Letter to a Young Woman Afraid / Her Life is Over

from a woman who was once a young woman afraid / her life was over

Love Love Love Love / Vila Madalena // São Paulo, Brasil /// May 2016

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Dear One¹,

In 2008, I left New York City and moved to Portland, Oregon. I was twenty-five.

Since the age of 7 — when I played Toto in a Recreation Center production of The Wizard of Oz² — I wanted to be on Broadway, I wanted to be on Television, I wanted to be a movie star. I wanted to walk red carpets in fabulous gowns. Those were my childhood dreams.

They have never gone away.

I might as well call them my dreams.

In 2008, however, I wasn’t making any progress toward my dreams. I didn’t have an agent. I didn’t go to auditions. I wasn’t making my own work. I was a yoga teacher who wrote sometimes and gave Thai massage for money.

I’d just returned from my first cross-country road trip, and suddenly it felt as though all the doors in New York shut in my face at once. My boyfriend broke up with me. (On a picnic. In Prospect Park.) My AcroYoga co-teacher had herself a new partner. My 7am yoga classes made me nauseous. (I am not the morning-est of people.) I was living in a crummy railroad apartment in Greenpoint, Brooklyn and I had to walk all the way through my roommate’s bedroom to get to the bathroom, or else put on pants and go out my bedroom door, down the crummy hallway, and back in the kitchen door to get to the bathroom. I didn’t like my roommate. And I was so broke that I couldn’t afford a tea every day so I could sit and write in a coffeeshop.