“Imagine everyone you love in the same room.”
The bride tosses her response like a bouquet.
Blooms of heart-wisdom pirouette through the celebratory cacophony of a wedding reception that rekindles the magic of old Mexico. Twinkle lights mingle with papel picados overhead in the trees, and guests playfully shake maracas as they sip paletas, the couple's signature drink. Spanish and English weave and merge conversations that praise the corn husked-wrapped tamales and tacos al pastor (I rave with several plates).
Traditional Mexican music ripples from the DJ's speakers and animates the spell, and even the Texas summer presents the beloved couple a breeze that lets us stay cool in our wedding best (at least at the beginning of the evening) as we start to dance.
On the porch, I share a dance with the bride. My sun-blaze friend gifts me an unwavering moment of pure presence, and I intently focus on keeping the rhythm to a dance that conjures the heaven warmth of her ancestry.
She mesmerizes as a stunning vision of elegance and grace as she sways back and forth in a gown that is glistening cascade of lily white lace. She signals for me to follow the lead and squeezes my hands.
“This is what my wedding feels like. Everyone I love is in the same room.”
“That’s an edit!”
My dreams in June move in a montage.
My daytime life at the theater seeps into my nights. I am a befuddled performer blinking into the lone spotlight on a stage enveloped in blackness.
Invisible improvisers wait in the distant wings and shout to end of the scene. Then, blurred compatriots race across the expanse of black, signaling the theatrical conclusion, cueing the beginning of the next scene.
“That’s an edit!”
But I’m uncertain of where to go, so I stay, and I wake shaking in an adrenaline rattling through veins. Restless energy exhumes the fears from that abyss of a stage and splashes them out to play in a real montage of summer scenes.
“That’s an edit!”
The game, the thread connecting the contrasting scenes with disparate characters, and it’s almost funny in how the pattern keeps repeating, heightens and reveals my struggle to claim my power.
And as my dream life mirrors my current work with personal power, my actual improv reflects that I need to be assertive.
My improv teachers call me out.
“Too polite, Meredith. Don’t take your foot off the pedal, keep going. If you stick to your intentions, then you’re actually helping your partner. You’re being supportive. How would you really respond in real life?”
Honestly? I would cry.
And I do. Later in the safety of someone who has seen me cry over the past two years. She is my in-house therapist.
I lean against the bedroom doorframe, and the loyal pit bull, my second therapist, sighs nearby. My hesitancy to step forward as a leader results in a disappointment that could have been avoided, and because the disappointment is from people in my care, I am crushed in the brutality of the lesson. I sob and she listens.
“You’re doubting your instincts, and you have good instincts. You keep getting into these situations over and over again because you haven’t learned to speak up for yourself. And once you do, these situations won’t take so much of your energy.”
She pauses from applying mascara, and her blue eyes find me choking down a cry. “Next time this happens, you can say, ‘I don’t have a response for you.’ Or don’t say anything at all. You don’t owe someone an immediate response.”
“That’s an edit!”
The piercing insight is offered forward from a person who loves me, who does support me, unlike the improvisers in my dream who holler commands, ghost me on stage and then leave me in the dark.
This a returning of power: this self-permission to take my time, to breathe and reunite with my own quiet intelligence, my own honesty, and then with an assertiveness that is a kindness, lead.
“What the fuck is this planet?” I whisper to the night air.
Barbara Kingsolver's collection of essays, High Tide in Tucson, shocks with an unexpected detailing of the atomic bomb.
School children vanquished. Innocence torched alive.
Sleep evaporates. Hiroshima haunts.
The writer knows what she’s doing. Let her do it, then. Break me open to the horror and the agony. I witness, and breathe through the witnessing, stretching the heart understanding of humanity, and the witnessing reignites the commitment to stay strong in the Light.
And in the flame of consciousness, I am wild in anger. I am outraged helplessness. I am tears that I feel are self-indulgent and selfish to spill.
Children are locked in a living hell and I am hours away.
We share the same air.
I exist in the same reality as you and I think of you, loves who must know that they are loved.
I dedicate stillness to you, I reassert choices that are aligned with the higher good, and I advocate in the ways I trust that I can be of the best benefit for you.
And then I show up.
There is work to do.
There is work to do, I think, as I surrender the attachment to the pettiness that scorched my throat in soreness.
There is work to do, I think, as I release the ego worry to be liked and just teach from my own authenticity.
There is work to do, I repeat, as I consciously choose (again and again) to let the snide comment slide away. I need to remain in the clarity of my energy.
Refocus on priorities, and my priorities are to be a presence, to champion on the dazzling improv stars’ artistic journey. These are the youth I can dedicate to serving by creating and holding safe space for them to be as they need to be.
And I work to hold that safe space for myself, too.
Let me stay radically soft.
Let me stay radically strong in my femininity.
Let me affirm that it is safe to be me, in all my heartaches and in all my confident expressions of joy.
Let me stay sensitive and trust that my sensitivity also roars as bravery.
I am responsible for my healing, for remaining present on this planet and not getting consumed and hardened by its pain, but being propelled by consciousness to alleviate and elevate.
Let me receive the moments that radiate in love, like dancing with my friend on her wedding day, so I can be nurtured to see love in the room, be love in the room, even and especially when I’m struggling to stay close to the light.
Slow breath in. Slow breath out.
Onwards.