A MOMENT OF PAUSE

All that mattered was healing my body, which at the time seemed like just a physical thing, but as the years passed and I grew in my awareness, deepened into something emotional, mental and spiritual.

I’m a failed actress turned Registered Massage Therapist. At first, once I realized I had failed as an actress, that my expiry date had come to fruition, that my body had betrayed me with the most shocking fall, I was adamant that my next move would be getting a Masters Degree in Drama Therapy in San Fransisco. The place was called CIIS - the California Institute of Integral Studies. There I would turn the pain of my failures into something worthwhile, something meaningful, and serious. My self respect was so low, my shame so deep, my self-loathing so potent, that the only way to survive through this tumultuous phase of my life was to cover myself in letters, become an intellectual, and get some goddam respect from the world. This world I lived in, had not been kind to me, had not been loving, or compassionate, or patient. No, this world I had grown up in, had cut me, attacked me, stripped me down and tossed me out with the trash. I was a shadow of myself, a figure of my own imagination, my worst nightmare. The screenplay I had spent years writing as a way to heal my own pain had come back to haunt me full throttle, saw my unhealed wound and what it was doing to me and decided to have an intervention. It stopped me dead in my tracks, spit fire in my face and left me in a pile of ashes. I got into the Drama therapy program, one of 40 chosen, and for all of about 5 or 10 minutes I got to gloat in the glory of my success. I could check a box that said to the world I wasn’t a total failure, but deep down I was a devastated, depressed, and total hot mess. I never ended up going to California. Never even set foot on the CIIS campus except for when I auditioned for the program. All my orchestrations and masked attempts at success couldn’t prepare me for what came after that.

My Expiry Date had Come to Fruition

“All my orchestrations and masked attempts at success couldn’t prepare me for what came after that..”

Before I could embark on my very important masters journey, I had to make a pit stop in Gainesville, Florida. There in that little town, was a place called Clear Passage, and there was where I would go to fix my broken body from that shocking fall I mentioned earlier. Let’s back it up a few months to that fall from grace.

A car had hit me on my bicycle, two days before I was to perform in a play. I had finally got a role I could be proud of, I felt like a star, and finally there would be an audience to watch me in all my glory. A big agent from LA was in town and attending, and I was inches away from moving to Hollywood. It went like this: Me on the brink of turning 30 and terrified, burning my candle at both ends, while trying to be a successful actress, while simultaneously dealing with unresolved trauma and self-loathing, barreling through into producing and starring in a play, then getting hit by a car two days before opening night, barreling through that to notible success, throwing myself into an acting intensive with a deeply wounded, unhealed teacher I will not name, all while recovering from shocking fall aka car accident, weird crazy side effects like not being able to go number 2, almost invisible periods, strange body sensations like half my body is in a sweater 5 sizes too small and it can’t move like it used to, and overall feelings of a meltdown. I didn’t want to admit I was barely hanging on when I started working with this abusive acting teacher (I’ve had a few), who saw right through me and instead of taking me aside and addressing these issues like a kind compassionate human being, stood me in front of the entire acting class and called me out on my big lie, humiliating me and crushing the tiny bit of self respect I had left.

Coming Back From the Brink of Obliteration

So yes, before I could become a professional ‘normal’ person with self -respect, and a clear trajectory for my life, I had to bring my body, mind and spirit back from the brink of obliteration. No biggie, just a pit stop to fix what some would call an accident, or at that time what I liked to call the biggest mistake of my life. But all good, I’ll just patch this fuck up with some hands on therapy in some weird town, then get back to it. What, like it’s hard?

Here’s the thing though, here’s the piece that I wasn’t yet willing to admit to myself. I was broken. I had been broken for years, first from an upbringing and culture that told little girls the only worth they possess is their youth and beauty, then from an industry that told little girls not only is their worth intrinsically tied to their youth and beauty but also to their ethnicity, which in my case wasn’t good because I was a Jew. So even though I had freckles and red hair and looked like a little Irish potato, deep down I knew I wasn’t worthy of the beauty badge because I just wasn’t white enough. If only my skin were a few shades lighter and my eyes weren’t so round and big and overwhelming. If only my eyes hadn’t had laser surgery and a corneal abrasion, and chronic flare ups through my twenties and hadn’t changed physically from that trauma. Yes one looked smaller, lusterless, and ugly to me, the hurt one, one that went blind for one night. You see I was 20 when that happened, in theatre school and full of dreams. I was beautiful and innocent and after that surgery I was neither. To punish myself for this mistake, I manifested chronic blepharitis for years and it wasn’t until I healed my own eye with a Cranial Sacral Technique, that it never flared again. But that’s a story for another time.

Untwisting the Physical Manifestations of Pain

“I felt safe. I felt loved and cared for and most of all I felt their kind compassion.”

So by the time I landed in Gainesville, hometown to Tom Petty, the true earth shattering brokenness had set in and the life I had known and strived for had become irrelevant. All that mattered to me now was healing my body, which at the time seemed like just a physical thing, but as the years passed and I grew in my awareness, deepened into something emotional, mental and spiritual. As these beautiful souls, to whom I will always feel indebted to, laid their hands upon me and began to untwist the physical manifestations of my pain, I felt something I had never felt before and it was the most beautiful feeling in the whole world. I felt safe. I felt loved and cared for and most of all I felt their kind compassion. Without getting too graphic, let’s just say that after the first day of intensive treatment, my body released a lot of shit. I got my periods again, and the heat of the Florida sun combined with the bewitching natural beauty of the swaying Oak trees, had seduced me into staying put. I enrolled in a 6 month massage course at The Florida School of Massage, with no idea of where I was going or what I was doing with my life and I really didn’t care to know. I was finally happy for the first time in so long and had stumbled upon something that my body had been craving for eternity, a moment of pause. A moment of peace.