It is a Thursday evening and I am sitting in an armchair while the kids I'm babysitting for sleep upstairs. They love me to a degree that is almost embarassing -- I walk in the door and the way they look at me you would think I was the sun. Any and all fears I might have around adults just dissolve when I'm alone with kids -- next thing I know I'm singing "dinosaur pajamas" at the top of my lungs while demonstrating such fine dances as a) the lawnmower b) the backwards running man and c) the shopping cart while the girls are giggling hysterically and climbing all over me and then we run around the house playing "Ashley Horse," "man from mars," and duck duck goose, and then we're dancing around the living room (they were actually wearing pink leotards today) and I'm teaching them old ballet moves and we're investigating if I can do a pirouette with a toddler on my hip and then I'm busting out fine old twirls developed whlle trying to imitate the figure skaters on TV when I was 10 and they are showing me the dead bug and we are all laughing until we cry and collapse on the couch, and then they crawl into my armpits and lay on my chest and investigate all my tattoos and trace the roots up my belly and ask about the wings above my heart and it is just the sweetest thing ever...

I wish I could be that fearless around people my own age.

I used to be such a performer. When I was a kid I would write songs and choreograph dances, roller skating numbers, and home-made musicals. I went to theater camp and was in all the school plays. I wanted to be an actress or a singer like Tiffany. I was always on stage doing something. I always wanted to get cast as the leading lady cause I wanted the attention, but that was never my part -- I was always cast as someone outrageous and bizarre, often cast as a boy or a man, often a show-stealing supporting character... which I resented and loved at the same time.

and then I stopped acting and performing when I was 12 or 13. After 7 years of ballet I had to quit dancing cause I developed chronic tendonitis in my left foot. But the sadder thing was stopping theater. I quit because I didn't grow -- I was all malnourished by my neglectful parents and I didn't go through puberty until I got sent away to a boarding school with a cafeteria where I could eat all the time. When I was 12 and 13 I still lived at home and looked like I was about 8. At theater practice all the kids who weren't onstage would fool around and make out backstage and no one would talk to me or touch me cause I was this skinny flat-chested traumatized dork. Around that time my mom was drinking a gallon + of wine a day, and my home life was absolute hell, and I never slept enough, and had huge dark circles under my eyes all the time, and was always sick, and spent hours and hours alone cause my parents either ignored or abused me and my social skills were all fucked up, and I couldn't bring anyone home, so I had no friends left. My few friends all dumped me right around the time when I stopped growing and started having horrible emotional problems. So I was this incredibly lonely, angry, brilliant, violent, dysfunctional kid who weighed less than her dog, and no one would make out with me at theater practice. So I quit acting and singing and went home to be alone and try not to get tortured by my mom.

It's really sad. I can feel that now. In the last few months a lot of my rage has been subsiding, and I have been discovering that what underlies the anger is a lot of grief and a lot of fear. A deep, deep sadness. A lot of mourning that never happened. Mourning for my childhood, mourning for the self-destructive years of destroying myself with drugs and booze, mourning for the way I put my queer identity underground after I broke someone's heart 5 years ago and tried to put my sexual self on a shelf... mourning for all the chaos and heartbreak and the ways I punished myself and tried to control everything and carried around huge amounts of shame and guilt. a lot of sadness for what has been dormant, or the ways I turned the abuse on myself. the cop in my head, the voices of control, the incessant weighing of pros and cons and trying so fucking hard to be good that the trying took life away from me.

I don't really know how to talk about it. I don't mean to go into a pity party, at all. It's not about that. It's not a poor me thing. It's actually seeing my life, and feeling the feelings I've been trying to drown for years, and moving on. I'm thinking about taking a dance class for the first time since my one attempt at 17. I'm wondering about performing my poetry again. I'm having crushes on women and spending time with my body. I've started a painting. I'm writing pages upon pages in my journal. I'm getting more and more curious about what it would be like to re-open my heart and my creative sensual self. I want to start singing again...