march madness (but less basketball, more meltdowns) sponsored by public transit: title of ep
A love-hate letter to the bus, the rain, and being 26
context is everything. i write to you now from april 19th. more than halfway into the month (okay now editing this on april 26…four days before the end of the month, listen i have a life) and i have yet to recap march as planned. no one noticed but me. today i am feeling anxious and inspired. the two often go hand in hand in my little body. a pit in my stomach of ohmygodthepossibilitiesareendlessicoulddoanythingohmygodwaitfuckicoulddoanythingthat’stoomanythingstochoosefromimgoingtoscrollthroughtiktokinsteadandthencomeupforairinthreehoursfeelingterribleaboutmyselfforwastingtime. or something.
…and exhale.
i think i hallucinated the last month of my life.
when does the quarter-life crisis lose the quarter qualifier?
not to sound like every other 20-something who grew up navel-gazing on the internet. but to sound exactly like one. which is part of the crisis. (not to mention when the quarter-life crisis becomes a third-life one but let’s not get into the mortality conversation just yet. that’s fodder for shitstorm proof’s summer edition.)
i feel behind. i’m 26. that’s not old. it’s not, i know that. but i want to stay young forever. i’m like peter pan. well really i’m more like tinkerbell because i usually wear sparkles and my blonde hair is usually in a bun atop my head and if i don’t get attention i’ll die.
despite this newsletter’s title, this month (pretend this is coming at the end of march like it was supposed to before i cried on the bus one too many nights) i proved vulnerable to the storm.
over the course of the month (again, we are time traveling here) i came to resent everything and everyone — even when they were making very reasonable requests. and this ultimately had nothing to do with them (okay maybe sometimes) and everything to do with me feeling guilty for not being able to show up fully in any given space because i was so overcommitted. never half ass two things (or three, or four, or 18), whole ass one, etc. etc. i know. but sometimes i fancy myself superwoman or wonder woman or something. idk, listen, i’m a spiderman girl but gwen dies in that. and i grew up being compared to kirsten dunst which made me resent mary jane.
note to self: add “don’t compete with other women; celebrate them” to next month’s to-do list.
i was raised by a fiercely independent (sometimes to a fault) woman to be the same. and when you’re young your parents are flawless. they are god. and when one of your parents shows their human fallibility at a young age by killing themselves, the other parent assumes the godly parental duty of both. i’ve always modelled myself after my mom. prod forward. don’t ask for help. i am an independent island, hear me roar. but life isn’t designed to be lived in the vacuum of the self. they say hell is other people. i think hell is being alone. or maybe it’s some combination of both and we all need to live less in absolutes. jesus i sound like a chapter from some erving goffman book they assign in a freshman year performance studies class. she says, scoffing at what pretentious 18-year-old would take such a class.
whatever.
i don’t even know what i’m trying to say. but it’s lonely on the bus late at night. and i’m a regular. the bus is like the opposite of the bar in cheers. nobody knows your name and they’re not really thrilled you’re here but you vaguely recognize their face from the 20 times this month you’ve both been on the 11:23 bus. the other nights you were on the 12:16. these timestamps have been engrained in you by heart since you were 19. they haven’t changed a minute.
the part of vancouver i know the least well is the part i spent the most time in growing up. i visited my dad a lot at ubc when i was little. in the psych ward. i’ve been using a bit about that in my stand up recently but somewhere between the set up and the punchline of his death i am occasionally reminded of its real weight. the real memories of visiting my dad “in the hospital” as i would tell ambiguously tell people growing up.
i had a dream the other night about a boy i knew once.
a boy i knew once.
that’s generous. i never really knew him at all. ‘cause what does it really mean to know a person? there’s a version of knowing a person’s day-to-day life and a version of knowing a person’s soul. i want to know both. but you can’t have it all. even my best friend and i who used to facetime every day keep missing each other lately. the reality of adulthood and his 9-5 to my 5-midnight actor grind has reared its ugly head. i don’t want to be another case of friends growing apart due to time and circumstance. that’s the saddest kind of growing apart. when there’s no big blow up. the love is still there. life just gets in the way. even though friends are what make life good in the first place.
i write in cliches. but that’s okay.
polysyndeton is my favourite rhetorical device.
it’s when you intentionally use conjunction to make a point. or to make something some more poetic. for me it’s usually a little bit of both.
i want my life to sound like alexandra patsavas soundtracked it and john williams wrote the score and robert yeoman did the cinematography and greta gerwig wrote and directed it and timothee chalamet is playing my love interest except maybe not because he was a dick in lady bird but then given my romantic track record that’s exactly on brand.
anyway.
i listen to a lot of hockey podcasts and often discussion is had of hockey history as it is a sport richly steeped in tradition. but as jeff marek so aptly put “tradition is just peer pressure from dead people.” and that same logic could go a long way. the second amendment for example. the royal family for another. and why do we revere the dead? we are literally all going to die. there’s no nobility in mortality. just inevitability.
something i realized this month is i don’t have to be the martyr of my own life. i don’t have to romanticize public transit every day just to remind people that life is good even when it’s not. sometimes transit is beautiful and sometimes it’s a pain. sometimes being a woman taking the bus full of weird men at midnight every night in the pouring rain sucks. having to turn off my hockey podcasts and walk home in silence because someone might be following me, sucks.
one time in march in the throes of overextending myself i thought a man was following me home. and maybe it was my ancillary anxiety about everything else in my life but sometimes you have to listen to your gut. it was after a show i was in one night and i was standing on the skytrain platform and a man congratulated me on the show. i was caught off guard and was adequately polite as girls have to be but something didn’t feel right. i got on a different door than him and proceeded on my nightly transit journey home. i then saw him waiting for the same bus as me. i looked up ubers home but how fucking dumb is that? that i have to pay $20 extra to get home on top of my fucking monthly compass pass because i’m scared of being maybe killed on some random march night. i got on the bus anyway in a heap of feminism and adrenaline and i almost asked the bus driver to stop where there was no official stop so i could get off but he too was a man and i felt girlish and stupid. i texted my mom who was in another country and couldn’t really do much to help and i felt myself crying on the bus and i felt weak and i turned away from where i could feel the man sitting because i didn’t want my tears signalling vulnerability to this person who in all likelihood just happened to live on the same bus line as me. but still. i wanted to be superwoman. i wanted to be invincible. instead i had to ask for help.
a family friend ended up picking me up at my bus stop and driving me home so i didn’t have to walk without my hockey podcast playing.
it felt like the culmination of my ruminations over a month spent in isolation despite being constantly around people but never really present. hustling from rehearsal to shows to work and back again without a moment to breathe and all of a sudden i had to be so glaringly present but not in a good way. not in the way acting teachers love to talk about being present. not in the “how did the scene go” “i don’t know, i wasn’t there.” kind of way. all i could do was breathe and remember my humanity and troubleshoot the immediate moment i was in.
there’s some greater point about community and caring for your neighbour and not all being so fucking self-centered all the time. (she says in her monthly newsletter.) but it’s also about how the world is scary sometimes. even when you’re an optimist who skips around doing heel clicks and wearing sparkles and chasing sunsets all the time. even when you fancy yourself a superhero whose chosen mode of transportation is the bus and whose spandex leotard is baggy jean jackets and checkered vans.
because some days you go to the beach to watch the sunset and it’s overcast and the grey slowly fades to black and your hands are red and numb from this attempt at searching for something and other days you accidentally catch the purples and oranges in the sky between two skyscrapers when you were on the way somewhere else but the sky demanded your attention instead.
and now i have to recap april in like four days. well i don’t have to. i want to. i get to.
better late than never.
love u.
xo,
rach
That was beautiful. Painful in the right ways and funny in all the rest.