I look at the last post in 2020 and realize that the world is right back as if the intervening four years did not happen.

I am an I, now, I think. “You” reflected the dissociative state of loss, grief, new sobriety, pandemic. Those years, I lost another parent. I wrote another book. I stayed sober, even stopped counting the days, months, years (five, going on six) of sobriety. My hair became curly without even paying to sit with curling rods wound to my skull and ammonia-scented perm formula leaking down my face like in the 1980s. It also turned platinum blond, otherwise known as gray. I got old. I mean truly old. I look at my students, full grown adults, and feel like we are time travelers from the past and future, meeting in this place called a classroom.

That actually makes me more interested in them as historical actors, living in a different era, a different context, even as it overlaps with my own. What do they need from me, teaching a class that even I don’t think they need. Time folds back on itself and I identify with them more than I identify with my peers in this respect. I’m not sure if my peers allow themselves to confess that our way of doing things is not appropriate any longer and has not been for quite a while. That we are part of the problem. They have hope. I quite quit long ago in despair. This past semester, I joked that I’m no longer burned out, I’m checked out. It’s a bad feeling when you have ninety young people on your hands.

I was in — how many? — several plays. I had written off ever acting again. Twenty years ago now, I had been Oberon in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, “Reclaiming Cunt” in Vagina Monologues (twice, actually), Violet Veneble in Suddenly, Last Summer, and both a nineteenth century guide and a ghost on living history tours. Great fun, but also of the time and place. I wasn’t a pro. I didn’t even rise to amateur. I took a few classes in Shakespeare in Washington, D.C., but that was — damn! time does fly — over fifteen years ago. But, then, I saw a call for everyone at my school to audition, and another faculty member did, and the parts were perfect for two older ladies, so we became two madwomen in an adaptation of Madwoman of Chaillot. Covid shut down the first production, but they brought it back in time for the freshmen in that version to be seniors in this one. The next year, I was cast as part of the chorus of Orlando and in a staged reading of a translation of Patenting Destiny. After that, I decided that I should find children my own age to play with.

I did. Now I’ve played Louella Parsons in Shakespeare in Hollywood, had a part in a staged reading of a one-act for a playwrite’s workshop, and will play Maria in Twelfth Night later this summer. The point of all this being that, I found in the whimsy some importance in this art. Embodying the joyful chaos of Madwoman and Shakespeare in Hollywood or the poignant beauty of life beyond gender in Orlando feels necessary — for the audience and for me. It challenges me to throw myself against this shell of fury that encases me, to go beyond Me.

I found a writing group. So the words flow toward something. I’m not sure what. I pick this blog up because it is something I know that led me to other books in the past. So, why not try again. I may never write another word here. It may peter out in a week or a month. Whatever. I’m not required.

Because, I have no project. Someone asked me, in a professional capacity, “what are you working on now?” My reply was that I had an official story but really I’m deeply uninspired and am working on figuring out what I will work on next. I’m figuring out the voice is I follow the official story. Mostly, I’m scraping away the parchment to leave a pamlpiset because I’m alienated from history, disgusted with the academic world, and resetting myself. Or maybe a better metaphor is that I’m like a bike or a machine that must be retored. I have to take the bits of myself apart, clean them off, replace and repair broken bits, and put it all back together to run smoothly.

Whatever the metaphor. Whatever the task, mostly I just want to be. To sit and be.