The Harrowing Tunnel of Commitment to the Same
and the caverns of gold to find there
About nine months after first meeting and taking the stage with Alan, this jumbled out of my fingertips to land in my notes app.
I love him.
I love seeing his ideas unfold.
I love his baffled laugh and bright eyes when I catch him in delight of mine.
I even love it when he sits stoically, getting or not getting whatever I am doing. Taking it all in. Taking all of me in.
One of the most uniquely difficult parts about the various transitions we’ve been through–in the seven and some years we’ve been together–is transferring our manner of connecting through bold performance and absurdist play to connecting in a more pedestrian way.
Lighting up with the unabashed seeing or being seen by each other among the mundane details of our day-to-day lives.
As artists of multiple mediums, we are both constantly in flux with where our focus is.
Having met and fallen into friendship and then love through the art of clowning, it was a challenge to find the type of intimacy we discovered through that medium during times of being less active in it.
Something about knowing each other, after so long, so well, across so many adventures and states of exuberance and grief and being and boring, creates a sensation of predictability. And a fear, for me, of being boxed in. Projecting outcomes of a bit (based on their known reactions to me) rather than just being lit up by one.
It feels that way when one stays in the same place for a while, too, which is perhaps why the Y2K generation and those that follow are so over-familiar with moving, with not settling down to a place, a career, a person, or a home. You can’t so obviously detect the magic of staying that the older generations were so much better at because it lies deep under the foundation of a fulfilling life. Coiling in thick, invisible ribbons like the undertoe of an ocean current.
We’ve been so entranced by the explosive nature of more obvious magicks, as depicted in your average Hollywood story, that we became accustomed to not seeing and thus not valuing those “staying” skills. They were not neon in nature. They did not imprint as dreamlife goals during our most formative years.
It is easy to rediscover your own immediate intrigue when you keep shifting directions. To find a sensational high off of someone new getting to know you, or a new community enjoying your offerings, or a new job cheering you on in all your sparkly, new-girl-around-town glory. It is the easy answer to avoiding the harrowing darkness that tunnels forth when all that easy sparkle stops shimmering through the air to lie flatly on a still floor.
Settling deep into that stillness… that’s the journey I am on. The journey I am flying a flag for here. Committing to this place and choices and path and self…I give my salute to those dramatically vivacious moments in the falling glitter of fresh.
As my bare feet pick up those sparkles to stay beneath me, I seek here to face the learning of how to overcome profound self-doubt in this submergence of the same! Honing the skill of long-lasting self-love through long-lasting partnered love, location love, lifestyle love.
It is essential for the spiral of self-growth I aim to achieve in this life to, at some point in this adulting chapter, refrain from the urge to shift courses. Or, even hold space for the distracting consideration of doing so. To give away the comfortable hold on a potential easy escape of leaning back into rediscovering the same parts of self that once lit one’s world up. Instead! To challenge oneself to let those parts feel dull. To accept that not all that glitters is gold… that’s when one aims to mine and find the real, unique, and profound treasures of their soul. Of themselves. Of their connections with others.
It isn’t for the faint of heart to commit to anything forever.
It wasn’t a piece of cake for Alan and me to find the level of profound intimacy we had in our clown-kingdom within the less…hit-you-over-the-head-with-wow…spaces of our lives.
In a week’s time, we’ll be at our wedding venue with our loved ones, building a mutual web of community with them to hold us and launch us into the ritual of marriage.
I love watching the choices Alan makes—in his minute-by-minute, aging, growing, and exquisitely human form.
It may not always be as bold as some of the insane things he does on stage, but the magic of each of his expressions and decisions lights me up. The magic of sometimes forgetting and then remembering (as though I am walking back into a theater I forgot I was already in) that I have a front-row seat to the most miraculous of shows. The lifetime experience of witnessing someone being so unabashedly themselves before me, through a wild amount of phases of their life. It’s leveling. It’s humbling. It’s a deep, humid breath in a thick morning light.
It’s only been 7 years, and we’ve mined such striking (and sometimes deeply difficult to find) caverns of gold within ourselves with one another together. Oh, do I look forward to discovering and cherishing so many more. And, oh! Do I cherish the luck and blessings I've scooped up in this lifetime, in my commitment to him, to soak in the treasure of each moment I get to witness him, and he I.
Cheers to commitment, my dears.
It is my last week of being a Sanders.
I am voyaging into the superb quality of being my own matriarch.
I am setting sail into the depths of my own same, my own heart, my own choices and life, and the beating drum of a consistent path I’ve laid down my sword for.
A hui ho,
Julia Fae Sanders
I liked how the glitter flowed through a lot of this. I'm sure you've heard that glitter is the herpes of craft supplies. thanks