Loving Life In All Its Forms: My Introduction

Excited to be here! I've been writing on Medium for some time now, and while I love so many things about the platform and have met many amazing writers—some I'd consider friends—there's also many things that aren't so cool. Just take a look at the home page feed to see what I mean.

Then @dmwh told me about this community. Many things appealed to me, especially the transparency (something that's painfully lacking at Medium, despite the many writers claiming they've found some secret for gaming the algorithm). So I thought, why not give it a shot?

For a non-techie like myself, getting started on this platform was a bit excruciating, but I plugged through, and here I am!

As I mentioned, I do write for other platforms, so if some of my writing appears familiar, I didn't plagiarize, I swear! (haha, I'm having flashbacks to my days as an English teacher, when students would copy and paste entire paragraphs of their essays from SparkNotes).

But I also want to write stuff exclusively for this community that I feel will resonate. And let's be real—I'm all for transparency, which is why I'd always written under my real name.

But I also realized I was still censoring myself (despite my vow not to), knowing that my parents, clients, future clients, and the Medium woke police could all be potentially reading my work.

So for me, writing on this platform will be kind of like this theater class I took in college where we did acting exercises wearing masks (no, not those masks). Sometimes the cloak of anonymity allows you to more freely express yourself.

That cloak of anonymity was why, at the first opportunity, I moved from my tiny hometown in Texas to the city of Los Angeles—so I could reinvent myself.

It took a few years, but eventually I shed my identity of awkward bookworm as I discovered psychedelics and underground dance parties (well, I was still kind of awkward, but at least I learned how to have fun!). I also discovered how dance can be a powerful tool for therapy, meditation, and manifestation, which I still use to this day!

Eventually I grew tired of the party lifestyle and its diminishing returns. But leaving the scene was kind of like when I finished school, ending my dream of becoming a career student. Everything felt stagnant and empty.

Then I discovered spirituality. Like many on the spiritual journey, I started with the main objective of trying to fix all the things I didn't like about myself and my life. Gradually I realized that no, it's about integrating everything that makes you feel alive, that lights your soul on fire, so every day feels awesome and inspiring and even if it was a disastrous day, at least it was disastrous in a fascinating way, like a scene from a movie that you can't take your eyes away from and you're like, "WTF, did that really just happen?"

My writing, like my life, is a bit all over the place. I started with experimental short fiction. Head Harvest, the novel I'm currently working on, has slightly more mainstream appeal (I hope so, anyway, as I'd like to actually make a buck or two) and is largely inspired by a conspiracy rabbit hole I went down along with occult movies and shows like The Craft and The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina.

Here's a picture from a promo shoot I did for the book as my alter ego, Clarice Calloway.

One quality that all my fiction shares, though, is multiple narrators. I must admit I stole this from Robert Coover, my absolute biggest inspiration of all time. If you haven't read his story The Babysitter, you must!

His brand of meta fiction was like nothing else I'd read—super out there but also breezy and entertaining and funny, even when he was writing about some seriously dark shit.

And that's something I remind myself when writing articles, which largely relate to life lessons and personal growth, because the spiritual community takes itself so goddamn seriously. And honestly, so did I, for years. I still catch myself sometimes.

I never delete anything after I publish it, but a recent headline I wrote made me cringe so much—it was so emo—that I actually wrote a whole article about it.

That's life, right? Nothing's set in stone, and we can always course correct. Just because you went off Keto and ate a pint of ice cream one night doesn't mean you're doomed for life.

So currently, I see blogging as a way to take moments that can be seen as banal, humiliating, or painful and find the humor and inspiration in them. Like alchemy.

In fact, my journey to my current home in the jungles of Oaxaca was much like the title of the great Peter Cameron YA novel, Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You. But that's a story for another day.

I can't wait to connect!