The Wicked Pattern

The first time I fell in love I was about 6. I went to visit my aunt in L.A. one summer, and she had a friend, and that friend had kids, and one of those kids was my age, and that kid who was my age was a boy, and that boy was the most beautiful perfect thing I had ever seen in my short life, and within instants I knew he would be my husband.

His name was Jamie.

Since the only training I had been given in regards to love came from disney movies, I was certain that the feeling would be mutual and that we would kiss and live happily ever after. I don't remember how long we played for or what games we even played before I declared my undying love to him. I proceeded to close my eyes like they did in the movies and wait for him to kiss me. Well, no such thing happened. Instead, he ran like the wind. I obviously had no idea what was happening, so I tried following him around for a while, but he just kept running away from me. Eventually he went away for good, my summer vacation ended, I went back home to Brazil, and for the next three years littered every single paper I could find with Larissa loves Jamie encompassed by red hearts.

Since that was my first experience with love, it became my definition of love. And once we define how we believe something to be, it tends to happen just that way, over and over again, until many years later we find that we're in therapy wondering, over and over again, why we keep declaring our love to men who then proceed to run away, and why we then obsess over it for the next three years. Fascinating, isn't it. One would think we'd catch on to it sooner- I mean, really, how many times do we have to do something before we realize it's a destructive pattern and we're bringing it on ourselves???

So here I am, 18 years after Little Jamie, and if we do the math (I literally just got out a calculator to do the math), it would mean I went through this 6 more times. Well, guess what. I made a list (yes, I did), and there were 6 post-Jamie's in the past 18 years. Not as neatly, some didn't take up three years of my life (thank god), and I was a normal high-schooler who had a new crush every week and dated guys I didn't like and all that, but in the end, the pattern of declaring my love (or what I understood to be love at any given time) to a boy/man, watching him run away from me, and holding on to him for much-longer-than-would-be-understandable-afterwards repeated itself exactly 6 times in 18 years.

Now, I'm pretty obsessed with myself and my life. I've kept diaries since before I could spell the word diary. I write down everything I do, feel, see, hear, and think. I love therapy. I love anything called self-help. I'm an actress. And look, I started a blog, which is basically a structured diary for the public with an added analysis of whatever I write about. I even called it "LARISSA THINKS A LOT." You get the idea.

And yet. Somehow, I have only realized all of this right now. All these years, instead of asking myself, "Why am I wasting my time with someone who doesn't want my love?" and "Why am I not the one who runs away when he doesn't return my love," I always, repeatedly, asked myself, "Why doesn't he love me?" and, worse even, "What can I change about me so that he will love me?"

It feels really sad and pathetic to look back on all the time and love I wasted on people who didn't want it. But it also feels good to "catch it". It always feels pretty good to catch a pattern, actually. Catching it means I'm conscious of it, and being conscious of it means I now have a choice about it. I may not have a choice over who I love, or even how their rejection affects me, but I do see that I may have a choice over how I go about dealing with the situation.

So Jamie and his clan didn't want me and I tried and tried and tried to win their hearts anyway. Okay. Clearly, that didn't work out too well. And it took me 18 years to learn from the same mistake. At least I'm 24, not 74. I actually have time to do something about it.

I don't have a nice conclusion for this post, yet, since it's a new discovery and all, but I do hope that in the future I can blog about this again, and it may include some experiences with mutual, respectful love. And I can say this for now: I'm kicking this wicked little pattern out, and my heart is really excited about the possibility of letting someone in who can return its devotion, and then letting go of those who can't.

How Did That Happen?

Eleven years ago, on April 20th, 1999, I was a regular 8th grader, going about my business as usual, hopping from class to class, half-daydreaming, half-present. I expected nothing from that day, as I expected nothing from any day at school. I was certainly not prepared for the announcement I would hear at my algebra class right before lunch. A news report had just been distributed to all the teachers at my school, a news report so dreadful it paralyzed my otherwise perfectly-in-control-math-geek teacher. She stood before our class, not knowing how to deliver the news. We, even at 13, instinctively knew something was wrong. We sat in silence and waited. Finally, she started saying, "It seems like there was a mass..." and her voice started breaking. She took a deep breath and then started again, "There was a massacre at a high school in Colorado today. It looks like some students got some guns and... " Her voice trailed off again as her eyes got watery. The class was stunned into silence. We sat there and said nothing for a while. Then we started asking questions. We wanted to know everything. And once all the facts were given to us, we sat in silence again.

We were silent for days.

For some reason, it hit me really hard. I watched and read every news coverage on the story. The images and stories imprinted themselves in my heart. I had no connection to any of those kids or to that high school in Littleton, Colorado- I had never even been to Colorado- but I was deeply disturbed and forever changed by that tragedy. I searched- I am still searching- for the answer to the most-asked question, "How did that happen?" How did those young boys, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, with their whole lives ahead of them, get to the point of such despair that they decided to buy guns, walk into school with them one day, and shoot their classmates, then themselves. Twelve students and one teacher were killed, and many were injured permanently. I wanted to know who they were, I wanted to know how they had been raised, I wanted to know more about the culture they had grown up in and what their high-school experiences had been like. I wanted to know everything. I wanted to understand.

I sought to understand what I, or anyone else, could never really understand. But there was something about them that I did understand, and that I would grow to understand even more deeply as I had my own high-school experiences. I had good parents, I had a great relationship with my brother, I had friends, I went to a high school that provided counseling and support, and I had my love for theatre to get me through any rough teenage times. But I also understood what it was like to feel like you did not belong. I knew what it was like to know you would never be the most popular person in your high-school, not even close, and to have to pretend, every day, that you didn't care. I had friends, close good dear friends, but I knew what it was like to secretly wish I had more friends, which would mean that more people liked me. I knew what it was like to feel invisible, at home and at school, and to never feel like what was important to me was important to anyone in charge. I knew what it was like to be terribly, dreadfully, unbearably lonely. And I could imagine magnifying those circumstances: never feeling like I could talk to my own parents, living in a town where nothing ever happened, where maybe I wasn't even invited to uneventful basement parties, going to a school where there were no subjects that interested me in any capacity, having only one friend- and I'm sure the list could go on. And although I can't understand the boys murdering their classmates and then killing themselves, I can start to understand their need for a violent gesture, their need to be seen, and their deep, desperate need to get out of their lives.

I am still obsessed with the Columbine shootings. I can't even write about it right now without shaking. I can't do much about it, I can't even do much about understanding it and answering the question "How did that happen?". But I can remember it. And I do. Eleven years have gone by and most people don't think about it anymore. April 20th comes and goes. Columbine high-school was closed today, and a few articles were written. Some students there still think about it, still wonder, still go to school with ghosts. And the families of the murdered teenagers still remember this day when they lost a piece of themselves. I can't imagine what Eric and Dylan's parents do on this day, what they do with their lives, how they have managed to get on.

And I, who never had any connection to anyone at Columbine, spend my day thinking about it. Not only thinking about the tragedy and mourning the losses, but also still wondering what propelled it. Wondering who Eric and Dylan really were. Wondering if it really could have been prevented by simply making guns less available, or some other explanation that was thrown at us by the media. Wondering who's to blame. Wondering if we've learned from it. And lastly, wondering, perhaps forever and to no avail, how it happened.

April 20th, 2010. Columbine, your victims are remembered.

image from http://www.freewebs.com/alifetimeofwords/Columbine%20High%20Remember.jpg

The Long Skirt

I'm one of those people who can't throw anything away. I keep things I most definitely don't need, forever. It drives my mother crazy and drastically limits my closet space. The thing is, I don't enjoy buying new things, so most of the things I have were given to me, and therefore I have some sort of attachment to them. And, as an actress, I just like to keep things so that I can refer to them when I need material for my work.

One of those things is a long green skirt. It's made of a thin cotton and it wraps around my waist and ruffles just slightly in the bottom. It's very poetic and hippie-ish and old-fashioned. It's 7 years old now, and faded and hard to wear, but I still have it. I got it when I was 17, in Spain, on my first back-packing trip through Europe with my friends Marina and Gabi. I had just graduated high-school and, for the most part, wore whatever fashion magazines told me to (see blog post The Doctrine of Vanity on January 16th, 2010, for more on that). My friend Marina had been going through her free-spirited phase for a while now, so this wasn't her first long skirt or "hippie" item, but it was mine. I don't remember why I decided to try it on, but I do remember the feeling I had when I wrapped that delicate cloth around me. I had never really worn anything like that before. There was nothing gripping at my stomach, tucking my tummy in, or shaping my butt, or grabbing at my crotch, or restricting my knee joint. I instantly felt supremely feminine- and not in a mini-skirt-worn-for guys-to-look-at-my-legs kind of way, but rather a feeling-womanly-for-me-and-only-me kind of way, which was extremely empowering and new.

Wearing something for my own pleasure, without worrying about what guys, or even girls, would think? I seriously couldn't remember if I had ever known what that was like.

The skirt was slightly overpriced (80 euros for a piece of green cloth that wraps around you!), but I bought it without hesitation. It became my absolutely favorite thing to wear. And I wore it so much. When I got back from Europe, I wore it because it reminded me of the feeling of freedom and independence that I had gotten to know and love during that trip. Then, when I went to Sarah Lawrence, I wore it on my first day of school. I wore it the first time I went to central park by myself on that first fall away from home. I wore it to my first Women's Studies class. I wore it to my first rehearsal of The Vagina Monologues. I wore it, essentially, all through college, and it became part of my memory of special times. It was the first of many long skirts I would own in college. It became my signature look: long flowy skirt, flip flops or sandals, no bras, long hair dyed red at the tips, and ray-ban sunglasses. I guess I thought I was in the 1970's, but all of us at Sarah Lawrence did, so it was okay.

And then, when I graduated from Sarah Lawrence, I put all my long skirts away in a bag. I was no longer living in the woods/suburbs with 800 powerful, free-spirited women, I was going back to city-life, and my skirt was no longer appropriate. The freedom and openness I felt when wearing it weren't exactly safe for a big city. I learned that when you have an open and sensitive heart, you have to be really careful in urban cities- you have to protect yourself. If you're too vulnerable, you might get hurt. And I wanted to be taken seriously as an adult now, so I had to dress like one. It was time to go back to pants and shorter skirts that made me feel integrated, in control, and slightly closed off from myself- which was my way of becoming an adult now living in New York. My skirts went off to some mysterious corner of my closet and I transitioned into city clothes fairly seamlessly.

I tried to wear one of my long skirts again one day, not long ago, and immediately felt the relief of having all that space and freedom in my body. As soon as I had that much space, I wanted more space. I wanted to put on shoes that didn't restrict my feet or the space between my toes, I wanted to wear a shirt with gentle built-in support so I didn't have a bra rigidly holding my breasts into place, and I wanted to let my hair out of it's controlled pony-tail. But that would have been too much. I wore the skirt, but put on tights and boots and a blazer and kept my hair up. I went out in the city and felt normal. This was a manageable way to wear my skirt. But before I could get to happy, the skirt let me know it didn't want to be worn anymore. It kept coming undone and falling apart on my slippery tights. New York City wind kept messing it up and making it fly open. I was having a hard time walking at my usual city pace. It just didn't fit. And it wasn't really me anymore. It was, but it wasn't. I had the feeling that it might still be me, but in a different setting, some day. I went home, took it off, and put it back in the bag.

But I won't get rid of them, especially my long green one. Not even if my mom offered me a Prada bag in exchange for it. I can't let go of it. And I like having it around, looking at it sometimes, letting it remind me of womanhood, power, strength, independence, and freedom. It makes me happy and I worship that.

I know that it was a big deal when women started wearing pants. They are practical, after all, and they signified a huge leap for women's independence and equal rights. I know there's power in that too. And there's power in mini-skirts as well, for a woman's flirtatious sensuality can be really beautiful and empowering. But for me, nothing feels quite as unbinding and holy as a long skirt, especially if made with a light fabric and not at all gripping in the waist. I love the musicality of it, the sweetness and inviting yet mature femininity of it.

And there's hope yet that I'll come back to my long skirts. When I meditate and envision my entelechy- my realized potential, my future self in ideal circumstances- she is very happy and free. She lives somewhere near nature, where it's safe and spacious. Her inner peace and warm heart are tangible. She is very connected to her womanhood and femininity. And she is always, to my complete delight, wearing a long skirt.

Pictures of me at Sarah Lawrence, 2003-2006, with my long skirts...

Day Off from My Brain/ The Hang-Over

Today I woke up and felt old. Well, let's be clear about the facts- I was hung over, extremely hung over, from a really fun night out with friends, where I drank more than I'm used to drinking. So I woke up today, head exploding and stomach turning, and as I nursed my evil hang-over, I thought, "Golly moses, I used to drink much more in college, and then get up and go to class at 9am looking like a super-model. Right now I can't imagine leaving my bed before 4pm and even then I'll still look like a drowned rat. I think this means I'm getting old."

So I went through the rituals of dealing with hang-overs: drank a gallon of water, took four tylenols, took a 20 minute shower, stuck my head in the freezer, had a fried chicken sandwich, and drank a cup of coffee the size of my head, the whole time thinking, "I will never drink again. Until I forget why I said that."

And as the day went on and I could literally think of nothing but how miserable I felt, things that I care about and think of every day became completely unimportant due to my inability to do them. I didn't avoid carbohydrates, I didn't go to the gym, I didn't go to yoga, I didn't meditate, I didn't do my crossword puzzle, I didn't read a single thing (didn't even want to read subtitles on a foreign movie), I didn't take out the trash, I didn't fold the clothes I wore the previous day, I didn't make my bed, I didn't look in the mirror and tell myself that I am beautiful and powerful, I didn't try to not think of any ex's (or to not think any negative thoughts in general, for that matter), I didn't de-clutter my inbox, I didn't check the mail, I didn't write in my journal, and I didn't even comb my hair. I probably wouldn't have even brushed my teeth if the action weren't so automatic for me. All these things that I "have to do" every day because they essentially make me feel better about myself, my space, and my life were completely ignored today. It's like I got a day off from putting in any effort towards expanding my happiness and well-being. All I wanted was to replace my brain with ice. And you know what? It was kind of a relief.

As it turns out, I put a lot of my energy, every day, into "feeling good". Into keeping the rhythm of my life the way I think I want it. Into making myself and my home look good and welcoming. I didn't even realize that it was all actually quite draining, and getting a day off from all of it could feel like such a relief.

Usually when I'm in some kind of pain I try to breathe through it, feel it but not get overwhelmed by it, not get sucked into negative thoughts and actions, and find a way to see some light in every situation. But when it's as overpowering as my hang-over was today, it just takes too much effort to try to see the good in it and feel better. I just wanted to hang out with how bad I felt and lay there feeling sorry for myself. And that's what I did.

I found that it was actually very relaxing to just feel like crap and not try to change a damn thing about it. By the end of the day, I feel like I got a break from my own brain, and every one needs that sometimes. My brain, my body, and I work so hard to keep me balanced and happy, it actually seems a little bit unnatural now that I can contrast it to a day of the complete opposite. Maybe I don't need to work so hard on myself. Maybe I can give myself a break, not monitor every thought and action, every day.

Positive energy is a powerful thing, and I'm starting to suspect it can do a lot of the work on its own- it doesn't need me to try so hard all the time to turn everything into something good. Even this blog post is the perfect example. I started writing it thinking, I'm not gonna try to put a positive or conclusive spin on anything, it's my day off from my brain, I can just write about how miserable my day was and how different it felt from every other day. And now, as I finish writing it, it turned out to have a positive and conclusive feel to it anyway. I think it's because positive energy, like anything else, only needs us to meet it half-way. It travels the other half of the way on its own. I don't need to take the whole trip on myself. Just being open for a shift in consciousness can be enough to welcome growth and insight into my life. Essentially, I don't have to try so hard to be happy.

What a relief.

Me this morning, feeling like death.

My Truth about My Lies

The first time I got really sick at school and had to be sent home I was in the second grade. I had a fever and got dismissed from school, which at first made me sad, until I got home and it turned out that being sick meant I could stay in bed all day watching cartoons with my mom by my side, who took care of me and gave me her full undivided attention. I registered that experience as feeling special. As soon as I returned to school the next day, healthier, I felt a deep desire to go back in time so I could have that feeling again. Since I couldn't go back in time, I figured out that I might be able to re-create that experience by being sick again. But I wasn't sick anymore, and I didn't know how to get sick. It took some planning, but a few weeks later, I went to my teacher and told her I had a stomach ache, the only illness I came up with that I could "fake". I was lying. It was the first time I ever lied to my teacher, and it may have been the first time I ever consciously lied to anyone. I was one of the best students in the class, so she didn't question me for a moment. She sent me to the nurse. The nurse, however, was used to children who wanted to go home to their mothers for the day, and told me I was fine. I could have given up then, but I was longing so desperately for that feeling of special again that I was willing to risk my credibility and reputation as an exemplary student. I went back to my teacher and told her the nurse didn't think I was sick but I still felt sick. My teacher actually got mad at the nurse, telling her that of all her students, I was the one who would never ever make up such a thing, and if I was claiming to be ill, it's because I was. I got sent home, and my teacher personally called my mom to tell her the story and to defend my honor. I had never lied to my mom either, so she believed the whole story. She actually seemed proud of me, proud of the fact that I was such a good, honest student that my teacher would take my word over the nurse's. I was put in bed and she sat beside me. All had worked out according to the plan. But the feeling of special wasn't as strong this time. There were new, overpowering feelings surfacing. I felt like a bad girl for lying, then I felt somewhat powerful for getting away with it, and then I felt endlessly scared that someone would find out I had lied. I had gotten what I wanted, a day in bed with cartoons and my mom at my side the whole time, but it didn't feel the same as the first time, when it was all genuine. Something had been accomplished, and something had been lost, though I couldn't quite figure out what those things were. However, I learned an important, very adult-like lesson: If other people think you're an honest person, you can get away with anything.

I would use that lesson to my benefit over and over again. It became one of the primary masks I would take on: The Honest Person Mask. I mastered the line, "How can you not believe me? Have I ever lied to you?" It would embed itself so deeply into my persona that when asked what one of my best qualities was during interviews I would automatically reply, "People always tell me I'm a very honest person."

Of course lying never felt completely "good". It was a way to survive. Since I couldn't simply demand things like, "I want to stay home with mom today instead of going to school and I want to be the center of her world", or- later- "I want to kiss other boys and not have to tell my boyfriend about it," and "I want to go to a rave without my parents knowing so I won't get in trouble," I had to come up with ways to get what I wanted, and those ways often involved, at the very least, some concealing of the truth. And, for the most part, there were never any major consequences either, other than internal ones that I wasn't mature enough to understand.

Then, one day, something new happened. I was in mid-conversation with a friend, talking about a guy I'd been involved with for a year, saying something along the lines of, "And he loves me. I know he does. Even though he doesn't say it," when my friend said, "Larissa. Stop it. Stop lying to yourself. You've been lying to yourself for a year. He doesn't love you. He doesn't want to be with you. You're going to waste your life telling yourself this lie." I was shocked. I hadn't noticed that I had gotten so good at lying that I had managed to lie, in a massive way, to myself. I wanted to be in a committed loving relationship with that guy, and since that wasn't the reality of the situation, I had thwarted the truth to fit my fantasies, and, as my friend pointed out, ended up wasting a year of my life with my own dishonesty.

Now, I know that women do that a lot. Women create whole relationships that never exist and deny mountains of feelings in order to believe they have something with someone when they actually don't, all because, well, we want to be loved and chosen. Blah blah blah. I'm not trying to say my experience was particularly unique, but it was a new realization for me at that time. I hadn't known the power I had to mess with the truth so that it suited what I wanted, nor had I ever been present to its real consequences in my life. It was as though at that moment, with my friend's words, I became aware of how little control I had over my ability to lie. Since it had become a way to get what I wanted, I hadn't really realized that I actually wasn't getting what I wanted, I was just making the circumstances look like what I wanted. When I lied to my teacher and the school nurse and my mom and pretended to be sick, I did get sent home, but I was seeking my mother's concern and attention, which were granted, but not to me- deep down I knew I was healthy, and so my mother's attention was actually being given to the lie I had portrayed, and that's why the experience didn't fulfill me. It looked like what I had wanted it to look like, so I figured it must be what I wanted it to be. But it wasn't. No matter how we set it up, even a lie that looks identical to the truth is not the truth.

It's like when you look at certain couples that are supposedly happily married. They live in a nice house, they have matching furniture, they have pictures on the walls where they're smiling, they have their set of activities and routines that they do together, etc., but something feels off. And it often is. They are playing house, acting out their parts, for whatever reasons (societal pressure or an unexpected pregnancy are popular ones), and so it all looks exactly like what happiness and matrimonial harmony tend to look like. But it's a lie, and everyone can feel it. And these lies are made of glass, it takes a lot of effort and specific organizing to keep it together, but one strong push and it will all shatter. Thus modern time's divorce rates.

As we say in Portuguese, "A lie has short legs," meaning it won't run very far, it will eventually get tired. I go so far as to say I think there are no inconsequential lies. No matter how it's justified or who it's protecting, it will do some kind of damage somewhere along the line, and it will never feel completely "good". A lie actually takes up space in our hearts and bodies, because we must then live with our knowledge that we have deceived someone, whereas the truth creates space. When I was telling myself that the aforementioned guy was in love with me and we were in a real committed relationship, I was carrying a lie in my heart, and it took a lot of effort and concentration to maintain it. As soon as I let go of it and told myself the truth, I had to deal with the pain, of course, but there was suddenly new space in my life- space for a truthful relationship. The simplicity of it surprised me- all the time that I was spending pretending that this guy loved me was time I could be spending with someone or in search of someone who actually would love me.

Of course, there's one dirty detail. The truth can be lonely. Once I chose to live by it, I broke up with that guy, and then I was single. I had no one to pretend to be with, which meant I had no one to be with. I was actually single for two years after that. And I'm not gonna lie (hah), it was lonely and it was hard. But you know what? Being with someone who didn't actually love me was also lonely and hard, and it was coming at a high cost. The payoff of honesty turned out to be the removal of inauthentic set-ups in my life that I had created in order to hide the empty space beneath it. I'll tell you what, though: that empty space, although sometimes lonely and hard, is real, and doesn't go away when we cover it up with lies. The only way to build upon that space in a way that creates more space is by living in truth and honesty. That is how we learn. That is how we grow. That is how we not only look alive, but feel alive, and our lives start to belong to us, rather than to our lies.

"The truth shall set you free."