This one’s for you, Miche.

There’s a moment that I love while performing. It might be before an entrance, or maybe behind a curtain that’s about to lift. Or right before launching into a solo. There’s a moment when I know what is going to happen in the immediate future, something that nobody else in the room knows. I’m holding that future in my mind, getting into the position that I need to be in to begin, collecting my breath and my body. In the space of as little as 10 or 20 seconds I run through the next sequence. My heart is humming with adrenaline, so I know that my timing is going a little fast. I take one extra moment to find a little bit of calm.

And then I leap.

That’s what right now feels like. I once heard an episode of Andy J. Pizza’s Creative Pep Talk podcast about how one’s relationship to a creative body of work has seasons. Some times, the land lies fallow. Other times, there are ideas ready to harvest. And other times, there are seeds going into the ground, germinating, and growing. It’s something I like to keep an eye on, asking myself from time to time, “Does this feel like a harvest time? Does this feel like a time for planting?”

Right now feels like a growing time. This year, as I’ve written about before, I am trying so hard to escape the tides of feed-based social media and recommendation engines. That’s a seed that’s growing. I’m reading more. That’s another seed. Something that I hope to write about more in due time is the work that I’m doing to really take a hard look at sex and sexuality, which is something that I was inspired by this new/ish crop of shows like Big Mouth, Sabrina, Steven Universe, Pen15, and Sex Education to talk about with my therapist and which has opened up so many different questions for me. Many days I am incredibly optimistic about the heavy things in my heart that I am starting to believe that I can set down. I’m also often emotional, tending to and reassuring the tender inner child who has learned to put his needs last.

One of the most difficult questions I deal with on a daily basis is how to answer the question, “How are you?” I can think of so many over-honest ways to answer that question.

I am frustrated because I need to tend to myself, but instead I am here.

I can’t possibly answer how I am because I’m barely able to answer when I am or where I am. DEFINITELY not why I am.

Please don’t ask me that. Even better, please don’t look at me or talk to me.

I have never identified so much with the teenager-y desire to be invisible (this is an exaggeration, please don’t fact check me). To bring it back up to the point of where I started, in order to get to the point where I am ready to take that breath and take the leap involves a lot of preparation, a lot of contemplating choices, and a confidence that this is the choice. I don’t have that yet, but I’m getting there. And more than anyone else, I’m so ready to discover what comes out.