no. 2
upsettingly or prayerfully, almost 95% of this remains true. guess the five.
from the after/hours archive: 42 [January 28, 2022]
My friend, Satya (whose beautiful podcast Our Mothers’ Gardens has featured everyone from Alex Elle to, well, me) tells me she has a reading ritual for these letters.
A: Kermit's finger.
I like to imagine her now: warm tea in hand, by a chilly winter window, breathing into the expectation of poetry, and opening to.. sex jokes.
If nothing else, let me delight in my contradictions.
Y’all, I’m losing followers; not in droves, mostly here and there. Actually, about as frequently as I post. In fact, each time I post, I lose a few more. It’s as if people are suddenly reminded of my presence, my name, or my words, and realize they have little use for me.
Honestly, I can’t say I blame them: I’m not of use to the internet these days! I make no slides, I create no content, I seek no clients, I sell no products, I offer no classes, I ain’t promoting nothing.
But, from June 2020 through this past summer, my follower count grew by 400%.
(I should probably put that data into media kit to use, promoting my influence and relevancy on social media, but a truth is that I don’t care. That sounds harsh. Please allow me to rephrase: I… don’t care. That is, I don’t care to be known by my social presence so much as my *social presence.* I want it to feel real good, or real challenging, or real vibrant, or real silly, or real cultured to be in my company, and if what I’m putting out isn’t for ya, I wanna translate my magic as much as I wanna show you the door – in equal measure, as ours oughta be a dynamic of reciprocity, let’s only be here if it’s vibin, you feel me?)
With the increased numbers came increased demand, and I sought to make good use of the attention. I was happy to be home and making and, frankly, had lots of pointed words to share. The battle for me will always be that excellence, which I demand of myself, suggests authority, which I avoid, and begs permanence, which I am programmed to destroy.
Sent my way via posts and shares, whatever free glimpses I provided to embolden the soon-to-be-abandoned learnings, I no longer offer, and I'm sure it's assumed that because I am not writing about race, that I am not writing about race. Or womanhood. Or America. Or art-making. Or public education. Or mystery. Or liberation. As always, it's an issue of nuance that gets me.
I’m not made for the internet, probably, and it’s ok that people know: I’m made for something grander.
Like a breadcrumb, I found this on the internet and followed it down a weird path I can't find again.
I moved to New York at 19 to go to acting school. The conservatory didn’t provide a dorm, and we found an educational housing program that scored pretty unique places, including my one-bedroom corner suite at The New Yorker hotel on 34th & 8th. I was there until graduation, when Christina One and I moved to a railroad apartment on the Upper East Side. From there, it was to Stuy Town on the Lower East, then Greenpoint, which was my favorite. It’s the northernmost tip of Brooklyn, only a stop outside Queens, but the G train that serves the small, Polish neighborhood is the only train that doesn’t connect to Manhattan. Man, people had to want to come see me, and I would spend months walking miles and miles throughout the boroughs, happy to have tucked into a private corner after all that time.
I worked in production companies, mostly indie stuff, and – none of this is important. Suffice it to say, I spent a lot of my day commuting, reading scripts, eavesdropping on dialogues, scheming for gigs, and generally devouring trade publications like the obsessive film freak I was.
I still read a fair amount, a hangover from that decade spent in production. A bit of it is flimsy, some of it is super fascinating, and I’m mostly in it for the records of deals made. This Backstage advice round-up popped up this week in my internet mining while contemplating age. I didn’t suppose I needed advice from actors on my career, but I’m nothing if not a slut for knowledge.
Asked for her words for young + emerging actors, Martha Plimpton offers this sage wisdom.
Really ask yourself: What do I want to get out of this business? “My mother was saying, ‘Look, do you want to be a working actor or do you want to be a movie star? Because movie stardom, you can’t get that. It picks you.’ She said, ‘You can either be frustrated because you’re not getting picked to be a movie star, or you can be an actor. You can be a working actor and go from there.’ ”
I hate that it's a trend, but again: the webz.
My father is a Zen pragmatist, and, like Martha, I hold dear his inspiring advice, though it sang a different tune:
“You can’t be anything you want to be.”
Well, thank glory for that.
Because some days I think I wanna save this place! Imagine me, one lady, a savior. Or me, this perfectly wretched and wonderful woman, wasted in some sort of athletic practice just because my Pilates class tricked me into believing in my own physical proweress. Or, and this is often when Musk or Bezos is in the news, I dream about what I’d do with a billion dollars, or if became Secretary of Education, or (and stop me if you’ve heard this one) won an Academy Award. A life spent wanting and chasing and losing isn’t for me: I’ve heard that story. I want to shake free of those circular stories of ruin.
& in this place (e.g. world, socials, Friday), for us mothers and brown folk and creatures of sacred nuance, we cannot be anything we want to be because and until that “anything” = liberated.
When I grow up, I want to be free & so I find myself preoccupied with the ways we name ourselves + are listed by others on the way to glorious crone-hood. It seems to me that it’s all these words in the way of our little lives: mother, woman, movie star, Piggie, 42..
This is a roundabout way to ask, “Does anyone know how to write an Instagram bio?”
If you ask my students, they’d say I was a hip-hop witch who likes words and effort. If you ask my colleagues, they’d say I’m an instructional coach + divisional leader in culturally responsive and antiracist pedagogy + curriculum development. If you ask my followers, my mother, my child, Monday me, Saturday morning me, my ex, my theatre friends, my Nownian loves.. each would know some part.
Perhaps I’m merely reiterating how we got here in the first place:
I am too old to be sold in pieces. I’m one whole thing.
So.. FNCYA to my lost followers, but I cannot be relied upon for daily consumables. I can’t be relied upon for a perfectly consistent bedtime routine, either, if you’re wondering! and I won’t be what I’m not because I’m hard at work becoming the only thing I am. I simply can’t be anything and I can’t be everything, and when I grow up, I’m going to be a free me, sex jokes, Oscars, and all.
Between Nightbitch and Scenes from a Marriage, I carved a little time last fall for considering the fractals of womanhood and the weight of mothering. (Last fall = every day.) Not necessarily their burdens, but their mass. I remain captivated by stunning portrayals of complex women, their interior worlds, and the sheer enormity of mothers’ asks. When this article on pandemic parenting stumbled across my path this week, I spent some time considering the final paragraph:
“We can’t make this work. That’s the thing. That’s why moms are choosing to spend their nights—their precious moments of child-free time before the next endless day begins—screaming into the darkness. We can’t do this. It isn’t fair. It isn’t sustainable. Then we do it anyway. We hope that when this wave ends, we’ll have a brief respite to compose ourselves before the next one comes, and dream—in the few hours we actually sleep—of finally washing up on the shore of that more normal world we’ve been waiting for all this time. We do it because we have no other choice.”
I don’t think this sentiment is unique to just mothers (duh), but if generations of mothers have brought us to this static, choice-less place, where we are all, by turns and strokes seemingly trapped,
Where do we begin if not in the home?
I mean to say: the shore of normalcy is a fantasy, but a land of loving embrace is possible, huh? Like, in this home. In this body. In this moment. That much I can do.
Lest you think I’m a one-trick pony, this isn’t my ancestral integrity speaking; it’s just time.
[via: @junejordanarchive]
The choice was never between normalcy and global pandemic, or mother and free person, or being seen as a woman vs. A Black Woman, or even my Brand and my Being. The choice isn’t between anything, but toward one thing: me, more and more and more saturated and in love with the deep work of becoming my fullest, fullest self.
When I was pregnant with Pearl, I read an article suggesting parents (mothers) raise first children like they’re third children. I feel the same about maternal expectations and the internet and audience response to dirty jokes and the business of acting:
Most of this is bullshit. May the new year weight I shed be the weight of expectation.
See, I’m 37 years old and I want to like my days and I wanna love the people in them. I want to like the pace of myself and to know that my rhythms are heard by me. I want to lean into what calls me and make a life of that. I refuse the suggestion that I am building a life around or in spite of this Triwizard maze we call a nation.
Like, yes, I want to eat cookies when I wanna eat cookies and I want to eat kale when I wanna eat kale, and I want to eat kale and cookies basically every day, and I think that tracks. But also I want to walk at my speed and make my bed and wear my dresses and write my little poems and drink my little drinks and grow my little life. I want to make my fucking art all day in my little studio with my little mugs.
I have waited all my life to be on the other side of 40; I’m desperate for it, and I assumed for decades that it would come with a sense of arrival. Turns out…
To proclaim sovereignty over my little life is no little thing, and I wonder if we’re talking enough about pure, unbridled desire. If, like age, we have no choice, I say, let’s make it glorious. Let’s make it beautiful. Let’s make it human. Let’s make art of living.
So, yeah, I’m 37, and one million other words that fail to encapsulate the immensity of me.
xx Adrienne
P. S. Things I read this week that make no sense in relation to this letter, but are objectively good reads:
from Eater: A Safe Place to Fill Up, or, why I know Brown’s is the best gas station fried chicken in town.
from The Atlantic, on medieval sleeping habits that seriously justify my every night’s waking + anticapitalism.
from Deadline, on a Broadway musical version of Black Orpheus that should send you running for the film’s soundtrack.
This entry on Hausa Animism, a kind of magic practiced by my maternal grandmothers ancestors in Cameroon.
Oh, yeah. I wrote this series in response to community questions in my little internet closet. This week was, “I’m 42, what about you?” and I.. had words about that.