april: a little less sad, a little less lonely, a little more myself

okay so i am fully writing this “april recap essay” on june 5. time is fake! capitalism uses clocks to control us! or something. 

april did not, how do you say, slow down. i continued to feel like i was treading water most of the time. (june 5 rach still feels that way but that’s for the june essay hitting email inboxes everywhere in november. but only if u subscribe.) i did have more fun though, so that’s something.

i think i learned a lot about saying no to things that won’t serve me. not to sound like a self-help podcast but sometimes i overthink an opportunity because i’ll sort of reverse-catastrophize in the vein of “what if this local production of insert-oscar-wilde-play is my ticket to fame and fortune.” babe it’s probably not. you’re allowed to be a person and have a life and not commit three nights a week to rehearsing a play that could probably stay unproduced for the rest of time and the world would somehow find a way to keep on spinning. we get it, being earnest is very important. 

honestly sitting down to write this 36-day overdue essay is the first time i’ve felt grounded in 2023. 

i was talking to my therapist a while ago. in therapy. and she said how when i talk about comedy there’s a light in me but when i talk about acting there’s a weight. acting stresses me out i think. maybe because i don’t know if i‘m actually any good at it. (@castingdirectors i’m actually soooooo good at acting i promise this essay is actually just a piece of sophisticated performance art.)

i really love comedy. making people laugh seems like the purist possible human experience. april saw the beginning of my weekly open mic. try as we might, comedy is still a boys’ club.  shocking, i know. and it’s boring and banal and not interesting to say because it’s been said. again. and again. and again. but it’s still that way. if you can’t beat em, join em, right? but what if i don’t to do that either? come to my open mic though.

sometimes i don’t know if i’m a happy person pretending to be sad or a sad person pretending to be happy. 

i’m guilty of seeing signs that aren’t there. like sometimes i’ll walk by a bar where i went on a date with a boy i really liked once and i’ll tell myself it’s a sign i should reach out. what’s the harm in a “i hope you’re well”-text. well the harm is reopening a wound that’s just starting to heal. the harm is an impersonal “thanks, you too!” text back. the harm is ambivalence. and that bar is on my regular walk home.  

all signs are is confirmation bias. all anything is, really. manifestation or lucky girl syndrome or anything of the related terms the tiktok girlies are using to live laugh love their ways to brand deals and better lives. manifestation isn’t like oh i thought really hard about my dreams and so they happened. it’s oh maybe i’m worthy of my dreams coming true and so i will exist and make actions in a way that tangibly moves me toward them and move me from thinking what if things go wrong to what if they go right. 

i did a few comedy shows this months i was really excited about. i didn’t get them by accident. i got them because i decided, subconsciously maybe, that i am good enough and funny enough and just am enough. sorry very pinterest-affirmations core of me. listen, one day the cliches click and it’s not by accident. it’s because you worked and prepared and here it is. and maybe it feels like it’s on a silver platter because you’ve repressed the blood and the sweat and the tears and the sleepless nights and the intrusive thoughts of what the fuck am i doing. i know i have. one time a bit ago i asked my childhood best friend about how i was in college and she was like oh rachel you were so depressed and i was like what??? no way! crazy, huh.

you know those people you’re meant to know? my friend goodness is one of those. we weren’t even that close when we first met. we just vaguely knew each other in our freshman year dorm as we were the two gregarious canadians. over time he became a confidante and a cheerleader and just one of the best people i know. he vibrates with an intensity and a thoughtfulness and a sense of humour i dream of having. it’s funny, those people in your life. one day goodness and i were talking about where else we had gotten into university. our parallel lives if we hadn’t gone to school in new york. we discovered we’d both been accepted to the same residential college at the university of toronto. i like to think the fact that in two distinct timelines we were destined to meet means something. i mean we both ended up back in canada anyway. but in a parallel universe we still know each other. but maybe that’s just my confirmation bias talking. 

i’ve have a number of friends that felt like meant-to-be-friendships. it’s interesting the people we stay in touch with versus the ones we don’t. i had best friends who lasted two years. but i don’t think that means we weren’t best friends. i don’t know what it means. but i know for those two years we were main characters in each other’s sitcoms and now we are the fan-fave characters who gotten written off. at least they are to me. 

whereas goodness and i have always just been recurring in each other’s lives. but sometimes that subtle yet strong heartbeat is more powerful than the early butterflies of friendship infatuation. i guess it’s like love in that way. 

i’ve been in a rush a lot lately and i can feel it in my body. guess she really is keeping the score. my therapist told me to do daily body scans which i’ve neglected to do because i’ve been in such a rush. life is a series of ironies. 

sometimes i try to make my life make sense. i try to moralize my monthly essays. i try to make sense of my life. so this month i’m trying to not do that. i’m writing the fragmented thoughts i jotted down in my notes app over a month ago. because i’ve been busy rushing from buses to trains back to buses. what does it mean to spend so much of your life in the in-between spaces. it’s sort of funny, how much time i spend on transit when my mom made a career out of the in-betweens as a flight attendant. at the airport, but never for long. on an airplane, but just to get people where they’re going. in a foreign land, but just for a night or two.

i saw two plays this month that reinvigorated me. i want to do more things that do that. i think all i really want to do in life is do things that make me feel like myself. rooted and grounded and authentic. sometimes i’ll be in a situation where i am talking to someone and the words coming out of my mouth don’t sound like my own. i feel like i am watching myself in slow motion like a train crash of me trying to perform a more tolerable version of myself but instead what comes out is alien and forced and bad. i want to avoid situations like that. it sounds so simple in theory. but even kim cattrall reneged on her refusal to be involved in the sex and the city reboot. we all make compromises. but i don’t want to compromise myself. when i walked out of those two plays i was like oh right. that’s why i wanted to do any of this in the first place. i vote for more experiences like that in the months and years and life to come.

okay that’s it see u whenever i write my already overdue may one of these.

love u xo,

rach