LETTING GO

I’ve been in a season of deep transformation. The final stage has been selling my house and moving out of Los Angeles.

I’d never be able to write this openly about STARF*CKERY if I was still living in the center of it.

They say that moving, death and divorce are amongst the most stressful human experiences. As I sift through the detritus of the last 22 years of living in Los Angeles as an adult, I am faced with multiple timelines —past, present & future converging.

This past month has had me reeling as I sort through my past; unearthing letters from my dead father; pulling out my wedding and engagement rings from the recesses of a closet where I’d stowed them years ago after attempting to sell them proved too painful. Memories and people I haven’t thought of in decades are suddenly resurfacing in my dreams, reminders of long buried emotions.

The sentimental hoarder in me still has every love letter I’ve received since I was 13, but the purge I’m in is real. As I clear out the old to chart new waters, I have been letting go of attachments, physically parting with possessions including all my furniture, wedding china and the bulk of my vintage clothing archive. If you are a fellow vintage fiend I am continually adding pieces online here. I have an addiction and my personal supply is seemingly endless, having collected since I was a teenager.

Places and objects hold memories, but they also hold energy— and I’ve been carrying around extra weight for years. My dining table and couch were purchased with my ex husband in my early 20s. I kept them when we divorced but now they feel like relics of another time. During our marriage, he wouldn’t allow us to use our wedding china because he said they would be too much of a hassle to hand wash. So our full service of dish-ware stayed in boxes until I moved into my very first apartment on my own, at 33. The first morning I woke up there, I admired the lotus pattern on my cup as I sipped my PG Tips, thinking “I could go to Ireland tomorrow and don’t have to ask anyone’s permission.” I am keeping the tea set, because it was a gift from one of my nieces, but said goodbye to the rest of the china. A giant sheepskin rug, a gift from my duplicitous, sugar- baby addicted ex boyfriend, was one of the few things I was going to hold onto, until I realized that every time I looked at it, I would be reminded of him. So that, too, had to go. 

As far as spiritual beliefs go, you might say I lean towards bougie Buddhism. As in, I have no problem detaching from most of my possessions but let’s be real— I still want to rock some Gucci thigh high black boots. In the last few years of releasing old paradigms and patterns, reading Buddhist texts on impermanence have been a great balm. I love this quote from Vietnamese monk and poet, Thich Nhat Hanh’s The Heart of the Buddha's Teaching: Transforming Suffering into Peace, Joy, and Liberation:

“Letting go gives us freedom, and freedom is the only condition for happiness. If, in our heart, we still cling to anything - anger, anxiety, or possessions - we cannot be free.”

Letting go of Los Angeles has been multiple years in the making, prompted by what I thought was a two month sojourn to Hawaii in November 2020 to write my last book, Sex, Health & Consciousness. In a total did not see that coming never even dreamed it twist of fate completely guided by my heart, the visit turned into a permanent move. A year later, in November 2021, I turned in the first draft of the book to my publisher. To mark the occasion I burned over a decade of my diaries to a crisp as an offering, a sacrifice, a release of the past. These journals contained my most intimate, embarrassing, enlightening, erotic and heartbreaking moments, many of which made their way into the book. I understand that to some, burning diaries may sound like a radical act, but carrying around those pages for so many years felt like a load I needed to slough off. 

The title of one of my favorite books since I was 13 is BE HERE NOW, written by Ram Das. Or in my updated idiom: DON’T FUTURE FUCK. Meaning, stay present instead of anticipating what the future holds, when most of it remains so much out of our control. I tell myself not to future fuck whenever I am getting too far ahead of myself, worrying and wondering about every possible outcome of every possible scenario.

Cover designs for Be Here Now on left & at right, Sex, Health & Consciousness. I took inspiration from the Ram Das cover and the copy for Dr. Bonners soap. The text wrapping around the pupil of the eye on my book cover reads "Free your mind and your ass will follow meditate masturbate manifest reparent reprogram rejoice in your orgasm expand your pleasure self love self esteem transcend transform evolve."

I once heard Ram Das on a podcast talking about burning his possessions. 

He said “A couple of years ago I had a fire and I burned up all the boxes of memorabilia, my old bar-mitzvah certificate, love letters and pictures of old this and that, old airplane logs and driver’s licenses, and important letters from the 60s. As Don Juan said, “Let go of personal history,” and that seemed right. Because I realized I was carrying all those boxes around with me waiting for the time when I would get bored and open them. I never had time to open these boxes. Who can relive his past? The present is so fascinating. If anything, we’re too fascinated. The old Chinese curse, “May you be born in an interesting time.” You want it, you got it. Somebody actually made a movie of me burning all that stuff, so it’s actually on film. But he owns the film. I don’t. He now has my personal history. It’s been haunting him for two years now."

Speaking of haunting, one of my closest friends, Peter Stanglmayr, who has been photographing me since I was 17, flew out from New York to document the burn. The diary from the year my father died was first on the pile and took the longest to turn to ash. Peter took the below video and if you look closely, you can see what I think is some kind of entity floating over my head as the journals smolder. If this much energy was contained in the pages of my writing, who knows what specters were lingering over my dining table and within ceramic plates. Call me a crazy hippie but I’ve seen enough by now to know the veil between worlds is thinner than we want to believe. I, for one, am ready to keep certain memories in my heart instead of letting them drag me around from one storage space to another. I found my marriage certificate as I was going through files and decided to burn it in my garden as a final adieu. That said, I haven’t been able to burn my wedding photos. My mom told me I might want to pull them out when I am 80 to remember. As for all my love letters, I’m saving those too.

If any of you have or are experiencing a similar process, how do you decide what to hold onto and what to let go of? Or have any of you, like me, lost someone close (a parent, friend, partner) and had to go through their possessions to sell, donate or throw away? Every shoe, sock or handwritten note might feel like a treasure that is impossible to discard. Sometimes it’s so hard to face the loss that you just want to rush through it and do away with it all. I kept a few ties of my father’s that will probably sit in a box for the next 20 years because I can’t bear to part with them. So am I living for the day that I open the boxes? After I am gone it’ll be someone else’s job to sort through the objects that made up my life. As Ram Das might say, it’s all one big trip, man…

Living in Los Angeles, more than any other city I’ve ever spent time in, is to be constantly confronted with a barrage of what’s next, what are you working on? My dad used to say you’re only as good as your last picture. This mentality permeates in LA: your worth is tied to having something new to pitch. I experience this professionally every time I’ve done publicity for a project and journalists ask what the next book/film/project will be, which makes me internally stressed about having to come up with some plan to seem productive, to be relevant, to appease.

So—there will be no post next week as I need to pause from letting go of past attachments to marinate and BE HERE NOW. I refuse to future fuck myself by succumbing to any pressure (from myself or others) to answer, what’s next?

Because I don’t know and that is OK.