Knowing My Way.... By Heart: July 2010

I've been doing a lot of driving lately.

The two and a half hours to and from Oklahoma City twice a week has become as familiar to me as any of the other roads I've driven in the last five years of my life. I say only the last five because I feel that, for me, 2005 marks the start of my adult life.

It was the year I graduated college, moved a thousand miles from my family and anything familiar, and started to make my own way. Through Graduate School, becoming Catholic, falling in love with films, falling in love with people, and ultimately getting my heart broken, the last five years of my life have shaped and formed who I am in very different ways from the first 22.

I'm feeling now as though I'm standing on a precipice-in a holding pattern of sorts-chomping at the bit. It sounds cheesy, but I honestly feel as though I'm living each day right now waiting for my 'real' life to begin.

And then I realize.....I've felt this way before. In 2001. I had just graduated high school, was moving two hours away to start college, and had a whole world of new people and experiences to explore! So, in one of those two and a half hour drives back from Oklahoma City yesterday, I let my mind slide over my time in Weatherford. I realize that I had thought and felt at the end of that the same way that I feel about the end of Tallahassee. I thought 'I've LIVED here. I've really grown up. I've learned so much and come so far. I loved here, grew here, fell in love here, got my heart broken here...'

Such a familiar train of thought. Sure, the people and faces were different. The heartbreaks and lessons were not the same, though similar. But it occurs to me that in the last ten years my life has split itself into two distinct periods that are very nearly xerox copies of one another.

I think about theatre, and then film, and how both of them scared the hell out of me even while they delighted me, and how I will always, ALWAYS, want them in my life.

I think about Thomas, who saw me one night singing and acting a mediocre holiday play on a mediocre stage and loved me, and how he's the only man, in his simplicity, who ever really made me believe that he did. I think about his accident that has taken his mind from him, and taken him from all of us. And I miss him so much that I can't think about it or my heart aches all over-not because I want to be with him now (I know we weren't ever really going to work long term) but because on one night, under my front porch light, he smiled, told me he loved me, cursed himself for it, and then kissed me. And in the cursing, I found an honest charm. And oh God! I miss my friend.

I think about Ryan, who stood next to me at sunrise one morning on set, and how before sunrise the next day, he'd become an integral part of my life. I think about how he fit so easily, loved so easily, and how when it all came crashing down around me I realized that part of me was always insecure about it, the way we were quietly frantic about each other, through all of our talks and even though we tried to be as honest as we both could, when it came to love, I'd never really believed him anyway. The hours and hours of talking had never been as real as a boy who cursed at me and kissed me on night on a front porch. But with Ryan, I had tried to build. I had worked at it, cultivated it, and we had failed. And I forgive us both because in the end, he would have never made me as happy as I deserve to be anyway. I'm glad for the miles between us now, and without malice, I wish him well knowing that we would never have been enough for each other in so many ways.

I think about opening night jitters and how they are just like premiere jitters, and how no matter how many gigs I get, compliments I get, I will always feel like I'm playing dress up and praying no one notices that the shoes are just a little too big.

I think about the family that I built for myself, and smile because I can almost feel my heart physically swell at the incredible people who form a wall around me and the rest of the world.

I spent all day yesterday with one of the most handsome, capable, and fun men I've ever met. And it hit me somewhere in the middle of the afternoon that I was sweat covered, makeup free, and driving him around in my beat up old car and that none of that bothered me. I wanted to laugh out loud, delighted with myself, realizing that five, or even two years ago, I would have spent all day with him nervous, trying to present myself as prettily as possible, frantically cleaning my car, coming up with charming things to say. But yesterday? Yesterday I was just me, quietly going about my day with my new friend, and dammit, I really like me now.

I genuinely, whole heartedly like who I've become. And even though there are things about myself that drive me totally nuts, and things I would change if I could, at the heart of everything, I can live with myself. And what's more, I like living with myself. And that is a hell of a thing.

I think about the next five years of my life, and wonder whether it, too, will echo the patterns of my past.

What will hurt more? What will be more fun? Who will I meet? Who will I keep? How will I live? Where will I live?

And so I'm in the car, laughing and crying and dreaming about what's next. And knowing that whatever it is,

I will leave Oklahoma to find it.