I realized I was developing something scarier than frown lines: fear lines. What was I becoming afraid of? Was it fear of myself? Of life of stagnating? Realizing you’re lost can be terrifying…. It’s being home yet feeling estranged from your surroundings. While sitting on my couch recently, in the most familiar of environments, watching a re-run of Will and Grace, I felt a new level of unease. It was a precisely ordinary evening, yet my body was physically rejecting the stagnation… the predictability of my environment. My ensuing panic attack was a wake up call from my subconscious: “Hi, is the real Noel in? We desperately need to speak to her.” My delusions: “No, she’s not in right now… can I take a message?” The thing is, we can live so many lives in a lifetime—and we should discover new experiences in each new life. When we don’t, we stop feeling alive. Well, at least for me I guess… the stagnation was suffocating.
I had gotten lost in books, which truly are a brilliant means of escape. But there comes a time when the phone rings too loudly and you must answer the call to be free. The fear lines near my eyes betrayed how trapped I felt inside. The longing for new challenges, connections, and experiences was insidious, building… to a point where I imploded on myself… I broke down and I had to get away. Sometimes I minimize my own life, my own needs as one of about 6 billion people on this planet. While I love writing funny stories, this is a bit more serious—I needed to take my life seriously for a moment.
The vacuousness of my friendships and the superficiality of my surroundings had seriously started to bum me out. And admitting that to myself felt ungrateful. Do we do what we should do believing it’ll make us happy? Or do we not do what we want to do for fear that it won’t? The mind is a powerful thing, a massive tool for self destruction. We’re all aware of the conspiracy that we’re living in a simulation. Well, guess what? We are… one of our own creation. Because, our brains are able to distort reality into seeing things that aren’t even there—into believing things about ourself, our lives, our limitations that aren’t even true. Even our past is distorted, recollections recreated so many times, reality becomes a question mark. Did I say that? Did I seem like that? Who we are and who were becoming—the meaning of our own existence becomes mutated by these delusions. The simulation of our reality is ever so contrived.
So, last week, to dip my toes in a new reality—one hopefully more interesting and fulfilling—I flew with my Pitbull, Whitney Houston, to New York for a writing job and decided to stay… to experience, if only for a few thousand moments, something new. Seeing this untamable city, teaming with a unique breed of human, through her eyes was that something new. I’d lived here before, but never with a dog. Her excitement and the city’s, in a post pandemic “reopening,” is contagious… chaotic, but contagious.
One thing’s for sure, I’ve never done this before. We’ve all never done this before. We’re re-adjusting and re-emerging from a pandemic for the very first time. The uncertainty is exciting and terrifying… But, finally, I feel alive again—or perhaps I’m stepping into a new life, one of many I’ll live before I die. Cats have nine lives they say, and I’m not sure how many dogs get. Whitney Houston, my Pit, is Whitney Houston, the singer, reincarnated so she’s already had two. I watch her strut through Central Park, approaching each human and k-9 with intense curiosity. She has no fear—she just sees things and smells them—like a kid… like a big fat fluffy kid. And through her voracious appetite for exploration, I’m curious again.
You can read millions of books about life without ever really understanding the pages if you don’t actually live with that sense of being fully alive-- pure experience. Whitney doesn’t read—I’m still trying to teach her. But she understands things, she senses things on a visceral level. She can feel emotions without putting them into words. And, that’s what I felt that day, watching Will & Grace for the umpteenth time: a dis-ease I couldn’t properly express. But, I knew if I didn’t act, my lives would die before they were even born and all of the possibilities along with them. The poet William Blake once said he was “born in 1757 and died many times since”; I think there is a reciprocal truth to Blake’s one-liner that captures my emerging sense of renewal and hope here in New York, which would say ‘We've experienced enough death-- here’s to many more lives yet to live.’