They Liked Us Better Dead

Unless you are off the grid and accessing this newsletter by sat phone or carrier pigeon you know tonight is the opening of Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour here in Phoenix. The city of Glendale has been temporarily re-named “Swift City”. The freeway signs will surely all be cheeky puns of her song lyrics. And while I didn’t survive the Ticketmaster fiasco to get seats for the show here, and somehow did not get the memo about trying for tickets in other cities, Sarah did. We are bringing our girls and meeting up next weekend in Vegas and we are 100% down the rabbit hole that is Eras Tour concert outfits. Google it. It’s all very serious. People are so committed. There is an entire corner of the internet dedicated to Swifties putting together their concert outfits to recreate concert/video/award show looks. Our girls have us so into it. I might wear my trusty gold sequins for “Champagne Problems” or newspaper print for Reputation. I also still have the green snakeskin stilettos I ambitiously wore to my 10-year high school reunion a couple months after Carsyn was born. But who am I kidding? We all know there’s no way I’m standing all night in stilettos.

All this concert talk has me flashing back to the Reputation tour in 2018, when just months after moving back to the States and deep in the thick of our grief and trauma, my mom surprised Carsyn with tickets for her 13th birthday and we all went together. Up until that point, Taylor Swift had just been the music of my girl’s childhood. Taylor’s songs were the soundtrack to Carsyn’s first VideoStar productions that convinced her from a young age that she could be a director someday. They were the songs she made up dances to with her bestie and the songs we blasted with the windows down in the car. But the Reputation tour concert was when the songs became mine too.

It feels silly to type those words. It’s just pop music, right?

I don’t think so.

I remember standing through every song of that show, no longer in my archetypal Maiden era singing along with every word of love and heartbreak over all of life happening to me. Instead, I stood rooted in my Mother era, both to my daughter and newly to myself, the fierce protector of my family and the one taking action on behalf of us. The Mother in me watched knowingly as the 63-foot tall cobra rose up from the stage and as the crowd lost their ever-loving minds I teared up as a smirk curled up one side of my mouth. Look at you. Look what you’ve made. That’s how you do it, honey. That’s how you create from wreckage. That’s how you learn to see in the dark. That’s how you own every piece of yourself and act on behalf of yourself. That’s how you eulogize your former self. And THAT is how you turn what was meant to destroy you into your most brilliant. work. to date. I scanned the massive arena wondering how many of us might be thinking the same thing. I stood witnessing a resurrection on stage as well as in myself. I stood there singing along to every word in my own Mother tongue knowing deep in my bones, in the flow of my own ancient serpentine wisdom, in my own little way, I too would create something beautiful from what was burying me. I had to. The only alternative would be soul-death and

we know all too well the things that bury us alive like us better dead.

There is a chapter I write in our upcoming book Slow Burn depicting the self-compassion of gathering up all the younger versions of myself from over the years that always makes me think of the ending scene in the video for “Look What You Made Me Do”. Additionally, I turned 46 this week and something about getting older and wiser and closer to my Crone era, having pulled myself up and out of so many pretty little graves, makes me think of the opening scene of the same video. This song I used to sing in the car from a place of trauma and fear and anger and a catalyst for action, a shattered skeleton of myself still covered in earth with scorpions crawling from my eye sockets, a protective force burning in my bones, is now the song I sing at the top of my lungs in the car as my wild Skeleton-Woman self, reassembled bone by bone, each piece of me just as angry and yet also named and belonging and a catalyst for creativity, plenty of breath filling once gasping lungs, the fire in my belly once reduced to embers roaring back to life with artistic force. I drive and sing and

the epitaph on the headstone in my rearview mirror reads: She rose up from the dead, she does it all the time.

Making something beautiful out of the thing that buried you is the power move - as in, moving in and through and in connection to and in alignment with your own power. Even if that beauty-making is simply the slow work of healing ourselves, of bringing ourselves back to life. Self-resuscitation. Our own resurrection.

When we know how to rise we can let ourselves die a million deaths trusting we will resurrect every. single. time.

We are coming for our younger selves, for our original goodness, for the bones of who we’ve always been. We are releasing the compliant, quiet, people-pleasing, good-girl versions of ourselves so the truth of our strength, softness, creativity, and resistance of our original selves can breathe free. This is who we are now. We are the makers of beautiful things. We are the excavators of pretty little graves. We are the breathers of flames and the resurrectors of bones. The ones fashioning truer art out of old clay and weaving more honest stories from old threadbare ideas. We are shedders of skins, so. many. skins. Not once or twice, but again and again. As many times as it takes. Scales forever falling from our eyes refracting the light as they float to the ground and throwing prisms all around the room. A disco ball where a graveyard once stood.

Is it just pop music? Is art ever just art? Is the thing that buries us alive ever just about us? I don’t think so. If it were, we wouldn’t gather in arenas and sing along in chorus. If it were we wouldn’t be in awe of cell phone lights in lieu of lighters swaying in unison and we wouldn’t feel a chill running up our spine with what Brene Brown calls “collective joy”.

Look what they made us do.

They made us rise and heal and create and find each other along the way.

They made us all so. damn. gorgeous.

Your pretty little grave is empty and your headstone is in the rearview mirror.

What does your epitaph say?

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FIVE FAVES

what I’m loving right now:

1. this mascara primer - So apparently as I get older the mascara that once dotted my brow bone and the lenses of my sunglasses now travels south (like a couple of other things have) and smears under my eyes. It doesn’t seem to matter that I don’t put mascara on my lower lashes. Somehow it gets there anyway. Thankfully, my dear friend Bethany recently intervened and told me I don’t have to live like this. She put me onto mascara primer and I went to Target that same day. The internet is divided on whether to apply mascara directly after the primer or to let it dry first. I’m team Directly After and I maintain my thoughts on the matter.

2. Andrea Gibson’s Instagram REEL response to Champagne Problems - I mean…

3. The big crone energy walking stick I bought myself on my birthday last year from the little office at the state park entrance where I often hike. I crossed paths with a bunch of retired gals and their hiking group and they had these wooden walking sticks covered in stickers from all the hikes they’ve done. The were total BAMFy crones and I wanted to be part of their gang. At least in spirit. (Note: I paid a fraction of the online price on-site, so you don’t have to spend a lot to get going.)

4. Currently binging Daisy Jones & the Six for a full three hours every Friday even though I didn’t read the book and had no idea going in that Riley Keough was Elvis Presley’s granddaughter. I’m in it for the screen-writing and the lens on the creative process, but also 100% for the peak ‘70’s fashion.

5. Trader Joe’s Bitters - I went dry back in 2017 after I began sensing that I would need to be sharp and clear for the season of life ahead. I knew whatever it was I needed to not be numb. I had ZERO clue how eerily true that would prove to be and I also have never wanted to numb-out more than I did during that season. Alas, I doubled down on my “soda water on ice with lime” drink of choice and have become a collector of preferred carbonated bevies ever since. I have very specific ideas of how carbonated a drink should be. The more bubbles the better in my book. My partner-in-iced-beverages, Allison, (aka @shebebrave on IG) turned me onto Trader Joe’s bitters as a little splash of botanical flavor for my favorite soda water. Yes, it has a little alcohol, but so does vanilla extract so make your decisions accordingly.