Intro.

An Introduction

It’s more vulnerable for me to share about this blog than it is for me to share the feelings, stories, and ideas that will make up this blog. I’ve spent the last year mourning, celebrating, shedding, finding old normals and losing old ones, moving back to my childhood home from LA, dancing, crying, breathing, praying, hoping, processing, forgetting, remembering, living, sleeping, trying…. I could go on, so I will. 

It’s not that this last year has brought about much change, it just feels like it has. But in fact, it’s quite the opposite. I’ve gone back to where I’ve spent most of my life. I am many people, but for the last year I’ve really only been who I am in my family. Instead of moving in a direction, it’s kept me still. Instead of furthering my goals, it’s made me sink deeper into them. Instead of painting a picture of my life, I’ve just painted a picture. It’s been still, it’s been present, it’s been hard.

I miss the subtlety and nuance of human interaction. I miss little glances across a room at a party, and how many different kinds of hugs there are. I miss holding on extra long. 

I have alternated between needing productivity highs to feel a semblance of myself and sleeping in as long as I can to make the days as short as possible. 

I decline calls from my best friends because I don’t want to talk about myself and don’t know how to listen any longer. My bandwidth for conversation is at an all-time low. I saw family I hadn’t seen for the first time in 9 months and had to take a break to cry in the bathroom because I felt so overstimulated. It doesn’t make sense. How can I be so lonesome for connection, and so unavailable to it? How can I miss my friends and family, and feel exhausted at the thought of being in a room with people again? How can I not know how to have what I’ve spent so much time missing? 

I am not altruistic. I am not being positive. As a matter of fact, I have so much optimism fatigue that I want to throw up when I try to think of one more thing in my life I can paint a silver lining around. The fact is, sometimes the wrong border distracts from the picture. And optimism is not the border that makes the chaos of my life beautiful right now. I say “chaos”, but I should really say “slowness.” 

The slowness of my life does not need an extravagant frame. It needs a sturdy, rich, perhaps cherry oak one, dinged up and crooked, broken once then fixed, painted, then refinished. My life just needs a border that helps the picture be the focus: my life is not my perspective on my life, my life is the picture itself. It has to be. My life is bigger than how I am able to see it right now. My life is bigger than the person I am able to exist as right now. But, I am still this person. I am still in this moment. I am still here, and I am still struggling, and I will again. 

My heart feels heavy for the weight of this world and for the weight of my world. There are beautiful things everywhere, but they are not the silver lining. They are just beautiful things. 

One fear I’ve held throughout this pandemic is that the world would start opening up before I was ready for it to. We’ve all just spent a year figuring out how to be as alone as possible, and now we’re expected to know how to want all the rest back. I’ve been so scared of the smallest things and lay in bed frequently thinking about all the ways I’ve messed up, done wrong, let people down, been embarrassed, embarrassed others, been someone I didn’t like, or been someone I liked but wasn’t.

My brain has made a room, or really a whole house, or maybe actually a whole town inside my head for these thoughts to live in. I’ve had more time to sink into them because I’ve had more space to, and fewer people helping pull me out.

In some ways, I am the most insecure I’ve ever been. But in others, that’s how I know I’m the most sure, too. Confidence doesn’t happen when you have every reason to be confident. Confidence happens when you have every reason not to be. Confidence happens when you do a five-minute stand-up set and don’t get one laugh, but you show up again the next night to try it again. Confidence is what happens when you choose to believe in yourself when you don’t quite know how to yet.

I used to think that being confident meant you were able to do everything you wanted because you weren’t plagued by the self-judgment and doubt that gets in the way of simply being yourself. But, I think my definition of confidence has expanded. I think confidence is simply trusting myself, no matter the result. I don’t think confidence is as loud as we’re told it should be. I think it is often a beautiful, quiet belief. 

Maybe you try stand-up 15 times with no laughs, but confidence isn’t doing stand-up, well. Confidence is just doing it at all. 

I’ve wanted to start a blog for as long as I can remember, or at least as long as my older brother Joseph has had one. I tried, once or twice, and never kept up. But if there’s one thing I’ve done right this past year, it’s that I’ve trusted myself. I’ve trusted my timeline. I’ve been able to practice confidence when it’s been the hardest to find. I’m here now because I’ve let myself be somewhere else for a long time. 

So, here we go. 

All my love, 

Lanessa Long

Editor in Chief, Spoiler

Photograph by Joseph Ivan Long