Well Hello again…

I’ve been cocooned for much longer than I thought it would take to gather my thoughts – which can be a bit like harnessing butterflies. But it feels great to break out of the shell and be back in the virtual world. 

Life in the real world has been busy and full; imperfect and puzzling but with bouts of laughter and whoops of celebratory glee. Sometimes the mess can be bigger than the tools at hand and it just can’t be flipped into a pithy post; sometimes the bruise is still too fresh and it hurts to laugh. Sometimes life needs my undivided attention. Public platforms can’t compete with private relationships and I can’t jeopardize self care for selfies so I needed to unplug for a minute.
Ha, time is relative. (so many jokes to make but staying on topic) 

I love a good cleanse. 

When the digestive system is feeling a bit sluggish, a simple purge of complex carbs can set things right. But sometimes a detoxifying Ayurvedic cleanse is the answer.

I also love the lightness that comes after decluttering. My shoulders relax 3 inches when I look around the room and see no stacks of mail or piles of New Yorker magazines (the rabbit of the printed word) and the chair backs are naked and hoodie-less.

And then there is the digital detox.

Post pandemic 90 percent of my auditions are self tapes which means my photo library is constantly full. I keep the taped auditions for a while in case there’s a hiccup in the submission process or a file gets corrupted somewhere on its journey to the various decision makers of a given project.
Undeleted items proliferate. Notifications are constant. There’s never enough storage. Buying extra storage for things I don’t need is textbook digital hoarding.
Time for an e-purge.
It has been an epic journey through seven year old voice memos, decades old email threads, ‘Live’ photos (which just means ‘more’), and forgotten auditions. And Gifs! So many Gifs! So many bytes of garbage! 

The digital attic is now cobweb free and the junk has been cleared out. Relationships are trickier than physical possessions but there’s been a tidy up there too that’s made life lighter. Everything really is connected; one thing just led to another. It took some time and there was some struggle but then there was a great sense of release.

A friend recently shared a story of a woman who found a cocoon. The woman watched as the butterfly struggled to emerge from a tiny opening. Thinking the butterfly was stuck she took some scissors to the cocoon. Unwittingly the woman doomed the butterfly to never being able to fly. It is in the struggle to emerge from the cocoon that the wings develop their strength to fly.
Struggle… and patience are sometimes very necessary.

Cleanse and shed what no longer serves. Don’t cut corners. Commit to the long game. Strengthen your wings. Fly.