I AM NOT MYSELF THESE DAYS

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You are not yourself these days.

You haven’t been yourself since your brother’s birthday, June 18th.

A part of you is embarrassed that you’re allowing something as cliché as a birthday to trigger such a flood of grief. This is the insecure part of you; the part of you that’s cold and smart and irreverent and funny—in a biting way.

But another part of you, the earnest, “grounded-in-her-truth” part of you, gets it.

Of course, his birthday is triggering, honey. It’s not only the first birthday he’s not around for, but it’s a stark reminder that this is real. His birthday is here, and he is not. The earnest girl within assures.

You decide her name is Guinevere.

You decide that Guinevere collects investment pieces, oversized cashmere sweaters, all in varying shades of pastel.

She’s warm and kind and has a clean home that smells like vanilla scented candles bought in bulk. She’s sweet, but lacks wit. There’s nothing cool, funny, or droll about cashmere, vanilla, pastel, sensitivity.

This is satire, right? A throaty chuckle cackles inside of you. It’s a sound Guinevere couldn’t conjure if she tried.

You’re not a birthday bitch. You hardly remember your own birthday, let alone anyone else's. Stop reaching for shit to be upset about. The voice rasps. It’s a vocal fry you recognize: it’s the insecure snark queen within. You decide her name is Nikki.

The name Nikki triggers you, middle-school style. Back in the salad days of adolescence, you would’ve traded ~anything~ to be a *Nikki.*

The Nikkis’ of seventh grade were athletic and titless; icy and chill; sarcastic and palatable. Everything you wanted to be and more.

Tweens who aren’t WASPs don’t own cashmere, and you were too goth-leaning for pastel, but still, you were pretty much a full-time Guinevere at twelve.

You think about your middle-school friend Pheobe, who once described you to your face as “overwhelming.” You were in the hallway between classes. You were devastated. When she said “overwhelming,” you heard “overdeveloped.”

You hated having tits.

If you’d known about binding back then, you would’ve flattened more than just your chest.

You were one of those girls who got taller and lither when you hit thirteen. The tits balanced out, were small even.

Moreover, you finally figured out how to be a Nikki.

It was the only way to survive, especially when you moved to LA at eighteen in pursuit of an acting career. All those auditions, all those creeps, if don’t learn how to channel Nikki, as an aspiring teen actress, you’re fucked. Mentally and physically.

Nikki got you through your first staff-writing job in New York. She helped you survive all those misaligned years in gossipy media. You listened to so many podcasts hosted by grown-up Nikkis, you began to talk and think like a Nikki in a way that (almost) felt organic.

One day in your early thirties, you went to a yoga class on a whim. You never were a yoga girl, but why not? You’d just moved from Manhattan to Montclair, New Jersey, with your then-wife, and were bored, maybe? The class teemed with the kind of women who wear workout sets with fun prints on them: lemons, stars, ditzy floral, pineapples, pears.

The class was full of Guineveres.

How did I go from speed walking down 11th Avenue to a yoga class in Jersey? You scoffed, promising yourself and your higher power, Lana Del Rey, that you’d never ever wear leggings with fruit all over them. It’s a slippery slope. One day you’re gazing at the Brooklyn Bridge in all black leather, the next you’re calling the cops on the teens skateboarding down the cul-de-sac, wearing bright banana spandex.

During child’s pose, the teacher, a man, gently put his hand on your back. You waited for your body to recoil. You’ve always detested the iteration of man who touches women under the guise of spirituality and healing. But his touch didn’t feel creepy at all. It didn’t even feel male.

It felt genuine.

Your then-wife picked you up from that yoga class, and for some reason, you couldn’t stop crying the whole ride home. “I just realized I’m not like those snarky podcast girls,” you sniffled, lamely. “I’m not where I want to be in my career because I’m not being authentic.”

Your then-wife was impressed by your yoga breakthrough. “Damn. You got all that from one yoga class?” She asked, incredulous. “I need to go back to yoga.”

She never went back to yoga, nor did you.

But you leaned into Guinevere a bit more, sans the pastel, sans the cashmere. Your writing elevated in the process. It transformed into a fine mix: equal parts Guinevere and equal parts Nikki. It felt very authentic, very you.

You might’ve been born a Guinevere, but life made you a Nikki. It’s not nature vs nurture, you finally realized. It’s nature and nurture. Both are valid. Both are real. Both have a point of view.

Nikki is your rising sign; she lives on the exterior. She’s who people meet first.

You are your sun. The person stuck smack dab between two opposing extremes.

But Guinevere is your moon. She represents the most unfiltered, deep parts of you.

When the big bad wolf of Cancer came to blow down your house, mid-April of 2023, Nikki was tanning topless in the front yard.

She was taken out in the first huff and puff; she never stood a chance. The window dressing is usually the first to go.

Guinevere had been out buying groceries when you got the call: your brother had late-stage pancreatic cancer, and it was going to be a long road of fresh hell. She returned home to find the structure of her house demolished. She worried for a moment she’d lost you, too. But eventually she found you beneath the rubble, injured but still very much alive.

Eventually, Nikki crawled her way from the grave. Everyone needed her to take impeccable medical notes at scary oncology appointments, dissociated. A master of the dissociative arts and the only person who could ride in the ambulance with your brother as they drove him to die in hospice, without falling apart.

Then the big bad wolf came for your brother. He snatched him away. You felt sick. A genetic hole blown through your chest. And Guinevere took great care of you for a few weeks there. Nikki knocked out in the bedroom. She needed time off, you guessed. That was okay. It was easier to soften and feel and grieve without her sarcasm and smug, anyway.

Three weeks later, that bitch of a wolf had the nerve to come back. What else could he take? The only rock left, you quickly came to learn. Your mom got diagnosed with stage-four ovarian cancer less than a month after losing your brother, your person, the genetic limb that held you through life. You and Guinevere were scared, heartbroken, and didn’t know how to put one foot in front of the other. You both knew there was no way you’d manage another life collapse without Nikki.

You summoned her from her coma. She awoke, looking roughed up. Emaciated frame with bruise-colored half moons waning beneath sunken eyes.

But you know how Nikkis are. She pulled her body out of bed, took a steaming hot shower, got a gel manicure at the 24-hour salon on Santa Monica Blvd, slithered into slinky black jeans, chewed down an Adderall, and emerged center stage, hot, numb, haunted, and ready to take the leading role in this weird twisted play, it had to be a satire. It had to be.

Nikki wasn’t traumatized or triggered to be back in Club Chemo. Crisis is Nikki’s superpower. Shock and survival mode numb more effectively than rubbing alcohol, straight vodka, and speed combined. She took immaculate medical notes at every scary oncology appointment and cracked wicked jokes. Made everyone laugh with an onslaught of irreverent quips after irreverent quips.

Around this time, you started getting harassed online again. This time was more diabolical than ever.

Nikki was unfazed. She rolled her eyes, we don’t have time for THIS dumb bullshit, she schooled you and sweet, kind Guinie. And she was right! You were dealing with cancer again. There is no space for dumb bullshit when you’re dealing with disease. Especially Cancer, who takes up more space than a man-spreading finance bro on the subway.

But amazingly, your seventy-seven-year-old mother got to experience something your forty-three-year-old brother never did: remission.

The cancer could come back, of course. But this was an unequivocal win, a beating of the odds, a wild-card miracle, if you will.

You unclenched your jaw for the first time in years.

Nikki, exhausted from overwork, collapsed in a heap on the bathroom tile. She slept on the floor, like a log, unmoored, dense, dreamless. Nikki knows the kind of tired that is too tired to dream, do you?

You were worn out, yourself. You hadn’t realized you’d been running on fumes for so long, Nikki and her eyeliner and wisecracks can anesthetize the most excruciating things.

But just because you can’t feel how intensely painful an experience is, doesn’t mean that it doesn’t take a toll, babe. You might not be as depleted as Nikki, who, like a Tony-Award winning Broadway star, carried the weight of eight shows per week without complaint. But don’t it get twisted; being her stagehand was not for the faint of heart, either. It was manual labor. There’s bound to be wear and tear after this much time.

Now, you’re walking around with the glazed-over eyes of an overmedicated psych patient in the 60s. Which is why, ever since your brother’s birthday, which was just weeks after your mother’s remission, you haven’t been yourself.

Too hazy and out-of-it to stop Guinevere from having a full meltdown on your brother’s birthday.

Guinevere is the new star in this new show.

Her performance can only be described as raw, committed, and perhaps a little “too real.”

An audience likes to watch a woman unravel from a safe distance. We’re okay with the breakdown as long as by the end of the second act, she’s put herself back together shinier and newer than before, wrapped up in glittery foil and flawless red bow by curtain call.

An audience likes to furiously masturbate to a pretty little, lone tear streaming down the pretty, little hollow cheeks of a pretty girl. It helps them romanticize the pending psychotic break they can sense brewing within.

But there's nothing romantic or cinematic or pretty about deep grief up close.

Guinevere’s delivery of soul-shattering hurt isn’t self-conscious; it’s eerily intimate.

Even if you’re so far in the back of the theatre, you’re in the nose bleeds, you feel like an intruder watching her perform. Like you’re looking at the actress from beneath a microscope, you can see her pores, her fine lines, her ugly, her truth. Makes that pending psychotic break seem a little less glam, doesn’t it?

Guinevere’s cheeks aren’t hollow; they’re bloated. Her tears aren’t slim or singular; they’re fat, salt-laden, pregnant with rage and brokenness.

The way Guinevere lets it all hang out is terrifying.

You feel exposed all the time.

“I’m not myself these days,” you tell your girlfriend, after snot-crying into a skinny margarita on the Fourth of July.

Ever since his birthday, I haven’t been myself. You think for the millionth time as you cancel plans and crawl into bed while it’s still light out.

So that’s how you found yourself, today, shaking Nikki awake. “I’m becoming ordinary! Earnest! I’m walking around with open wounds, and I’ll lose everything because of it. It’s too grotesque, I’m scaring people off, motherfucker!” You scream till she flutters open her eyes.

So that’s why Nikki is here. Today. Repeating to Guinevere, “This is satire, this is satire, this is satire.”

Guinevere doesn’t respond. She just holds you like a baby. Nuzzles you between her earthy, big, maternal tits.

Nikki crosses her skinny arms. “You don’t even remember your own birthday. Let alone your brother’s. Calm down, everyone,” Nikki yawns.

But Guinevere doesn’t give a fuck about what Nikki has to say. Has she ever? You suddenly wonder. Has Guinevere’s shame around Nikki not belonged to her, but to you? A perception, a deflection from the inner demons you deny exist?

You aren’t sure.

You just look at Guinevere looking at Nikki firmly, like a true mother, like a true woman who is too real to be rattled by anything that isn’t. She clears her throat, “I’m making you a giant bowl of spaghetti, Nikki. Then I’m putting you to bed.”

You wait for Nikki to protect you with a jab. You wait for Nikki to save you with a scathing roll of the eye. You wait for Nikki to break the tension with sarcasm.

She doesn’t.

She nods, eyes heavy with sleep.

You realize how young she is.

How small.

How run-down.

You decide to let the bitch sleep.

You follow Guinevere into the kitchen. She stirs a pot expertly. Her muscles are bigger than you remember. Or maybe you never paid attention. You realize she’s stronger than all of you.

You realize her salty, fat tears will set you free.

Her earnestness will keep you safe.

You won’t be cool or cold or calculated in the season of Guinevere.

But you’ll be healed.

And if you let her do her thing, you might even find a way to feel close to your brother again.

And that is worth everything.

So you let go. You aren’t yourself these days. Because it isn’t your show.

Or maybe it is. After all, you were born a Genieve. Maybe this is the most real you’ve ever been on stage. Maybe the audience isn’t uncomfortable. Maybe they’re relieved.

Maybe you are, too.

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