Zen Bender

by Stephanie Krikorian

  But I didn’t want to do anything else. I had no desire, in fact, for many things that might have made sense. Tattoo, no thanks, not interested. Piercings in weird places, other than earlobes, are certainly not for me, in part because pain is just not my thing. Drugs aren’t for me, not even the latest CBD phase that fancy people are embracing.

  A red streak partly buried in the back of my hair so nobody could actually see it, well, that sounded downright wild. Being in Venice Beach at the time, I wandered into a salon and asked for an expert colorist, and a bright and cheery girl who curses like a sailor (like me, which is a lot of the reason I love her), named Illiana, fixed me up.

  There is certainly no way to know if that red streak put me on the path to creative success, but I liked it. In fact, I kind of loved it. Being wild was apparently fun. Clearly, I had been missing out. It was, perhaps, as wild as I’d ever get. But I understood the rebellion of it all once I did it. And it felt dumb and fun at the same time.

  That red streak was short-lived, but Illiana in my life was not. When I was back in New York for my cut and regular highlights and color, my colorist of a solid decade apparently didn’t like my red streak. Without asking, he dyed it back to match the rest of my hair. He didn’t understand the point of the red streak. And he took it upon himself to remove the red streak. And I took it upon myself not to return to that salon after all the years of loving the way he made every strand of my hair look. His act of discouragement was probably the reason the book suggested doing something we always wanted to do, to transcend the judgment of others. Had I asked my regular colorist to streak me, I’m certain he would have talked me out of it.

  So, to give The Artist’s Way credit on this task: Turn down the noise and just do it.

  Youthfulness for Purchase

  What does all this have to do with aging?

  Well, for starters, gray hair.

  That was the first sign of aging that I noticed. At first, just a couple, then suddenly clumps, then eventually, I needed to do my roots every eight weeks or so. After my colorist committed red-streak-o-cide on me, I found myself turning to Illiana for color that wasn’t rebellious in nature, just necessary. While I found someone A-plus in New York to work magic with the scissors (Ricky), I never found anyone as artful with the color as Illiana.

  And so, a new and expensive grasp-at-youth habit formed: Flying to LA to have my hair colored at least three times a year became a thing.

  Obviously, I could not get on a plane every six to eight weeks to touch up those rapidly increasing gray roots, so to save money, I started using a dye-by-mail kit for the touch-ups. Illiana gave me my recipe, I punched it in online, and voilà, dye started to arrive every other month. Each time, I would put on the gloves, pour bottle A into bottle B, and paint the inch of hair closest to my scalp. The entire system worked like a charm.

  Until, one day, it did not.

  One month, I opened the box of hair color and got myself set up in my finest ratty shirt. I gloved up and opened the bottles that contained the two ingredients that make medium brown. Based 100 percent on nothing, I imagined that neither bottle did anything alone, but the magic happened upon mixing. That’s when medium brown became, well, medium brown. Otherwise it was just a bottle of white liquid and a bottle of canola-oil-colored liquid.

  That particular day, I peeled the seal, and before I could pour the oil-looking bottle into the other one, it slipped from my hand and dropped onto my white tile bathroom floor. Startled, I hesitated and stared, then I reacted. I picked up the bottle, used some toilet paper to wipe up the spill, threw everything in the garbage—including the liquids, because I couldn’t dye my hair with half the product I needed (though I considered it)—and stepped back to assess the situation. I looked at the counter, the side of the vanity, and the floor, and they were all as white as they had been before my #DyeFail began.

  I exited and went on with my day, just without medium-brown roots.

  Hours later, I ran upstairs again to grab something from my bedroom. One quick glance into the bathroom stopped me in my tracks. The countertop was medium brown; the side of the vanity was splashed with medium brown. The white tile squares on the floor were medium brown, and the previously white grout was fully and deeply medium brown. The toilet seat, and the side of the toilet, were heavily splashed and stained with medium brown.

  While it was all horrifying, the toilet seat in particular was a problem. To be clear, it looked like someone had experienced a massive misfire of extremely explosive poop, and had tried in vain to make it to the seat, but basically couldn’t and had crapped everywhere. Essentially, everything in that bathroom that day was medium brown except the roots of my hair.

  And not just that day. Saving hundreds of dollars by dyeing my roots at home would one day cost me thousands in bathroom renovations to get the new and permanent brown out.

  Note to self: Apparently, each bottle alone did actually have some active ingredients.

  The Thrill of Looking Emotionless

  It’s fair to say, gray hair soon became the least of my aging worries. Eventually, I noticed it all just started to sag. My belly started to look like cake batter that was being poured and then froze mid-pour. The boobs were suddenly a little less perky than they had once been. And, worst of all, I started to notice that my face was falling. Wrinkles and jowls, two words that had not entered my brain space in my early forties, became my nemesis. Fortunately, I was already taking an anti-aging journey to the West Coast when I decided to add to my anti-aging regime the best invention next to air conditioning: Botox. Sure, LA gives good guru, but the City of Angels absolutely excels at wiping the emotion completely off your face with a little squirt in the forehead just once or twice a year.

  So, while I’m certain it was never The Artist’s Way’s intention for me to pick up some when-in-Rome habits, that was indeed the result of my efforts to unclog and unleash my creative genius.

  What it certainly did unleash, as in run off the leash and out of my head, was the information I had learned in my early feminist reading from books like The Beauty Myth by Naomi Wolf, the kind of books I used to soak up before more satisfying ones like The Secret came along. That particular piece of literature stuck in my head for most of my younger years, but obviously drained right out the second I learned the term “elevens” and that I had them. What I had learned from Wolf’s criticism about high heels as a tool used by men to keep women down, the dating coach caused to evaporate, like the elevens on my forehead, with one little injection.

  More, it quickly became apparent that Botox wasn’t a choice, but an imperative. It wouldn’t be if all of us on the planet chose not to do it. We’d be equal in our wrinkles. As things stood, however, opting out of buying youthfulness would set me back and make me look older than all the Botoxed people of the world.

  It was an anti-feminist, damned-if-you-do-damned-if-you-don’t quagmire that was inevitable unless all the women of the world united and agreed to accept wrinkles, forfeit injections, and all look our actual age forever. The problem, as I started to realize, was that we trash female celebs when they overshoot on the face work, but we trash them even more when they don’t do it.

  We’re all rotten.

  And so, I get my Botox. Since I quite frankly never need to look or act my age, those beauty runs to LA became a lifetime commitment that I will never abandon as long as I’m able to make that flight.

  As I got to thinking about that notion—not looking my age (not only thanks to Botox, I believe)—I made an all-out effort to tell people I was heading toward fifty. There was no shame, in my mind, of reaching that age. The response was always the same: What? You don’t look it! Of course, that’s supposed to be a good thing and, for all my insecurities, I certainly enjoyed hearing it and felt smug being told how young I looked. But it also made me wonder: What’s fifty supposed to look like? For me to not look fifty meant peo
ple have compared me to others at fifty. It meant they have sized a woman up and essentially told her, Don’t worry, you don’t look that dreadful age. It meant we were all hating on fifty, and age in general, and being young was still the only win.

  I wasn’t going to stop coloring my hair and freezing my face, but I also wasn’t going to be ashamed of my age. I’m proud of it. I’m not sure that means age is all about the way we wear it, more that we need to recalibrate our notion of fifty, or every age. Even with our hypocritical touch-ups.

  Can I connect that line of thinking to my red streak? Maybe. Can I thank The Artist’s Way for getting me there? Yes, I think I can. It certainly wasn’t the goal when I started reading it. Plus, I feel certain the author’s intention wasn’t to encourage my Botox habit. And I had long since stopped doing my morning pages. Perhaps I’m a hypocrite for still grasping at looking younger, but the book made me decide that fifty wasn’t going to stop me from doing anything that I’d previously felt too old to do.

  The thing I was not able to square in my head: Why was I able to feel okay about aging, but not to feel okay about my appearance or whatever I was measuring as success? All I could come up with was: We all have our shit.

  My friend Sandra asked me a few months before my fiftieth birthday, “What are your goals for turning fifty?”

  Despite the very timely nature of her question during this writing, right as I was pondering the notion of goals and then beating myself up for having stopped setting them, I said, “I have none. I just want to be okay with it and not freak out about it like so many other people do. I want to have a party. And go on a trip. I’d like to buy myself a gift to celebrate, and I’d like someone to make me a cake.”

  Of course, I have had those moments of terror when I thought: I can’t accomplish anything great after fifty, so why set goals? Nobody becomes a raging success at that age, do they? Or am I just getting started? I frequently Google who’s-done-what-at-what-age inquiries. Van Gogh was a late bloomer. Julia Child didn’t publish her first cookbook until she was fifty. Laura Ingalls Wilder published her first book at age sixty-five.

  When I was working on Dr. Jen Welter’s empowering book, Play Big (she was the first female coach of the NFL), we were trying to square away some advice she was going to write about everybody’s potential to make history. My counterargument to the point she was making was that, for example, I would never make history. I was too old. And this was post-the Dove and the others, so perhaps I had forgotten that I was going to be famous, which would have been perhaps like making history. As Dr. Welter and I hashed out how to demonstrate her point, I kept insisting I would never make history.

  Dr. Welter said, over and over, “But you might.”

  And then along came Elizabeth. And that made me think Dr. Welter was onto something—that we have it in us to make history.

  Elizabeth is a good friend, a supremely knowledgeable wellness advocate, an all-around lovely and caring person. And she creates and reads astrological charts based on planetary placement at the moment a human was born, and she does so with great passion and focus. She did mine, and it was an amazing experience.

  Elizabeth told me that, in general, I was just getting started, that my life had some purpose that would in time be revealed. I apparently have a mark to make on this planet.

  Simply put, before Elizabeth explained harmonics and such to me, when I sat down for my reading, she said, “You are here on this earth to get some shit done.”

  And Elizabeth said it was yet to come.

  The thing she told me that stuck in my head the most was a trait I shared with this guy you might have heard of named President Barack Obama. I don’t think I’m Barack Obama-caliber. At. All. But it was inspiring to hear that he and I, thanks to Pluto and Jupiter, and the 41st Harmonic, share some characteristics that tee us up for action, including being driven, and for being part of the largeness of life, comfortable on the mountaintop. To be clear, politics will never be my thing (other than obsessing over it). Elizabeth agreed that wasn’t my future, but rather, some sort of significant bridge-building was.

  Here’s the thing about her words: Believe them or don’t believe them or the concept on which they are based, but understand how motivating it was to hear them. At the very least, I dismissed my pre-determined idea that I was too useless and too old to make anything of value happen. That my time had come and gone and that I should settle into a pleasant life and do what I needed to do to get by. Not a bad thing, my life, but, somewhere in my mind, I had always marveled at the amazing drive of great people, and their desire to make the world better. And I had a desire to do it myself, but just didn’t (and still don’t) know how. But the wheels are, once again, turning.

  I asked Elizabeth if I’d missed my chance, though. What if I had driven right past the Doing Something exit without even noticing while I was busy obsessing over MSNBC?

  She said my accomplishment-to-be was unaccomplishable without all of my life experience to date. That the bridge-building would manifest later. (She used fancier words that had to do with planets and stuff, and I was mesmerized by the depth of her knowledge.)

  But she said something else, too: Getting there, wherever there was, was going to take some hard work. It wasn’t going to be easy and it wasn’t without risk.

  Dr. Welter had written about as much, as well. She had many inspirational and aspirational sayings, but one was that, “success didn’t only take talent, it took fortitude.” They were both right, nothing was going to be handed to me; nothing is going to be handed to any of us. And perhaps that’s a problem with self-help and psychics, or rather the way many people consume them. A lot of these fixes are radical and promise big and quick change. Intentions get made fast and furiously and then drift off, unfulfilled, into the atmosphere. Users want it easy. That’s not how life works.

  Maybe I had spent too much time hopping from one fix to the next when a result didn’t seem to pour in fast enough for my impatient mind, body, and soul. Maybe I need to focus, concentrate, and take my time.

  If, in fact, at the actual second I was born, the pattern of the stars and the moon and the planets above set me up for success, then doesn’t that mean it’s at least possible and I should keep trying? Having said that, if Barack Obama and I share a planetary alignment, do we also share the I-spend-eight-hours-watching-TV planetary placement? Does he waste his days watching back-to-back episodes of Narcos or Billions, wiping out entire weekends of productivity and do-good potential?

  Probably not.

  Elizabeth told me that my charts made it clear that I tend to avoid stepping into my future by watching a lot of TV. I can confirm she was right on one count at least so far. And I’ll try to be aware of that.

  Still, I hold out hope for the rest and, in fact, it inspires me to keep on keeping on. To this day, I can’t say I believe history-making is in my future, but I often think of Dr. Welter’s words and Elizabeth’s too, and so, I won’t totally rule it out.

  That’s hope. That’s inspiring. That’s what keeps us going.

  Chapter 12

  The Beginning of Everything

  confidence

  I began to smell smoke that didn’t exist about a decade after I was laid off. It didn’t smell like the usual smoke smell from matches or a fire but was a sort of incense smell. That’s the best way I can describe it. And it was irritating in that it was extremely distracting. The first time it happened was at about three in the morning. It woke me up. It was so overwhelming I got up and walked all over my house to see if I had left a candle burning. I hadn’t.

  The smell persisted, like kept-me-up-all-night-it’s-so-strong smoke, that night and many more for months to follow. I assumed it was the smell of my house until I started smelling it all over the place—at the gym, at the movies, you name it. It wouldn’t go away.

  If you Google that particular sensation, you’ll conclude t
hat you, for sure, have a brain tumor. Logically, I felt like there had to be a better explanation. Emotionally, I was certain I had limited time left on this planet.

  Why be logical when I could be an irrational catastrophizer?

  Flush with Fear

  When I was maybe thirteen or fourteen, I was allowed, for the very first time, to come home to an empty house from a friend’s house, meaning no parents and no babysitter. My parents had gone out somewhere and my sisters were not around. I was on my own and I was excited about it.

  As per protocol, when I got home, I went around to the back of the house, which was left open for us so we didn’t have to carry a key. For some reason, that seemed like a logical safety measure at the time, though looking back, it was quite flawed thinking, because it would have been easier for a burglar to enter the back door unnoticed than the front. Our backyard was out of sight, as we backed onto the Welland Canal, a waterway connecting Lake Ontario and Lake Erie. There would have been no prying neighbors to see an intruder.

  We lived in a modest brown split-level house with aluminum siding. There were paint marks down the front of the taller side of the split because my dad was once painting the gutters (we call them eavestroughs in Canada) and dropped a white paintbrush down the front of the house. He touched it up with brown paint, but it wasn’t exactly what you’d call a perfect match. Maybe it was a good thing. Maybe nobody wanted to rob a scarred house, so the open door didn’t matter.

  On the day in question, I was excitedly heading home to an easy-to-prep dinner. I had been promised that a head of washed romaine lettuce, a box of croutons, and some bottled creamy Caesar salad dressing would be there for me. That would be me cooking my very own first dinner alone, and I was super excited. We didn’t have TV dinners growing up. I used to watch American commercials with envy—kids sitting at TV tables, peeling back foil, steamy squares of fake meat and piles of fluffy potatoes unveiled—begging my parents to buy us a frozen meal for babysitter nights. I was told those luscious tin-tray-packaged chemical meals were not sold in Canada. Literally, until this actual very second as I write this, I believed that information was true, but now, as I think of it, I was probably being duped into eating salad, the healthier choice despite the bottled ingredients.