We Are Not the Weight We Carry: Downtown Under Curfew, I Was Crying in the Back of a Venue.

A Wednesday night, a LA protest on the horizon, and the memory of who I used to be

DAY 1252

i rock side-to-side, holding myself in my arms, as tears spill down my face.

i am standing in the back of the venue, crying. it is a Wednesday night. The Belwether is close to empty, full of quirky white people— Millenials and Gen X. on the way to the venue, my phone had issued a curfew warning: LACITYALTER:THECITYOFLOSANGELESHASDECLAREDTHATACURFEWISINPLACEFROM8PMTO6AMFOR 1-110TOWEST/1-5.

We are downtown but just outside of the curfew zone, and Tune Yards is playing their final song— a song from their new album that i haven’t yet heard. the singer shares the chorus with us and encourages us to sing along. she adds, “I know what it means for you to be here.”

i am here, in my city— the days leading up the No Kings protest— afraid for my friends and neighbors and community in a way that feels hard to articulate. no one is going to grab me, no one is going to harm me, but the people i love? they’re already hurt.

so i am crying for them. but i am also crying because a mirror is being held up for me— a moment in time, in which listening to Tune Yards was a portal itself. and life now is so incredibly different than the last time i listened to them, over and over again.

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the year is 2021. i am at MacDowell, an artist residency in New Hampshire.

i am part of the second Covid cohort of artists who will wake up in their own cabins. baskets full of organic, chef prepared food will be quietly placed outside our doors so as not to disturb us, so that we can work. everything is in service of supporting the fact that we are artists. i can’t believe that i am that— like, really and truly believe that. in the fall, my teen guide to consent that i wrote with my dad will be pushed out into the world, making me an author. but i don’t feel it. no matter, i am at a place where anything we could think to ask for would be delivered (a filmmaker asked for a flat screen tv— and a flat screen tv she did receive). i asked for a tarp so that i could paint on the floor. in shifts, we were able to sit in the James Baldwin Library, able to check out books and DVD’s and CD’s from all the artists who had ever been to MacDowell in their lifetimes— no one else allowed on the shelves, but MacDowell Fellows. during my shift from 8-10 AM, i would check out DVD’s and take a CD at random and grab a book just because, before returning to my studio, alone.

the first week i was there, we were asked to quarantine even though i had been vaccinated early because i was an educator in NYC (an online educator is an educator, so i told myself).

i brought a baggie of 25 mg edibles, thinking they would get me through the entire residency. but days spent entirely alone, i had to get high to deal with being alone with myself.

i tried to start a fire in my fireplace, but did not know to open the flue: smoke flooded my tiny cabin, and—high— i was convinced sirens would go off and i would be OUsTED! my residency would certainly be revoked! after failing to clear out the smoke myself, i called an emergency number, and realized that there were no cameras, there was barely a signal— this cabin that Audre Lorde and Charlie Kaufman had also written in had never had any such technology, nor would it ever. an old man entered masked, said, “It’s not cold enough to build a fire,” then opened the flue. i couldn’t tell if i felt shame because i felt stupid or because i was high.

after eating my entire bag of 25 mg edibles that first week, i was out of weed. i had taught myself to enjoy solitude with weed, and MacDowell was my first experience outside of my home during the Pandemic. in the first few days, i would call my (ex)boyfriend, but as soon as he started projecting his ideas for himself onto me— you should learn how to learn the bass, so you can relate to me— i would start feeling lonelier, more alone than before i had called. was he always so incapable of hearing my ideas before launching into his own? did i actually want to learn the bass (no)?

but every morning as the sun arose, i would blast the latest Tune Yards album from my JBL speaker— an album i am thankful he introduced to me.

“Sketchy” by Tune Yards

the week before i had arrived, i had an endoscopy. minutes after the anesthesia wore off, the only conversation i had with the doctor was in passing, him saying: “Your throat is a mess.” on my second day there, over the phone i found out that i had esophagitis, which meant: no coffee, no carbonation, no spice, no chocolate, no citrus, no smoking, no drinking. no eating or drinking two hours before bed. i said okayokayokay as the nurse told me what i must abstain from fOR THREE MONTHS to heal my throat and i said okayokayokayTHANK YOU! before i hung up and thought to myself, “they mean tobacco,” already contorting the directions to suit my delusion that weed was not the reason my throat was torn to shreds.

detoxing off of coffee, picking tomatoes out of my freshly prepared salads, i was trying to create but i could not stand to sit with myself.

but i would wake up and turn on “sketchy” and drink my earl grey tea and eat what i could and do my morning pages. then, if i was lucky, i would snatch an hour of writing. it felt like i was stealing words from the ether, unsure of how long they would want me near. uncertain of my purpose there or why i even got to be. i was only able to suppress the fear and dread if i woke up early enough, if i always able to jump through the sliding glass door that led to unbridled creativity just before it closed, just enough to say: i wrote something.

by the time the song “silence” played, which is a song that abruptly stops the flow of sound after the words were uttered: SILENCE. i was forced me to sit in silence for one whole minute, training for the idea that i could in fact sit in silence. then, the music would pick up again. i was no longer alone.

what i could not name in that silence was the way in which my day was ruled by weed. the second week, i would drive across state lines to get more flower. and when i ran out of that, a fellow would share some that his dad’s friend grew in Michigan. i would bring terribly wrapped joints to our nightly gatherings as an offering— a token of generosity and connection— but no one would touch them. weed felt like i had to offer. weed was the only way to connect with my boyfriend, so it felt like the only way to connect to anything or anyone else.

i was there to write. i had the space, time, and freedom to do so, but i was trapped in a cycle i was unwilling to name or claim: addiction.

there are so many moments in the road to recovery that feel like cracks in the facade that i built to maintain the delusion of my own functionality. i was scraping the barrel of existence, barely getting through the day— outside of the context of my Brooklyn apartment, i couldn’t take giant rips out of my foot-high glass bong that made me projectile vomit. by the time i got high, i forgot that i vomited— confused as to why my throat was in shreds. even when i was in a dream scenario, a cabin in the woods afforded to me for 3.5 weeks so that i could make art, i still pretended.

all i wanted to do was get high.

all i could think about was going home so i could do drugs how i wanted.

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i am back in LA in the year 2025. tears are sliding down my cheeks. my city is under seige and i am about to leave for Portugal the following week for Disquiet Literary, an international writing fellowship. i can’t even imagine what it will be like.

there is no doubt in my mind that i am a writer, an artist. and tears leak out of me as i think about how heavy a burden it was to not only keep up with my addiction but to have wasted the previous fellowship. there is no question in my belief that i am who i am: a writer

i can’t help but think about the spell of addiction: that i so fundamentally was trapped but unable to see it until i was taken out of my normal context. in Portugal, i will be again taken out of my context and able to see myself more clearly because of it.

six months after MacDowell, i crashed out and landed back home in Los Angeles, ended the engagement and get sober. LA was a place i long resented, associating it with the first 18 years of my life, in which i felt trapped in the container of perfection and expectation— when my life was merely a series of ice rinks.

but that night, i felt nothing but pride: so much had changed. Los Angeles was so much more expansive. the way i folded into it, the way i had always belonged when i felt i didn’t.

i like to say that Los Angeles is a town of defectors— not because we are defective, but because it is a place where people who find their way there HAD to leave home. when i first moved back, i was blown away by how many transplants live here. i was from there, but i barely knew it— identified more deeply with being a New Yorker. but after 9 months in Minnesota, i learned that the people who find their way to Los Angeles had to in order to survive. either because of war or poverty or because they never fit in where they were born. they made a home out of Los Angeles— a place i just so happened to be born. and i have no more claim to it than they do. (it is, of course, stolen land, first of all).

the final song, Merrill Garbus taught the audience the chorus, and encouraged us to sing along. it quickly became a mirror for us all, a reminder of all that we have endured and all that we can no longer carried:

We are not the weight we carry

Clip the strings and float away

Live inside a sanctuary

Lose yourself to find your way

when the song ends, i walk to the bar, where T is bartending. he mouths, “Are you okay?!” and i nod and yell, “YEAH. CATHARTED. GONNA WRITE ABOUT IT.” he laughs and mouths “O-K.”

i find our group. the girl who had been rolling at Just Like Heaven was there. when i first saw her, she was all, “After you guys left the festival, I thought to myself, ‘Were they trying to leave that whole time?’” i was quickly reminded of the trap-like vise that drugs can become— a moment of euphoria so quickly twisted into self-doubt and paranoia. i laughed and said, “NO! Not at all! You actually changed my life! And I wrote about it!” and she was all, “No way? You’ll have to send it to me!” which assuaged my anguish over the fact that i saw her and realized i had written about her and didn’t know if she had seen it. but she had not, but i would make sure she would.

the music ends. T finds me. as we exit the venue, a military grade helicopter swipes a search light through downtown overhead. it is fucking ominous. we are eager to drive home, worried that our path will be blocked. i pray that we will be okay. i pray that things will change for the better.

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after a beach day in Cascais, standing in the Lisbon metro

as always, i love you. i am in Portugal— writing most certainly forthcoming. there is so much to write about. but this piece was living in my head, and i had to take the split second i had to write it down.

please, if you haven’t already:

i would love to hear your thoughts, genuinely:

and if this is a piece you think someone would resonate with, please share:

iloveyouiloveyouiloveyou.

xoxoxo,

P