D E C E M B E R / J A N U A R Y
MD: Next to Godliness
I have a birthday tradition. Every year, I put on a suit, head up to the Neue Galerie on the Upper East Side, view its collection of German and Austrian art and design and sit down to a coffee and sacher torte in the Café Sabarsky. It’s a lovely ritual. But here’s the hitch: I’ve never done it. It came to me as an idea shortly after the museum opened in 2001. It seemed like a wonderful way to treat myself to a rare experience and step out of my common, casual routine. It still is a good idea, but in all the years since I’ve never followed through with it.
I was born on December 17th, eight days before Christmas. I’ve always felt that the Christ Child and I have a lot in common. Well, maybe just two things. We both have December birthdays. He was persecuted and I have a persecution complex. From an early age, I found myself pondering those fathomless syllables: “why” and “me.” Perhaps my December birthday was the cause of my persecution complex. (Thanks a lot, Lamb o’ God!)
On the day of my birth, my mother was supposed to be attending my sister’s nativity pageant at Our Lady of Angels in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn. My sister was cast as the small, yet pivotal role of “German Girl.” Why a mädchen deutsch was present at the birth of Christ was never explained to me, but what is aired every year is how angry she was that my mother missed her theatrical debut. That my grandmother attended in my mother’s absence was cold comfort as one can see in pictures from the way my sister broods in a corner of the stage, arms folded and face pouted. (Actually, she’s a very convincing German.) From the start, my arrival was an inconsiderate interruption.
Kids with summer birthdays always lamented not being able to bring cupcakes into school. This is hardly a trial, especially since the warm weather allows for killer birthday parties like when my brother got to bring friends to Great Adventure. But as the pressure of the Christmas holiday was in frantic motion by the time my birthday rolled around, I had to field the same question from my mother every year, “You don’t really want a party, do you?” No, Mom, what young child wants the rapt attention of friends and the excesses of cake, ice cream and gifts? I negotiated a party every other year but as I got older, midterms and Christmas vacation eclipsed my birthday completely. In college, my birthday usually fell on the last day of scheduled exams which meant that my friends had either already left school or were cramming and packing.
As a result, I have never put much stock in celebrating my birthday. This is not to say that I have not had great birthdays. There have been years where I have been feted in the most thoughtful ways. And yet, generally I don’t think to put much emphasis on this one day. I have grown to think of my birthday as an afterthought, a secondary concern or a dependent clause in someone else’s declarative statement.
Though my own celebration may be more measured and marked by curbed anticipation, I still apply significance to the day nonetheless. It is maybe the only day when I allow my mind and body to slow down, to observe myself in the world and to release myself from angst and internal critique; to slip effortlessly through the world without judgment. I wish I could do that most days out of the year, but as things stand, this is the best gift I can give myself. Perhaps next year I will don a tie and jacket, make my way uptown and stare into the eyes of German girls unbothered by my arrival.
SJ: Where Do I Start?
I’m a big fan of new beginnings. I love the idea of clean slates, fresh starts, full reboots.
And really, who doesn’t? What could be better than shrugging off the past and starting again, unburdened by the foibles and screw-ups and let-downs trailing in our wakes? To wash one’s hands of it all, make a clean break and step forward feeling all brand new – is there anything better in the imagination than just that?
Enter the New Year, the ultimate moment of new beginning, the annual opportunity to make right all that has been wrong. It’s a terrific holiday and I’m all for it, but I don’t actually need an internationally recognized starting point to plot some resolutions and vow to begin anew. A random Monday morning, for example, is a great time to change a life. I might start planning on a Thursday, let’s say -- while I sit in my sweatpants at noon, eating ice-cream for lunch and gorging on internet news – the life-altering plan I’ll put into play come Monday. How I’ll eat like Gwyneth Paltrow, and start every day with some focused and productive writing, and put in a 7 to 10 mile run followed by some restorative yoga. How I’ll work on guitar and French, and devote myself to some Important and Meaningful volunteer work, and adopt a daily mediation practice. How I’ll turn all my ambitions into actions, and be pro-active every moment, and will my dreams into reality. How I’ll remake myself entirely with the Big Plan. And I’ll totally do it. I will. Starting Monday.
Now, it might seem that rather than waiting until the other side of the weekend to enact the Plan, the better thing to do would be step away from the ice cream and the internet and go ahead and get to work doing some of those things in the moment. And don’t get me wrong, I will do some of the things on that list before Monday, I certainly will. But I’ll do them in the usual scraggly, haphazard-feeling way I do everything, and that’s not at all the same as activating the Big Plan. The Big Plan has to be a fast break into a whole new way of being, and so the Big Plan will start on a clean, predetermined, shining and uncorrupted day, because that’s when new beginnings…well, that’s when they begin.
The notion of a fresh start seduces because it promises not only a seismic shift in one’s present self, but also a return of sorts. My new self, the one that will come into being when I start the Big Plan, will have no history, which means it will take me back to a time before. Before all the mistakes and questionable choices and moments of regret. I’ve always felt – even while knowing better – that if I could actually realize one of these fantastic new beginnings of mine, and if I could succeed and get it just right (“it” being “everything”), it wouldn’t only lead to greater future happiness, it would actually overwrite the past. Eventually, the new way of being, the new me in my new life, would overpower what preceded it, and all that messy stuff before the Big Plan would be wiped clean. Off my permanent record. And with that thought, the promise of the fresh start grows larger still, moving past mere rejuvenation, and offering something even greater: redemption.
I’ve spent a long time waiting for some change that would forgive me for and free me from my less-favorite pieces of my self. I’ve spent a lot of time anticipating the moment when I would get it together enough to get it together to Change Everything, waiting for myself to pull off some kind of transformation that would mark my life clearly into Before and After categories. Before was the time of struggle and shame and uncertainty, the time of messiness and failure. After will be the time of clarity and confidence and accomplishment, of dreams made real and unimpeachable success. If I could just get started, just commit to my starting point, just make real that new beginning. If I could, if I could, if I could.
But I’ve never managed to do it. That change never came. And it never will. Because it’s a fantasy, and though it pains me a bit to know that’s so, I know very well that it is. There is no starting over. There is no Before and no After. There is just this life, just this one unbroken line of a life. It would be so much nicer if it organized itself into tidy storylines, if there were new beginnings and clear endings and satisfying arcs. It would be so much easier to make sense of ourselves and draw conclusions about our lives if this were so. But it’s not like that, it just isn’t.
When I look through the years worth of notebooks plotting my proposed fresh starts, I see lots of things I’ve actually succeeded in changing, or at least improving, over the years. It just never happened the way I imagined it would, the way I wished. The narrative hasn’t been the clean beautiful thing I’ve tried so hard to orchestrate. I never woke up and was all brand new. I always woke up and was just me, but every now and then just me managed to do just a little bit better, not at everything, but at something, just a little something, here or there.
I had a moment in an acting class years ago when I did something very good. It was a scene study class at graduate school, and somehow in the context of the scene I was working on at the time, I’d managed a true and soaring moment. I’d found this way of working, this way of “lending myself to the work” (which is something we said a lot in graduate school) that was very different than any way I’d been able to do it before, and very much, very obviously, leagues and worlds better. I had found away to be my best self, at least for those few moments. Afterwards my teacher was talking it over with me, talking about what I’d done and why it is was good, but I was frustrated. “Yes, yes, I know what I did,” I said with typical impatience, “but I don’t know how to do it all the time! How do I figure out how to do it all the time?” He smiled and I knew he wouldn’t answer my question because he couldn’t possibly. Instead he said, simply, “Well Stephanie, you have to have something interesting to do with your life.”
I try to remember that now when I find myself falling into the new beginning trap, imagining I can undo and redo myself in one fell swoop. I try to remember that sometimes I will do good, sometimes I will be a success, sometimes I will get it all right. I try to remember it’s okay that I don’t know how to do it all the time, and that there will never be a moment or a morning or a year when I crack the code and never err again, never struggle or feel like a failure. I know that I’ll never be done figuring it out. And I try to stay content with the idea that that’s okay, that’s just the deal, because I know my teacher was right -- I have to have something interesting to do with my life.