Zen Bender

by Stephanie Krikorian

  I use highbrow terminology for that: People dump their shit on you. All. Day. Long. Not just dating stuff either. Their insecurities with their lives and their successes. Their need for, rather than want for, a relationship.

  And I say all of this fully admitting I was (am) looking for, but not finding, that guy to be my life partner. But, as I assessed my life to date in reverse order as it pertained to being single, the fact remained that I was presented with an insanely exciting job at a young age, a job that, even looking back now, I would not have traded for anything.

  I traveled all over the world chasing newsmakers. Me. Regular young and naive me from St. Catharines, Ontario, Canada. Inexperienced. Hopping on and off planes and checking into fancy international hotels on someone else’s dime. That was thrilling—more exciting than the clown I met at speed dating who didn’t want to pay for a drink at a bar on our one follow-up date. Instead, he brought little bottles of Sambuca (of all things) and asked if I wanted to take one into the bathroom and pour it in my glass; no (I’m leaving now) and no.

  I preferred getting on a plane to Sun Valley, Idaho, to cover the big-thinking Allen & Company Media Conference, or covering a Super Bowl somewhere, or standing in every Major League Baseball dugout at spring training in Florida and interviewing the players for a series on the business of baseball.

  Maybe Mr. Sambuca would have been okay. But landing interviews with Jeffrey Bezos or Michael Ovitz or you name it was a lot more exciting. Don’t get me wrong: Plenty of busy TV producers manage to meet their eventual life partners while also jetting off to interview luminaries. But I wasn’t focused on it. Not my A-focus, anyway. Not while I was in my prime and didn’t know that my face would sag and my hair would get gray. My A-focus was on landing a plum assignment. My B-focus was on landing a bruised plum of a date.

  I was born in 1969. And I have a lot of friends who are essentially my age who currently have no life partner and some who have never been married. There are some who met their mates deep into their forties but divorced them. Professionally, these single or single-for-a-long-time friends of mine kick serious ass at work. Lawyers, corporate executives, managing directors, fine art brokers—powerhouses, all of them.

  Those judgy people who kept asking if I’d met anyone clearly hadn’t read or understood The Feminine Mystique, the book that called out the false concept that our place, our only place, was in the home as a mother and homemaker. It wasn’t. It isn’t.

  But, I’ll admit, we had perhaps experienced a Feminist Mistake—window-shopping, not buying or committing, thinking time was never-ending. (Nobody told me then that eggs get old, the baby oil you used to put on your face to tan at sixteen will show up at forty in the form of spots, and the inventory for finding a life partner will shrink considerably. Well, maybe they did. But I didn’t listen.)

  Maybe I was five minutes too old to hear about the concept, but I had never met anybody who’d frozen their eggs. I could be wrong, but I feel like my generation of women is maybe the first that, en masse, was able to grab at professional opportunities, and who chose to do so as a priority over finding a partner. Not that we didn’t want one, but the doors were kicked open at our jobs and we were proudly storming in with glee.

  I will allow myself this: At some point during this dating blitz, I found a little peace with myself. I accepted my starring role in This Is the Life I Made, not These Are the Cards I Was Dealt, and with the decision to take children off the table (because at some point it gets a bit rusty up there), the faucet was loosened, the pressure was off, and the conscious decision to only let value-added people into my life made dating different. More enjoyable. Once I figured out that I could go to Paris alone if I felt like it and I didn’t need a date…the doors opened up.

  Do I have dating fatigue? Yes. Over the years, so many people said, “You gotta put yourself out there.” I have. I do. I’m tired. I get rejection all day long as a writer, pitching and pitching and pitching. It cuts deep, but not as deeply as dating rejection. That’s emotionally exhausting. So is choosing outfits and staying out late and pushing through the painful awkwardness of a first meeting with someone you don’t know who has nothing to say. If you’ve done it, you can relate. If you haven’t, trust me when I say, it is a lot.

  But the good news is, after trying all the books and the coaches and the online dating, I have at least figured out that the stakes don’t feel so high anymore. The tick-tock of the clock is less noisy. All in due time. The only good thing about dating later in life: My thinking started to change for the better. Wisdom and experience began to feed my decisions, not just coaches and books. I started to realize that relationships would not look the way I thought they would look when I was twenty.

  And that was okay.

  I also learned a few tools from my efforts that I’ll employ, and some of the things that just didn’t feel right, too (a little anti-feminist to say the least). And, with all the preaching about authenticity, I’ve fully dismissed any tactics that require any form of dating deception (not that I ever embraced any of it). You get what you pay for in some sense. Friends who have acted breezy and created a persona to land a guy have then had to live with the ramifications of not having a say in the day-to-day once the ploy worked.

  We are different people than we were in our twenties and thirties. And, despite the trauma of decades of more bad dates than I care to recall, and the disappointment when one that I kind of liked didn’t feel the same, at least in my forties, I was finally experienced enough to know that it would still all be okay. I have built a good life and it will go on.

  Plus, there’s this thing called hope. And that will eventually get me back in the game.

  And because of hope, I will always keep shopping. Even at Marshalls. Because every once in a while, there’s an Isabel Marant blazer on the rack that’s in perfect condition and fits just right, that I know I’ll have and wear forever. Or at least there’s the potential that such a unicorn exists.

  Chapter 5

  Numerologists, Clairvoyants, and Healers, Oh My!

  spirituality

  Nowhere do enlightenment and bliss feel more achievable and available for purchase than in Venice Beach, California. Nobody there seems to work, so they seemingly have time to fill achieving peace. And everyone, no matter who you talk to, is a believer in the pursuit of healing the mind, body, and soul. They juice, they chant, and they don’t make decisions that aren’t psychic—or healer—approved. People are painfully familiar with the lunar calendar, the latest New Age remedy, and of course, Mercury in retrograde, which, it seems, is taking place: All. The. Time.

  Venice is a place of contrasts too—littered with both young people, lunching and surfing and trotting around on electric scooters (annoying), and the old guard: the real hippies who laid claim to the beach zone decades ago, who have dress flip-flops and casual ones. Both have made Venice a true state of mind, not just a zip code, one that permeates its population’s every move and every meal, and can be felt in every item for sale on its boardwalk (and now couture-filled retail zone), Abbott Kinney. It’s both frozen in time and a snapshot of progress as seen by the gutter-less, colorful bungalows beside the modern, concrete, steel and glass, high-rise homes that have been squeezed onto a thousand-square-foot lot, thanks to the surge of dotcoms and apps that have infiltrated the vibe.

  But that vibe is its allure. When I first started spending time in Venice, I didn’t just look around. I inhaled. Deeply.

  Guru Ground Zero

  The writer’s life, like Venice, grew to be a world of contrasts.

  I quickly discovered that the freedom of working for oneself was a stress-filled curse rich with an entirely new menu of anxieties, but it was also completely glorious in multiple ways. There was no more Sunday-night angst ahead of Monday-morning blues back at work. There was no more six o’clock scramble to catch the subway to the office. Sure, there were endless hour
s of time to fill and schedule, but those hours, I learned, could be filled anywhere on earth.

  My anywhere became Los Angeles in the winter.

  When I first started working for myself, I sponged off my friend Karyn, who generously allowed me to stay with her in LA for long periods of time. She didn’t just offer accommodation and good wine, but frequently some words of wisdom as well. Not found in any self-help book, her words kept me going when I thought of quitting (often) and returning to a day job with health insurance, because it might have been easier than slogging away on my own.

  Once, when I said as much to Karyn, she offered up some key thinking. She said, and I’m paraphrasing, not to pull the rip cord on my new business until I absolutely had to because, once I did so, I would probably never try to work for myself again.

  And so, despite the occasional struggle or speedbump that came my way, I stayed the course. I waited it out, and it eventually paid off. Because, as people struggled with a stalled economy, they increasingly, it seemed, turned to self-help books. Previously in publishing, it seemed like the hot trends were books by Real Housewives and Snooki. And then suddenly there was a flood of diet books and self-help books by experts, many of whom needed help writing them. And that was good for business.

  That meant that, eventually, I didn’t have to be a sponge, which was good because I hated being a sponge. I was able to rent my own little bungalow in Venice.

  Renting in Venice, by the way, was an interesting endeavor, almost like a pyramid scheme that put me squarely at the bottom. I was renting from a woman who was renting the bungalow from another woman, who was renting the bungalow from the owner. Everybody I knew in Venice was doing something similar, hanging on for dear life, keeping their options open as housing prices soared, never willing to walk away from cheap rent in case they needed it back one day.

  The first winter I rented a house in Venice I was particularly fogged up in the brain from whatever was happening at the time. Maybe I was feeling anxious or stressed, about what in particular I don’t recall, but for a writer on a deadline, it wasn’t a good state of being. No work was getting done, just fretting. After talking to some local friends, I was immediately informed that the only way to clear it out was to hit the New Age action hard. I assembled a list of spiritual experts of varying disciplines.

  It was time to insert a little church in my life. Venice offered up the religion and congregation I needed.

  Like a good New Yorker, I was ready to throw money at it and embrace even the most seemingly far-fetched spiritual activities.

  That made great sense to me.

  As I started to research what single practice might be most appropriate, I was entranced by them all. There were so many. It became clear that there was no need to pick and choose. Why approach my urge to reduce my anxiety as an either/or situation, when I could do everything that existed to fix my problem?

  And, without any hesitation, I decided that more had to be better, so for every suggestion that came my way, a booking soon followed, until I had fully overloaded my days with appointments in order to reduce my anxiety, figuring that where one fix didn’t work, another would pick up the slack.

  I’d already dabbled in a few things by this point—I had been cleansing, and dieting, and doing multiple self-help-type activities on the East Coast, but this mission was next-level, and more of an out-there and New Age approach to change and enlightenment. More wacky, sure. But the way I saw it, I had six weeks to make it happen, and I was determined to cram. I was going to get fixed, California-style.

  I was going to kill it; my quest for enlightenment was a certainty.

  Armed with a list that was long and grew longer, I charted out an A-type-personality mind-body-and-soul regimen certain to brush away the cobwebs and, in the process, make my life great. It included numerology, rainbow healing, sound-bath meditation, acupuncture, Thai massage, yoga, astrology, and frankly, whatever else I could get my hands on. I asked everyone I spoke to for a referral. And believe me when I say that everyone had one to give. Simply put, there was a lot of AFOG (another fucking opportunity for growth) in Venice. An endless supply.

  There was a constant stream of unsolicited advice, too. Unprovoked, I was told things like: I wore too much black because I hoped it would act as a protective shell.

  Or, as I preferred to think of it: Black hid the extra pounds better than white.

  Regardless, I welcomed it all, and soaked up all the wisdom I could take in.

  My first stop: The Mystic Bookstore. It’s on Abbot Kinney Road and is a Mecca for crystals and incense and tie-dye and feathers and beads and books on fixing all kinds of shit about oneself. And, of course, healers—a wall of names, photos, and their specific practices.

  Just walking in there made me feel semi-healed, but I knew I’d be more healed once I sat down with the on-call numerologist.

  Back in a little dark room, a very serious man asked me my name, birthday, and birthplace, then didn’t utter a word for the first ten minutes. This deeply concerned me, as I’d only signed up for thirty minutes for eighty dollars. I couldn’t concentrate as I watched him do some fancy calculations, applying numbers to the letters used in the limited information that I’d provided him. It was like trying to beat the parking meter, knowing time was ticking. Panicked, I wondered if I should zip out to the front desk and quickly buy more time, since nothing was immediately happening and the time was dwindling.

  Eventually, he spoke.

  I learned that I was a strong eight and nine. In the looks department, I’ve always considered myself no more than a six, so my immediate assumption was that this had to be a good thing. Higher numbers = better?

  Not the case in numerology. This wasn’t an appearance-based science.

  He explained that those two numbers were somewhat bad together; they stifled one another. Eight spoke to my need and ability to run a business and generate money—abundance and my ability to enjoy it. The problem? The other number canceled it all out. The other number, nine, was my need to do good in the world, likely a result of my modest upbringing. Those two numbers were at odds with each other: that I could in fact succeed in business and be rich (my interpretation), but that my parents being frugal (his words, not mine) taught me it was better to be careful with money, so I constantly resisted being rich.

  Personally, I have always felt quite open to being rich.

  Still, I started to reflect. Could that have been true? A few things came to mind…

  My father will, to this day, into his eighties, bend down and pick up a penny. I might not exert myself in such a way even for a quarter. Maybe a dollar. War-time and post-war children, my parents walked ten miles to school, home for lunch, and back again, every day. You know that story.

  When I was young, I wanted a pair of Dominion Precision white roller skates with red wheels. My dad bought me a pair. I opened them up, all shiny and white, and slipped them on. They were big, he said, size eight, so I’d grow into them. I never did. To this day, I only take a size seven or seven and a half.

  And once, after I’d moved to New York post-college, my father saw how many pairs of shoes I owned. He said he’d worn the same pair of Florsheim Shoes for twenty-five years. I was in my twenties at the time, so I explained of course that my feet were somewhat smaller twenty-five years back. That new shoes over the years were a necessity.

  Shoes aside, there’s always a used tea bag on the counter at my parents’ house because nobody should use a tea bag just once. It can, after all, make a couple of cups.

  The worst and best depression-era-thinking memory I have is of my grandfather on my mom’s side. That man was a penny-pincher of monumental proportions. One afternoon, way back in the eighties, we were sitting in our kitchen, with its bronzy-brown appliances and dark brown cupboards, at our oval glass table, eating off our white Corelle plates with blue flowers, when my older sister b
egan to drain a can of tuna liquid (oil or water) into the sink. Suddenly, my grandfather, noticing what she was doing, jumped up and screeched. We were all startled. He approached her, making her stop immediately. He grabbed a Corelle mug from the cupboard, and then Papa, as we called him, drained the tuna juice into that mug. And then…he drank it. Drank. It. All. He said it was wasteful to throw out the liquid in which the tuna was packed.

  With that gag-inducing memory relived in my head, the numerologist’s words suddenly made sense. I was frugal by way of DNA. I had just forgotten or not really given it much thought. I loved spending money. But I could suddenly see his point.

  He told me that, if I could ignore the pull to be frugal, the floodgates would open and riches would follow. He said the best way to ignore it was to live a little—to stop holding onto my money so tightly and splurge—because once I did, more money would pour in. Um, dude, this session ain’t cheap.

  Near the end of my short session, my numerologist asked what I did for a living. I had not previously mentioned it. I told him that I was a writer. He paused and looked at me and said, “Wow. I see nothing in your numbers that suggests you’re remotely creative or a writer.”

  And then my time was up.

  As I walked home, having hoped my numerology would inspire me, I was instead deflated and defeated, because I was, apparently, not a writer. Not anymore. Not according to the numbers. Problematic, since it was how I had been making my living and how I was going to pay for all this New Age stuff I’d just booked.

  But I believed him. That night I tried to think of all the other things I could do instead. Nothing came to mind.

  The very next day, waking up feeling desperate to figure out a new career and develop a new perspective on life, I decided I needed a break, so I went for Thai massage at seven in the morning. It was half-price at seven, so, okay, I was apparently even more frugal than I had thought but flexible about my schedule because I was a writer. But then I wasn’t, so it was confusing.