recovering (5.27.23)

I remember when I first read the story about Frida Kahlo's bus accident. When she was 18 years old, the bus she was riding in got hit by a trolley car, resulting in a number of crippling injuries. Internal organs, her spinal column, her bones – all affected. Her convalescence ultimately resulted in discovering her talent and passion for the visual arts. Her first documented paintings were done from her bed, where she was stuck for months. It is recognized today as a paramount event in both her life and the initiation of her career.

I'm not saying it's even remotely the same situation, but I can't help but feel guilt about how I spent my own physically restricted recovery. I recently had one minor outpatient surgery that forced me to chill out for a week, and I didn't know what the fuck to do. I felt like my life was like that point in Miyazaki's “Howl's Moving Castle” when Calcifer, the anthropomorphic flame that is the “heart” of the moving castle, gets removed from the castle's fireplace by the witch. This causes the castle to malfunction, and it starts teetering, dropping screws, wood panels, doors, windows, porches, and frantically running up the mountains with its staggering skinny metal legs. I cycled around my apartment, scrubbing cabinets, practicing Bach and Ravel, sinking in to my bed with the L Word on constant play because my incision hurts, alternating between looking at the clock and staring at my ceiling. There was certainly nothing notable or career-altering getting done in this time.

I took the train home from the surgery. After all, it was just numbing and a tiny bit of laughing gas. It's surely ill advised, but I figured it's nothing like eating an edible and drinking kratom at the same time (a frequent disassociative pastime of my junior year of college) and not realizing until 30 minutes in that you took the F train all the way to Forest Hills when you live in South Brooklyn. I also did not want to be recognized in my post operative state, so I made all attempts to look as nondescript and removed from society as possible. I had on sweatpants, some borderline orthopedic clogs, and a hoodie – all black. I also brought a head scarf and some sunglasses.

When I step out of the building to go outside towards the train after the surgery, the sun is in full blinding effect. It's 3pm on a Thursday around Bryant Park. Zara and Best Buy loom particularly tall and brutalist. Evangelists hoist signs claiming they have “Proof That Hell Is Real” while selling bootleg Bibles on the corner. Lawyers walk around with matte blue suits and Sweetgreen bowls. Tourists are on their way to the M&M Store. Hahahaaa. Jesus, I can't fucking do this right now, I think to myself. I tie my scarf I brought around my neck, put my sunglasses on, and pulled up my hood. I probably looked like the Hamburglar or something. And that was fine by me.

I get on the train and slide my way into the seat that's in the far corner of the car, across from another two seats that face it. It's tucked away from the center of the train where traffic goes in and out the two main doors. I figured I would be perceived by the fewest amount of people there. But about 6 stops in, I notice the guy across from me keeps staring at me. I think, well, I probably do look kind of strange. So long as I wasn't fucked with or noticed by someone I knew, that didn't bother me. I just wanted to get home, lie down in bed with my cat, and pretend the day never even happened.

Anyway, he appears to be some sort of anonymous clerksman. He's wearing a white button up short sleeve shirt that's about one and a half sizes too small. He has on a tiny black messenger hat which only emphasizes his rotund figure. He has a bluetooth piece in his right ear. People continue to get off as the train approaches Brooklyn, but he's still on the train. I rest my head against the metal wall to the left of my seat, hoping it'll all blow over, when I notice him get up and slide in to the newly vacant spot next to me. He was sitting next to a Black woman before, so my first thought was, oh god, he's creepy AND racist. I pretend to ignore it until I see him take out a Palm Pilot type phone, something like a Samsung. He draws out a white pen from the side of his phone, brings up a black blank page on his phone, and begins to write something. I don't want to engage him, but I'm curious what he's doing, so I stare out of the corner of my eye.

In jagged capital letters, he starts writing, are you going through something?

I immediately stand up. The train pulls right in to the Fort Hamilton Pkwy station at that time, which happens to be where I'm getting off. I still have to wait a handful of seconds for the train to slow down and open the doors, but I'm committed to standing up at this point. Something about his writing startled me in a way I didn't expect. But now it's too late. I see him rushing to erase the writing on his phone, even though he technically hadn't shown it to me yet. I get off the train, and that was the end of it.

Of course, I feel awful assuming he was possibly racist and also going to harass me. He was trying to exhibit a gesture of kindness. I don't understand why I jerked up after having read that. I guess I thought I was not going to be noticed and I was, and that was enough to set me off.

Going through something. Hmm. I think everybody on that train was going through something private. We all suffer in some way, to some degree, every day, silently, with normal clothes on, before, after, with or without surgeries or physical ailments. And I wonder what would have happened if he had written that to somebody else. I wonder if they would have needed to hear it. I thought about all the people in those social experiments who see a stranger blindfolded holding a sign that says “hug me if you need it”, and a bunch of folks are filmed hugging and confessing to the individual what they're going through. Some say they just broke up with a partner of many years whom they loved. Some say their father passed away recently. And it may have never been vocalized and released unless that person holding the sign was there.

Why was my own reaction not that of the people who hug the stranger with the sign? Maybe it's because I didn't think the surgery was that big of a deal. Maybe it was also because I don't want anybody to feel sorry for me. I have developed my own personal system for coping with struggle alone, physical or mental, and unless I'm panicking, I don't want to bother anybody with it. I was not hit by a bus. Nobody died recently who I was close to. I'm not totally broke. I guess what I'm going through is better told by the experiences I create or engage in before I'll ever share what exactly it means when I answer to what I'm “going through”.

_

A week after the surgery, I'm on a date, trying to pretend as if I am back to my normal physical condition. We're having oysters and wine in Williamsburg. It's going okay. He tells me a lot about himself and I listen. He tells me he was in a coma for six months after an accident years ago. He's been arrested twice for starting fights in bars. He has sold a painting recently for $11,000. I ask him if recovering from the accident warranted a new lease on the act of creation. He says he doesn't really know. He fiddles with a box of Marlboro Golds in his long tattooed fingers. I think about the last time I was offered $11,000 for my work and how I had to split it with my other three band members on tour. I think about how badly I could use $11,000 for my next project. I'm 13 years younger, but starting to develop the intrusive thought that my life may be going awry. He makes a habit of meeting my eyes intensely and then turning away as if preoccupied by something else in his mind – perhaps the possible UFO sighting he saw from his studio hours before. I am trying to understand what might be going on in his head. I don't know that I'll ever know. I have never had a substantial physical injury that could have affected my brain chemistry for life. He is fairly attractive, and yet, I don't desire him. I can't really explain why.

We run in to his Danish friend, a classic Williamsburg transplant bearded dude working in art curation who I later find out has a heart of gold without even trying - a very Scandinavian quality I have known from my own family. My date is annoyed when I say I'm tired from the surgery and the beer, and also evidently annoyed that I'm not falling all over him. He asks incessantly if I'm okay, and I wonder where that concern was two hours ago. He superficially points out a pair of fake boobs that distracted him from our conversation with the Danish friend. His friend shrugs (he's happily married). A different guy asks for my phone number and my date seems to get jealous. I keep making excuses to use the bathroom and text a third person who I actually do desire about how I can keep the night interesting. There's a stagnancy and a mild discomfort in the air, segments of time in which the conversation stalls for a couple seconds before rolling again.

It seems the only right thing to do to shake the weirdness, bring us all together in a unified experience, and jolt me awake, is for all of us to rally and do coke and ketamine that the Danish friend has in tiny ziploc bags in his wallet. I had originally said I wouldn't disrupt my healing time post surgery, but I told myself it was a desperate situation.

An hour later, we're on top of the Water Tower at the Williamsburg Hotel. I'm talking to my date's Danish friend, and he reminds me of the new extended “family” I found recently in Scandinavia on tour as well as the reconnection with my actual Norwegian family. He is the perfect person to take drugs with, and somehow, we all let down our guards a little, dissipating the tension. We look out on the expanse of the Hudson and the buildings that line it, glowing with specks of window lights and midnight color shows that you can see all the way from an airplane above, reflected on to the still water below like a painting. And somehow, in a city full of eight million people in which I hold the hand of somebody I can't decide truly deserves me or not, standing at one of the highest points in all of Brooklyn, looking out into the world, there are palpable pockets of time in which I am overcome with inexplicable loneliness. It stays with me well into the next morning.

_

A trip is scheduled to LA and SF with my best friend the next week. I will show her the place that raised me, the ice plant covered cliffs of Fort Funston overlooking the beach expanse below. I remember the red ladybug rain boots back when I was in 2nd grade and had blonde curly hair, walking the white and brown beagle/lab of my childhood through the massive, ages old eucalyptus trees that are particularly characteristic of west San Francisco. My friends in New York remember San Francisco by the crack heads next to The Black Cat in the Tenderloin. My new Danish friend described the city as “beautiful” and “also boring”. The treasured memories of growing up in San Francisco seem to be dissolving along with the advent of the tech transplants and modernized high rises. It's a bittersweet sort of nostalgia.
I remember the days in which I walked dogs at Fort Funston for extra income because I didn't have enough gigs yet, I was about to move to New York for the very first time, and I had cut ties with most of my high school friends in Oakland. My boyfriend at the time is abusive, and my musical mentor is sexually harassing me under the premise of your “old soul” and “perfect pink lips”. One of the only friends I did keep from high school falls off the Fort Funston cliff six months later in an accident and passes away, three months before my other close music friend gets fatally shot on USC campus for being queer and Black.

I do not wish to be lost in the growing darkness of my birth place, and those are lives I hope to eternally cherish and not mourn. So I must hang on to the feeling of treading down the sandy cliff to the water like when I was a child - before the deaths, the harassment, the insecurities of young adulthood. I will put my arm around my friend, Blue Bottle cortado in hand. I imagine the dogs running, families hugging, the salt from the spraying water at the shore. My dad comes out of the water in his wet suit with his cream longboard of 20+ years, the new family puppy leaping across the sand to meet him. The sun decides to show once the fog layer migrates north to the Sunset District as it does every spring morning around 11am. I'll go home to make pancakes and sit out on the wooden deck, doing the New York Times crossword puzzle. My friend will look up into the sky with her red framed sunglasses from the deck chair, beaming.

-

To cap off the weekend, I go to a friend's album release party. My old guitarist who is there with me tells me about a show he attended at the Blue Note when I was stuck at home in my Howl's Moving Castle whirlwind, recovering. They said, “the drummer really wanted you to play. If (Blue Note artist + vibraphonist) couldn't make it, they would have called you.” I've heard some variation of it a little too much over the past year. I sip a wine that is a little too sweet for my liking and try not to think about it too much. I go home with a heavy fatigue and stare at my instrument, mallets in hand. And just as I feel the excitement that crops up in my chest every time I play, ever since I was 13 years old, it suddenly disappears. My heart sinks. I drop the mallets on the floor and go to bed.

I wake up with a headache and a sore reminder from my right lower abdomen that post surgery, the Endometriosis gets worse before it gets better. Breakfast is uneventful. I leave the dishes in the sink instead of doing them right away. My new students ask over Zoom how they can learn to play like me, and I can't help but feel like a fraud to be looked up to in such a way. I have passed the time post surgery losing inspiration instead of gaining it, taking my free time and using it to pay only a little bit forward. It makes me sad and it is stubbornly occupying my mind, holding up in my bones that become paralyzed when summoned for action. People have made careers out of immobilizing injury and desirable artworks out of comas, and I would rather put toxins in my body precisely at the moment it should be healing than be stuck with the resounding, helpless feeling of not being where I want to be. And yet, there's not really any other place I can be than here, where life has led me from the string of my experiences and choices both good and bad. I know others are going through the same exact thing in their own lives – it's a common thing when artists are between tours or major exhibitions. I believe part of me not wanting any sympathy has to do with acknowledging that what is hard for one is also shared by so many.

I end up confiding in an older music mentor of mine who asks how I'm doing. This time, I don't want to turn my nose up at the gesture. I accept it. I ask him why I'm feeling this way, how exactly I can “beat” this and get my normal productive self back. He tells me not to worry so much about it. Not just because I owe myself the time for my body to safely heal, but because when I'm back up and busy again, on the normal tour schedule of performing in LA one moment and rehearsing in Europe 12 hours later, 4am lobby calls, wondering when I can catch a break to do something other than eat and sleep, I'll wish I was right here at home, doing what I'm doing right now. It's the kind of cadence of life that we need to let happen instead of fighting against. And while I don't think I've necessarily evaded my guilt during this time period, I will let it live beside me like a visitor before it's ready to go.

So I guess it wouldn't hurt me – or any of us – to break the stagnancy, to step on to the train on our way to work and pretend like we are not all mopping the messes of our minds in silent tandem. We could all use a gentle act of sympathy, whether or not we take it or simply save it as a random instance to think about later. Maybe this is how we learn to recover safely.