What to Do

What do you do when you don't feel a song in your heart or a hop in your step? Aside from roll your eyes at how corny a rhetorical question that was, it was actually the issue of my day. Do you just give in to the self pity and the overwhelming sense of UGH? Or do you actively work to pull yourself out of it?

It was 97 degrees of a rough go of it in NYC, especially because I brilliantly could not sleep after 4am and started my day off in the uncomfortable vulnerability of an early morning acting class (It really sucks to suck at something... it's been a while since I really truly sucked at something, like at the beginning phase of learning anything new for the first time. OUCH! I know it's good to suck at something, it means you still have stuff left to learn, blah blah blah, I've used all these lines before, but they weren't making me feel any better)

After class, I had this vague sort of empty feeling of not actually being good at anything as I walked away from the dance studio. Incomprehensibly slowly for a six-year transplant, I meandered my way to LaDuca Shoes to pick up my refurbished black character heels. Then I roamed uptown (I've never walked such an unstraight path in New York City in all my years of living here... even when I was a newb). I ended up at the music library at Lincoln Center, thinking I would find something to make my whole being wake up and want to sing.

At the Song Reference Desk there was this woman who looked like she had stepped out of a Mad Men shoot, or more accurately, out of the alternate dimension that was the 40s, and just tore her way through the lining between worlds into New York City's Performing Arts Library. She was stunning. Period perfect. UTTERLY bizarre and of unplace-able age.

I felt a little less lonely somehow, seeing her and realizing that everyone in New York, perhaps everyone in the world, is just trying to reinvent themselves, sometimes aggressively, toward a version of themselves that they'd rather be. That active effort - forced reincarnation, a novel form of etch a sketch that still leaves a grainy imprint behind - at once appeals to me, disturbs me, and makes me feel like I'm home.

40s reincarnate must have checked out a bazillion Disney song books, because they were strewn over the reference desk. One was open to "A Dream is a Wish Your Heart Makes" and I started humming the familiar tune as I thumbed through the pages of sheet music. It was the oddest thing, but I teared up in the middle of the stuffy lobby at this old Disney stuff that made me feel like I was four again,

and I felt better.

So I guess the moral of the story is that everyone has their own process for finding what to do to feel better, and the only thing you can really do for yourself is not judge your process while you're in the middle of it.