Marking my words

This post is a testy-ment to making your mark.

I spoke these pink and green words to a friend while cleaning up at the end of a long serving shift in Brooklyn, at a restaurant I practically called home for my first four years in New York City.

These years were riddled with work trips back to Columbus, Ohio, from whence I had recently transplanted. Around this time Columbus was alive and teeming with steaming hot dance parties and I was living hard. Hard as in, overextending myself energetically and financially to juggle my first professional dance gigs, restaurant shifts, travel costs, apprenticeship and commissions, but finding lifeforce in the center of these community dance exorcisms like it was my actual job.

I was in the process of learning a lot but not knowing what, yet. So this is what came out of me —

My friend ended up hearing me, and feeling me, so much that he made this great little quote-meme and posted it up on his Instagram page. He didn't credit me for saying this, but that's alright. I gained a personal insight instead, and now...

I vow to mark my words!

-

Social media stopped being a personal outlet for me at the start of the pandemic. Ever since, I've found it difficult to share my life on Instagram. Not only was it a major obligation for my work in the past several years, but I also no longer saw myself as a candidate to "succeed" there personally, and it started to make me feel like I wasn't succeeding in real life either.

I was reminded by deep friends during a recent cross-country move that even your tiny thoughts and observations matter, whether it's through a mid-thought text, a poorly timed phone call, a gift or a letter.

Without as many in-person community events to capture our collective whole, it's more important now than ever to let in the friends and family who lift you up, and spoke out like a web through time and space. Seeing little glimpses of life through each other still adds up to some misty picture over time.

After seven beautiful but torrential years in New York City, moving away pretty much ripped me to shreds, leaving me in a weak and protozoic state. Though I'd felt fully docked in New York during this period — building generations of chosen families at the restaurant and my apartment building — the fact was that I had been living very transiently in and out of my home city. Being a nomad in the city felt so common that you only needed to be there part of the time. Beyond traveling to Ohio for work upwards of ten times over the years, I spent 7 with my family during the pandemic, then the following summer entirely in Montauk, and the past two months full-time on a tour. Rather than moving away from New York I felt like I was moving away from nowhere.

Suddenly my present life became a part of my past....... I closed my eyes and left. Some truly deep friends formed a supportive blob around me during my transition away and reminded me to make a point to stay in touch, ~regardless of whether it was something important~

Of all these dear people, my friend Gina, a filmmaker, teacher, dreamer, and blossoming wine specialist said it best. So much so, that I think I'll need to make an illustration or embroidered pillow for her quote, but at the very least make her bit of paraphrased truth from a hotel phone call known. She said,

"Don’t call me when you’ve figured it all out. Call me when you’re a mess, when you’re afraid, and when you’ve actually just shit your pants." — Gina Abatemarco (2022)