My Stupid Boring Life

The truest thing about my life right now is that everything is moving, and I'm still standing.

And I think that manages to simultaneously be a little boring and a little interesting.

Nothing in my life is static. My location, my relationships, my work, my creativity. Everything is in flux, and it’s been that way, mostly intentionally, for a long time.

I still tell everyone and anyone who will listen that my dog died while somehow making it sound like she abandoned me. Like she had control over the tiny brain tumour that grew and grew until it rendered her incapacitated. Like we didn’t have to sit in an emergency room and say goodbye while the wind rattled the door to our exam room as though people were trying to get to her and take her away.

And then they did.

One moment I find myself at a real race track, with the sound of cars roaring just feet away, being ushered in and out of trailers, learning everything I can. The next I’m in a field with so many wild rabbits, being photographed, the sun setting while I fight off mosquitoes. The next I’m downtown in an emergency room, petting a dog who has just passed away and comforting the guardian who watched the dog slip out the front door and into traffic.

But I’m supposed to be waking up in London right now and boarding a plane to Barcelona, and I am not.

Instead, I’m in Canada.

My therapist would probably tell me the plane is the metaphor.

This is why she has a job and I have so many unused airline points.

I live with a life-threatening illness that’s a lot less manageable than I’d like to admit, and a lot less manageable than people like to recognize, because I seem fine. On the days I’m not fine, I isolate. I cancel flights. I disappear until I can convincingly be myself again.

“When are you back in LA?”

I don’t know.

I am untethered.

I say this as though I am a boat. I am not a boat. Boats at least have designated places to return to.

There is allegedly earthquake weather, and suspicious fires seem to pop up every day in ways that make me want to put on a tinfoil hat. I wake up to smoke from faraway forest fires that darkens the day in a way I wish never to experience again. I wake up again to sinkholes from broken water mains flooding my neighbourhood in Los Angeles.

Apparently you cannot out-travel climate change.

I have tried.

Hyper-independent. Evolving. I don’t have everything figured out. No one is asking me to, which is perhaps the strangest part. People often ask me to figure things out for them, and I usually can. But when it comes to my own life, I can’t see the forest for the trees. The painting from the frame.

So I just do what I know and learn what I’m inspired to.

Everything is changing.

I am changing.

And somehow, which feels almost suspicious, that I still feel my life is a little stupid and boring but it’s mine.