current state of mind, as one friend pointed out in a much-needed tough-love e-mail (Thanks, P!). It’s true. I know exactly what Andy would think about my wallowing because we were psychically liked (as I am with my younger brother, Justin, and my father, Fred, and my sister-in-law, Dawn.) Andy would have said, “You can’t help me. Get on with your life!”


I feel ashamed that I made some of you worry about me. Unfortunately, I can’t take it back. But since I’m trying to accept myself warts and all these days, all I can do now is say thank you and I’m sorry. No, really, thank you for indulging me in a moment of pure self-pity. And I’m so sorry I took you on a journey that came to an abrupt halt the next day when, for no apparent reason, I was right as rain again. Sometimes all it takes is a piece of really moist chocolate cake, or a chance encounter with a celebrity.


A few weeks ago, I met a guy in the dog park with his beyond-gorgeous Italian greyhound, sporting an equally gorgeous little sweater. The dog, not the man. (Well, also the man.) So, I asked the man where he got the doggie sweater, thinking how great it would look on Shy. The man said he’d look for the card of the woman who makes them and bring it to the park next day. I didn’t see him for a few days, but when I did see him next he said, “I brought that woman’s card with me everyday this week to give to you. I’m not sure I have it today.” But he fished in his pocket gamely and found it! That, however, is not the happy ending to this story.


Ever since then, we’ve seen each other almost daily at the dog park (no, this is not a blossoming romance, girls and boys, so get your heads out of that story or you’ll be disappointed with the punch line). Recently, I asked him what he does with this days and he told me he works in the theatre. Yesterday, I asked for more specifics about his work, so he told me he does some writing and directing. I happen to know exactly one person who works in the theatre, so I did the do-know-know-my-friend-Geoff thing. The gent said yes he did, and that Geoff is a marvelous actor. (Must tell Geoff). That made me feel so connected and, yes, even a little cool (although technically Geoff is more a friend of a friend, I decided that really didn’t matter. Knowing him gave me cachet by proxy.). Then the gent reciprocated by asking what I do. Communications and portrait painting, I told him. To which he responded with his own do-you-know-so-and-so-who-is-also-a-painter thing. But I did not know his painter person. So he asked me my name. “Liz Phillips,” I said, to which he responded, “Oh,” before adding, as if it would not ring any bells, “My name is Daniel MacIvor --”

“OH. MY. GOD!!!!!!!!!! YOU’RE DANIEL MACIVOR???!!!!!”


Yup. I yelled it. Right there on the street. With hipsters on the other side of the street watching me as they sucked back their espressos.



I’m not really a star fucker. But I am impressed by talent. And Daniel MacIvor (because there is no way I can call him Daniel) has talent out the wazoo. How could Daniel MacIvor be casually talking to me in the dog park about dog sweaters and other things so mundane I can’t even remember what they were when he is the creator of Past Perfect, a film I caught on Bravo one night when I was living at my father’s house after returning from a failed relationship in Seattle (and on the heels of my fire in Montreal)? (Synopsis: Past Perfect “intercuts between two days, two years apart. The first: a flight from Vancouver to Halifax, where Charlotte and Cecil, two strangers, meet in seats 3a & 3c and fall in love. The second: a Saturday two years later, where Charlotte and Cecil now a couple, fight, break-up and finally reunite.” Thank you IMDB). What story could have been more perfect for me at that time? None, I tells ya!

Some of you may have no idea who Daniel MacIvor is, and that's OK. Celebrity is in the mind of the beholder. I'm also hoping that making a fool of one's self is also in the mind of the beholder. Not the espresso-chugging beholder beholding me, mind you. Maybe yelling Daniel MacIvor's name made his day. Knowing that he had thought to bring me the dog-sweater-maker's card every day made mine. Imagine, Daniel MacIvor thinking of me as he made his way to the dog park!

So, there it is. My life as a dramedy. While it’s true that most of life’s unfolding is out of our hands (when/how we die, who loves us), we do have an insane amount of control over the rest (when/how I will write an article for publication, or when/how I will make a body of paintings for exhibition, or who I will choose to love) – we can create a great deal of our reality through thoughts and actions. (Yes, folks, the Liz of old is back!) It’s also true that while we don’t always get what we want – kids, partners, clear-cut and satisfying careers – we often do get what we need: a Liz Lemon moment of slipping on a proverbial banana peel to remind you that life’s randomness can also be really effing funny.