“Surrender to the Zen of the traffic.”
The screenwriter from LA offers her driving counsel in between bites of a sugar-slick donut. Rock music crowds around the raised conversations of writers meeting for morning coffee and Austin famous baked treats before the official start of the film conference.
The idea for an informal meet-and-greet was initiated by a self-proclaimed introvert, a screenwriter heralding from the East Coast with an awarded script placed in the final coveted and contested rounds for Best Drama.
He confesses to experiencing social anxiety in a pre-conference chain email that’s been a pleasant tennis match of wits and e-hellos for the traveling writers.
“I think we should go,” my mother decides after reading out loud the invitation for morning donuts. She keeps her gaze on the MacBook screen, the computer casts a glow on an unwavering attentiveness to the world of words spilling out in emails, plays, and scripts.
My mother sits perched at her new make-do desk at the Airbnb’s kitchen table, already decorated with resting pages of scripts, welcoming packets from the film conference, an open folder of carefully preserved synopses.
This is a scene from my childhood reset and replaying in front of me here now in Austin: my mother writing, my mother in her own focused flow of creative work, and unlike when I was a child and grasping for attention, I recognize the reverence of this persistent and purposeful communion with the muse, and I let her be.
Watching her write, I see a brave woman writing, a woman forging her dreams. I’m twenty-eight and have taken J.K. Rowling’s advice, and honor my parents as (gasp!) people. The veil has fallen away. The caregivers I burdened with heavy and high expectations are separate and not responsible for my selfish whims and commanding desires, for my happiness and my struggles, for how I did or did not turn out.
I drop the expectations I unfairly shove onto my parents who are people doing the best they can do, and this has freed me to respectfully and lovingly relate to both my father and my mother as full-fledged adults.
I feel a surge of protectiveness as I hear my mother’s melodic clicking of keys echo throughout the living room of the Airbnb.
My heart bursts with the purest wants for her to have the best time in Austin, I want to be the best daughter that I can be, and this includes being a savvy and calm chauffeur in Austin’s tumultuous and temperamental traffic.
Dear driving gods and spirits of the city lanes, help me as I navigate downtown to get my mother to and from her conference.
This is my silently whispered prayer as I weave in and out of the speedy roads defining a city that exploded too soon and didn’t have the proper plans to sustain a population boom.
I restrain from expletive complaining about the driving because I am part of the problem – I moved and added another car to Mopac and I-35.
She wants to go to the donut meet-and-greet, and I suggest dropping her off and then scurrying on my way because that donut spot is downtown, and downtown Austin on a weekday morning will be a frenzy of commuters who may or may not be entirely caffeinated.
Without stopping the parade of writing she retorts that she’ll drive, she’ll parallel park if need be, because it’s comforting to have a sidekick at these meet-and-greets, especially with the writers who are nervous and shy, and I have nothing to loose, only a new adventure and perhaps, a donut or two.
So I stand serenely in a sea of a writers from Vancouver, Atlanta, New York, and eagerly lean into hearing their pitches, their travels, their stories. I am enlivened by their passion, their bravery, and the rock music and the sweet scent of donuts energizes the scene.
I feel at ease speaking with the writers, liberated from my usual subtle self-consciousness mostly because I have no expectations. I’m not there to network, to pitch a script, to impress. I have nothing to loose in just showing up and being myself and relaxing into the perfume of sugar and listening to stories.
And in my listening to stories, I chat with screenwriter who splits time between California and Georgia, and confide my frustrations with the traffic here, and question how she handles the commutes of the infamous highways of LA.
Surrender to the flow. Just know that this is part of living in the city and everybody is going through the same thing.
I think of the LA driving advice as I grip the steering wheel and moan as I sit and miss another green light. I’m stressing and striving and so hopelessly fighting this five o’clock rush in the desperate wish to get my mom a nice dinner at a charming Mexican food hot spot.
Surrender to the flow.
And here at a red light, pressed bumper to bumper, with rain pattering on the car’s hood, and my mother attempting to ease my mind with revelations from panels she heard that day, I see that I am harboring unrealistic expectations of how I am navigate my relationship with my mother, my driving, my life’s driving.
Expectations resist and pressure the present.
I might have freed myself from expecting behaviors and certain responses from my parents, but the expectations I cling to for myself are unchecked.
Responsible. Communicative. Dependable. Kind.
In a free write I am startled to be faced with the expectations I place on myself in almost every personal and professional interaction and relationship.
Responsible!! Communicative!! Dependable!! Kind!!
OMGOODNESS.
No wonder my stomach aches with clutches of anxiety.
So what if I released these expectations like balloons floating away?
Then I am left on the bare ground of myself.
I am frightened and relieved by the thought.
I tie myself to strict expectations out of fear.
Fearing that I won’t be adequately ready for all possible scenarios, that I won’t know how to handle the “what ifs” if the “what ifs” should occur, and striving to prove, once more, my self-worth, my intelligence, my capabilities.
If I drop the expectations, then I drop deeper into my self, into strengthening my own foundation of trust.
I can trust myself enough to step forward into uncertainty with fierce faith in myself, in believing that I can rise to address with grace and intelligence whatever arises in the moment, be that parking downtown or figuring out an alternative route as I go.
Yes, take the mindful steps beforehand to smartly prepare, and then drop the expectations, let it go, and relax into self-trust.
I surrender to the traffic. I see human beings wanting the same things that I do – we all want to get home, whatever that home may be, we all have fears and desires, and we’re all in this together, on this crammed downtown street.
Life pushes me to relinquish resistance, breathe into fear, and the breath stimulates the expansive movement to create the clarity to proceed from there.
The screenwriter from LA tells me to surrender to the traffic flow. So I do.
And I also surrender all unrealistic expectations that have been clinging and gnawing at my self-worth.
I keep thinking of fall, and how the trees remind me to let go.
I’m letting go, and stepping forward into a darker chapter of uncertainty. The uncertainty that wakes me up at 3am with loud fears hissing the what ifs, and I trust myself enough to I know that whatever happens, it’ll be all right, because I believe in myself, I trust myself, and give over the need to control through expectations and resistance so I can be present and calm and openhearted, just as I was in that donut shop talking to the writers.
I keep dropping the expectations as I breathe into an inviting coolness that is Austin in November, and surrendering into a story that flows forward in faith, and in self-love, self-advocacy, and a belief reflective of my mother’s belief in me, and this is the writing carrying me onward, forward into the finishing chapter of 2018.