The calendar is full. The thing you made is working! You’ve gone viral!

That one Substack note got 1000 likes!

You're saying yes to everything and delivering on most of it, and people keep telling you how good you seem. How energized. How productive. How completely unlike the version of you from two years ago who couldn't get off the couch.

But…perhaps…somewhere underneath all of it, something very quiet in you is whispering “this isn't wellness.”

But you can't prove it. Because from the outside, and honestly from most of the inside, it looks exactly like your dreams coming true.

If you have the kind of brain I have, you know this ambiguity. It might be the hardest question my particular wiring (a brain that spins non stop) ever asks me, and it asks at the worst possible time, mid-show:

“Is this recovery? Or is this the illness, doing its best impression of recovery?”

I've now learned twice, the hard way, which is apparently the number of times I need to learn things: momentum can impersonate recovery.

For those of us with bipolar wiring or adjacent mood disorders (I have a touch of it, type II to be exact), the feeling of finally becoming the person I was always trying to be is sometimes health. And sometimes it's hypomania in health's clothing, running your life at a speed your body never agreed to. The cruelest part is that it doesn't feel like a symptom. It feels like you’ve arrived. And that’s confusing.🫤

Let me tell you how I found out. Again.

Somewhere in the last year, without quite realizing it, I slipped into what now feels like a hypomanic episode. The momentum felt like recovery. The relentless scheduling felt like finally, finally becoming the person I was always trying to be.

I have written a solo show about falling apart and getting better, about using my writing to save me, about it working. And the show kept growing, the way good things do when you pour everything into them. It found an audience. It found a life of its own.

And I kept feeding it.

What I didn't see was that I was feeding it with pieces of myself I didn't actually have to spare.

I wrote a show about being sick. And the show made me sick. And I performed the show while getting sicker. And the audience gave me a standing ovation. And I stood there in my body, which had just been through something genuinely frightening, (a panic attack and a puking episode off stage mid show) and I smiled.

I hit a breaking point and canceled the two remaining shows. A thing I do not do.

But I was afraid this might put me in the hospital. So I cancelled.😞

There's a longer, truer version of this story. It involves a night I threw up in the middle of my own solo show, and I've written a monologue about it that I'll release here soon(ish). There's also more to say about why I got so sick in the first place, some of it involving things that were happening behind the scenes, including with my director. I'm not ready to write about that part yet. But I will be.

For now, the useful question: how do you tell them apart?

Here's how I understand it based on lots of experts.

Real recovery and hypomania both produce energy, output, and optimism.

On the level of productivity they're nearly identical, which is why it’s hard to spot. The difference shows up somewhere else: in how each one responds to rest.

Have you noticed a lot of books about rest lately? I have.

I don’t love rest, but I’ve come to appreciate it, and understand it’s necessary.

Recovery can survive a pause. It might not love one (ambitious people never fully love pausing), but it can tolerate a day off without treating it as a crisis.

Hypomania does not like it one bit.

It’s kryptonite is the pause…”if I stop, I'll lose everything. If I'm sick enough to cancel, I shouldn't be allowed to enjoy the rest.”

I said that exact sentence to my husband.

The momentum isn't serving you.

You're serving it.

And it will spend you down to the last piece you didn't have to spare, applauding the whole fricking time.

So here's the test: schedule a deliberate pause, and watch your reaction to it. Not the pause itself. Your reaction to the pause.

Calm, even reluctant acceptance? Probably drive.

Panic, guilt, bargaining, a sudden list of nineteen reasons the pause is irresponsible?

I don't always know which one I'm in. I'm not sure I'm ever supposed to know with certainty.

There's a little mystery to this wiring, and I've made some peace with not finding out the ending. I’m more interesting that way and I have more to write about.

Tragedy + Time= Comedy, ya know.

The practice for today comes from my dad, the late great Larry Bell.

When he turned 50, he had each of us kids and my mom write him letters. He took them to the top of Half Dome in Yosemite and read them up there, alone. He had eight more years to live. I like to think his wisest self was asking him to stop and connect before there was no more time. I like to think nature whispers to us, and he tuned in.

Mine has been whispering to me too. I've been performing right through it. My entire life, honestly.

So here's what I'm doing now, now that I’ve hit my 50th birthday, and what I hand you: put rest on the calendar in the same ink as the shows and performances and major presentations of big projects.

Booked with the exact seriousness of a performance, because that's the only seriousness people like us respect.

And here's the rule that makes it work. You would never cancel a show for a rest. The practice is refusing to cancel a rest for a show. That's it. That's the whole discipline. If the thought of protecting that block makes something in you start bargaining... well. Now you have your test result too.

After I canceled the second show, my husband took care of me. Chicken and rice from the Thai place down the street. A slow walk with no agenda. Handmade lime sorbet. Mint tea. He reminded me I didn't need to write anyone back. And slowly, in that quiet, pieces of me started returning. Not all of them. But enough.

It feels like I've cycled back to where I was six years ago. But I know, in the part of me that is wiser and quieter and doesn't perform for anyone, that I haven't gone backward. I've just found a new edge of myself I didn't know was there. Now I know where it is. Now I can be a little more careful with it.

We are always growing. Each day a new chance to become.

I can only breathe. Look around.

And begin again, more gently this time.

But Jesus, it’s hard.

Hi! I’m Molly.

I’m a writer, a performer, and a person with a rare immune condition that has strong opinions about my calendar.

I read an embarrassing amount of self-help. Books, podcasts, the researchers, the monks, the neuroscientists, the ladies with journals. I love all of it. I spot the patterns fast and I go down the rabbit holes so you don’t have to. Although honestly, you should. Rabbit holes are my favorite place.

But I’m a little nuts. (Lovingly nuts…but, ya know). Most people read this stuff, nod, underline a sentence, and go back to their lives. I don’t have that option. If I only think about the ideas and never do them, I get sick. Literally. So I do them. I read, I think, I move, I reflect, and then I take the action. Every day. Not because I’m disciplined. Because I’m motivated by consequences.

I’ve spent thirty two years being sick on a pretty much daily basis. I have a disease called Common Variable Immune Deficiency in which my body makes zero antibodies. This wreaks havoc on my day to day life, so I’ve had to really focus on what keeps me semi-healthy.

On top of my primary immune condition, I also have a bipolar 2 diagnosis. I loosely wear that title. I like to say I’m bipolar “lite”, and I don’t really know what that means except I do know I’m not like most people.

My entire life is about figuring out balance. The obstacle to this is: ME.

This is a newsletter about living in the middle. That’s where I am most days. Not fully sick, not fully well. I spent years waiting to land on one side and I’ve stopped waiting. The middle is where the interesting stuff happens- we’ve all heard that before. But it’s true.

So that’s what you’ll find here. Self-help, road-tested on a body with other plans. Essays about what I’m trying. Rabbit holes worth falling into. The occasional song, because I can’t help it.

I read, listen, speak about, sing about, perform illness through the lens of creativity. This is my passion project, but I also write musicals and perform at a fairly high level. Sometimes I will write about the artist career and help others find their way.

One thing before you subscribe. This is not a support group. It’s a rehearsal room. I have real diagnoses, mental and physical, and they talk to each other constantly. I take them seriously and really try to apply all my research to my body and mind.

I try not to spend to much time on complaining, although there is room for that too. But mostly we do growth. We take action. We try our best to make a commitment to life. If you’re sick, or stuck, or 50, (I just turned 50 this year!) or all three, and you want to get better at being alive anyway, come in. You’re my people.

I’m so glad you’re here!

Molly

I was walking the dogs this morning when I remembered something I haven’t really told anyone.

When I was 33, I took too much Vicodin. I was in the middle of yet another ear infection, which sounds minor and is not minor, and at that point I had been sick constantly for fifteen years with three more years to go before anyone figured out I had a major immune disorder called CVID. My earliest memory is being eight years old and my grandmother giving me something disgusting tasting to try to fix my ear. Every time one comes, my body pulses with this specific, ancient fear. Ear pain makes you very aware of how fragile the whole situation is.

So I took some Vicodin. And then a little more. Not thirty or a hundred a day like happens with some people, just more than I needed, because it let all the illness noise recede to the background. I no longer had to be afraid of my own body. I remember thinking, very clearly: I shouldn’t do this. This is what they call abuse.

And then I took too much, around 4am.

I woke at 9, stood up, and my heart started to give out. I knew immediately. I held onto the banister and called for my husband to phone an ambulance. My two and a half year old stood next to me, wide eyed, and said: mommy you’re gonna be okay.

I asked my husband to brush my hair.

The fire department was coming and they would most likely be hot men and I needed to impress them. Sure enough, about nine of them came through the door, immediately emasculating my husband, and they all agreed they should be in a calendar. One asked if it was okay to expose my breast and I remember thinking how awkward this was, not knowing that ten years later we’d be calling an ambulance again for the exact same reason, except that time it was for a pot overdose, which is a whole other story and also a solo musical.

They put me in the ambulance. Heart failing, still completely coherent.

The EMT said: Molly, we’re going to turn on the lights and sirens.

I had just enough energy to ask whether he ever got annoyed when cars didn’t pull over, and if he’d like me to press my face against the back window and scream GET OUT THE WAY at everyone.

He asked if I was always funny in a crisis.

I said yes. And often paid for it.

At the hospital they got my heart rate up. I was in full performance mode the entire time, cheerfully assuring everyone I was absolutely fine, while almost dying. The nurse said she wasn’t expecting someone who looked like me to come through those doors. I wasn’t entirely sure what she meant and I chose to take it as a compliment.

And then it was over. I had gotten away with it, the way we so often do with the close calls, not really understanding how near the edge we were, or how fast everything can escalate while you’re just standing there holding the banister.

My two and a half year old was right.

I was gonna be okay.

I just didn’t know yet how many times I’d have to be.

I’ve never really said that out loud before. The quiet part. That I overdosed. That it was accidental, yes, but that it happened at all, that I got there, that someone who is by all appearances holding it together and making people laugh in ambulances can also be a person who is quietly taking more and more of something because being in her body had become genuinely unbearable.

I say it now because I think it’s important that it doesn’t stay quiet.

Chronic illness is relentless and invisible and it will find the cracks if you let it. It found mine at 33, in the form of a little pill that made everything go soft and distant and bearable for a while. It can find anyone’s. It doesn’t care how funny you are or how many shows you have coming up or how much you have to lose.

I got lucky. I got nine hot firemen and a husband who brushed my hair and a two and a half year old who already knew, somehow, that I was going to be okay.

Not everyone does.

So I say it now, for anyone who recognizes the part where you think: I shouldn’t do this. And then you do it anyway. Because you are so tired of being afraid of your own body.

I see you.

I am you.

I’m still you.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

Substack runs on ♥️’s. Did you know that something like 99% of people never click it? So if this landed for you, be the 1%. Hit the heart. Share it with a human you like. Or subscribe and never miss a post. It genuinely helps more people find this little corner of the internet. I’ll be here either way.

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I bought a tart from Safeway for Easter at my mom’s brunch a few weeks ago. Just couldn’t bring myself to bake anything because, well… I am not a baker. I’m not really a “cooker” of anything. (Though I suspect people who actually cook don’t use the word cooker.) So. Safeway tart.

It was a hit. First thing to be finished. Probably should have bought two.

Hold that thought. The tart matters later.

Here’s where I actually am: doing too much. Again. And I’m guessing — since maybe I see your eye is twitching a bit— that you know this place. The season where every single thing on your calendar is good, wanted, even lucky… and your body is staging a quiet revolt anyway.

The body always files its complaint first. Mine files early and in triplicate, because living in a chronically ill body means the margin between “full life” and “flare” is thinner than anyone with a normal battery would guess.

Here’s the trap, and once you see it you can’t unsee it: efficiency doesn’t empty your plate. It just upgrades you to a bigger plate.

Every hour I clear gets claimed by something new before the seat’s even cold. The demands expand to fill whatever space I create. I get more efficient and somehow end up more overwhelmed. Oliver Burkeman — one of my intellectual crushes — calls this the efficiency trap, and the crucial part is that it’s a trap with no exit on the level of doing. You cannot out-organize it. You cannot productivity-hack your way out of a hole that productivity is digging.

Don’t believe me? Here’s my current plate, which I earned by being disciplined and ambitious and putting myself out there — which is to say, by being efficient:

• Two kids, one riddled with ADHD and the other away at his first year of college. Getting older, easier on my body, still a lot of work.

• A new house being renovated simultaneously.

• A late father-in-law’s estate I’m still clearing out, because he was, let’s call it, a hoarder-lite.

• And seven shows a week for the next two months, while chronically ill, with no understudy. (Actually, I do have an understudy! But she’s 23 years old and I play a 50 year old mother of two with a drug addiction.)

These are, of course, great problems to have. A job. A house. A show. Some money. I know that. And one of my biggest pet peeves (even though I do it) is people performing their busyness like it’s a personality and also a competition. That’s not what this is.

This is me noticing that every item on that list arrived because I cleared space for it. The trap, working exactly as designed. The funny thing about the best things in a life is that they’re sometimes the exact same things making my left eye twitch and my right shoulder brace against the precariousness of everything.

When you’re chronically ill, the efficiency trap isn’t a time-management problem. It’s a symptom generator. I don’t pay for overdoing it in vague “stress.” I pay in flare days, in pain, in the currency of a body that keeps immaculate books and always collects. The trap is annoying for a well person. For the rest of us, it’s a health event on layaway.

So why can’t we just… stop?

Two reasons, one psychological and one almost spiritual.

The psychological one Burkeman calls the “nonchoice” choice: the compulsion to fill every hour feels like something happening to you, even though you are technically the one doing the scheduling. And it’s self-sealing — the more overwhelmed you are, the less equipped your brain is to find the exit. Chronic stress literally shrinks the part of the brain responsible for focus and decision-making. The trap disables the very tool you’d use to escape it.

We build things, create things, push through things, because the activity makes us feel like part of something larger than our own fragile bodies. The work becomes the proof that we existed. That we mattered.

And if you’re a creative person, this gets extra sticky — because the heroic project isn’t just a coping mechanism. It’s also, genuinely, the medicine. Seven shows a week is flattening my body. Seven shows a week is also the best mental health treatment I have ever found; I am more myself onstage, mid-story, mid-song, than anywhere else on earth. Creativity is both the medicine and the overdose, and the dosage line moves daily.

Which means the busyness isn’t a scheduling problem. It’s an existential strategy tangled up with the very thing that keeps us well. That’s why no app fixes it.

Here’s how you catch it in yourself. Ask, about any given commitment: did I choose this, or did it just fill the space? A chosen thing, even a hard one, has a quality of consent — you can locate the moment you said yes. A space-filler has no such moment. It simply appeared, the way water finds a hole. My stack, when I run this test honestly, is about half and half.

I don’t have the exit from the trap. What I have is a practice for the middle of it, and it’s almost insultingly small.

One slightly smaller breath.

Once a day, in the middle of the stack — between the show and the estate boxes, in the car line, wherever the bracing is happening — take one breath that is deliberately smaller than the situation seems to demand. Not a deep cleansing yoga breath. Not a reset. A smaller one. A breath that says: this moment does not require my whole nervous system.

Why it works: the trap runs on the feeling that everything is urgent and everything is yours to hold. The smaller breath is a ten-second dissent. It doesn’t shrink the plate. It briefly un-volunteers your body from the emergency.

If you live with chronic illness or pain, this matters so much. A body that reads everything as threat turns all its volume knobs up — pain louder, fatigue heavier, the twitch twitchier. A moment of genuine non-emergency, even ten seconds of it, is a signal in the other direction. The smaller breath is me telling my nervous system: this is not a crisis. This is a Tuesday.

And unlike every other intervention, it cannot be turned into another item on the list, because there is nothing to optimize. It’s too small to become a project. That’s the whole design.

The bigger question is still open, and I want to be honest about that. What I’m actually afraid of isn’t the middle of my life or even the end of it. It’s that all this pushing through now might be quietly shortening what comes later — and I don’t know what to do with that thought. I just know I can’t stop thinking it.

Is the right choice to live fully now, cost and all? Or to become so careful and nurturing toward myself that I never get any work done and also become insufferable at dinner parties?

I don’t know. That’s why I write — because writing is how I find out what I actually think, and sometimes I finish a piece and still don’t know. That has to be okay too.

Becker again: the irony of the human condition is that our deepest need is to be free of the anxiety of death — but it is life itself that awakens it.

I’m certainly not shrinking from life. That might be the whole problem.

So for now: I buy tarts from Safeway. I note that I probably should have bought two. And once a day, in the middle of it all, I take one slightly smaller breath.

It’s a very small plan. That’s exactly why it might work.

📖 Reading: I’m currently in the middle of Tell Me Where It Hurts by Rachel Zoffness. She’s a pain psychologist at UCSF and she uses a pain recipe metaphor that maps almost exactly onto how I think about my own high pain and low pain days. I’ll write more about this one soon. It’s the kind of book that makes you feel seen and slightly vindicated simultaneously. [Find it on Amazon here.]

🎧 Listening: Just finished a 10% Happier episode with Maria Semple, who wrote Where'd You Go, Bernadette. Loved it. If you haven't read the book, fix that immediately and then listen to this episode with Dan Harris.

📝 Substack Inspiration: Just discovered Jenna Park's Everything is Liminal, a visual newsletter with essays on culture, art, identity, and navigating the post-career creative life. Highly recommend. Free to anybody, but archived posts are paywalled.

More later, and thanks for reading/listening,

🙋‍♀️Molly

Substack runs on ♥️’s. Did you know that something like 99% of people never click it? So if this landed for you, be the 1%. Hit the heart. Share it with a human you like. Or subscribe and never miss a post. It genuinely helps more people find this little corner of the internet. I’ll be here either way.

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If you liked this you might also like:

It’s a little cringe, a little frightening, and a little envious all at the same time.

There’s a thing that keeps happening with people who know me well. Not the audience, not the students, not the people who see me perform. The closer ones.

It’s hard to explain but it’s a feeling. An eyebrow lift when I announce a new idea. A small smile rather than a full throated yes, that sounds cool. And sometimes a flat out “why would you do that?”

That’s sounds a bit over-the-top, but it’s not.

There’s not much more deflating than the exuberance of telling someone about your awesome idea, or maybe it’s not awesome but it’s still fresh and you’re excited, and watching them react like a wilting flower.

Waa waa waa.

I asked my husband recently what he thought that behavior was actually about. This was about a specific person in my life. He thought about it and said if he had to guess he’d say it’s a reaction to decisiveness. To me making a decision about something.

Huh.

I don’t love that answer but something about this rings true.

I looked it up. It’s called Social Comparison Theory.

The basic idea: we evaluate ourselves by watching the people around us.

When someone close to you makes a move, announces a project, takes a swing at something, it functions as a mirror.

I know you are but what am I?

Your decisiveness doesn’t make them feel bad about you. It makes them feel bad about themselves. The reaction is self-protection dressed up as skepticism.

I realize that could easily be read as me saying “she’s like totally jealous”, with full vocal fry. That’s not what I mean. I mean something is happening in that person that makes your cool idea land as a threat rather than a delight. I think it’s worth understanding why.

The People Closest To You Have The Most To Lose

I looked this up too. 😋

Researchers who study what they call Ambivalent Relationships:

Relationships in which love and subtle undermining coexist, have found that close friends and family have the most at stake in us staying exactly as we are.

A stranger cheering you on loses nothing if you succeed.

Someone who has known you for twenty years has a whole story about who you both are to each other.

Your change can destabilize all of it.

I've been sitting with this particular kind of friendship loss for a while.

It’s not always conscious. It’s just human behavior. Pre-wired into our DNA to keep us alive.

There’s also a concept you have probably heard of, called Tall Poppy Syndrome:

This describes the social impulse to cut down anyone who rises above the group.

It’s not purely jealousy.

There’s a group cohesion mechanism underneath it. The discouragement is almost reflexive, like a system maintaining its own equilibrium. Nobody has to mean it. It just happens.

Some researchers go further and argue that when someone in your life takes a bold public risk it doesn’t just trigger envy. It threatens the whole internal story they’ve built about why playing it safe was the right call.

The “why would you do that?” isn’t really a question. It’s a defense.

My excitement, my ANNOUNCING! of things, my very public trying, functions as an implicit critique of everyone watching who isn’t doing that.

Which is why learning to let people actually see you in the first place takes its own kind of nerve.

That’s heavy. And it definitely slows me down as a creator.

I’ve walked through life trying not to be too excited about things.

I’ve learned that certain people, men especially but honestly some women too, don’t love when I speak too fast, too emphatically, too opinionated, too too too.

I’ve done enough work on myself to recognize that sometimes I genuinely am the problem. I’m working on it.

I have extended family members with more extreme versions of this tendency so I can see it clearly in its full expression, which makes it easier to spot in myself. It’s always helpful to have a strong genetic component within you that you can see outside of yourself in order to grow as a person.

The gender piece of all this is its own article entirely, so I’ll save that for another day.

Here’s where I land: if I don’t feed my soul this way, the public trying, the announcing, the decisive moving forward, I start to drown. In illness, in stagnation, in the particular misery of a person who stopped attempting things.

So I keep going. I try to meet myself in the middle.

And I’ve mostly stopped explaining myself to the wilting flowers.

📖 Reading: I’m currently in the middle of Wise Effort by Diana Hill, PhD. It’s all about how to focus your genius energy on what matters most.

🎧 Listening: Here’s a companion episode to the above book. Diana Hill and and his episode of 10% Happier.

📝 Substack Inspiration: My favorite writing inspiration is Writing In The Dark. Just look at how she writes and be inspired. One of my favorite subscriptions here on Substack. I’ve been very busy lately, but once I open my next upcoming show, I’m hoping to do some quiet writing like hers while I am performing and need ways to keep my body calm.

Language taught me to hold the shimmers and shards of my life gemstones. To let grief and wonder live in the same sentence. To let texture and shadow and silence mean something, too.

From language I learned that time isn’t a line. It’s a tangle of dog fur, a dropped spoon, a broken screen door, a winding path, a trap door, a secret passageway behind the lilacs. I write to braid it all. To make a form from the mess.

More later, and thanks for reading/listening,

🙋‍♀️Molly

Substack runs on ♥️’s. Did you know that something like 99% of people never click it? So if this landed for you, be the 1%. Hit the heart. Share it with a human you like. Or subscribe and never miss a post. It genuinely helps more people find this little corner of the internet. I’ll be here either way.

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You’re in-between right now. Maybe between jobs, between homes, between the person you were and someone you can’t quite see yet. And if you’re anything like me, you hate it.

You want to skip ahead. You want the montage version, right? The part where the boxes are unpacked, the new title is on the door, the grief has gone away. Like a kid in the backseat you ask: are we there yet? Are we there yet?!

You might arrive in five minutes. You might arrive in five years. Nobody will tell you which.

And so you do the thing we all do. You grip. You push. You try to force the outcome into existence through sheer urgency, because urgency at least feels like progress.

I’ve had to learn the hard way, more than once: the in-between isn’t the obstacle between you and your life. The in-between IS your life. The murky, liminal, can’t-see-the-road part is where the actual becoming happens. Rushing through it isn’t efficiency. Rushing through it actually means you’re skipping the work.

I know. I hated hearing it too.

I’m speaking from the middle of a bouquet of transitions happening now.

A small one: I’ve stopped yoga and dance and started walking instead, because I’m a professional actor and I literally cannot help trying to be the star of pilates. (Look at me! Best yogi in the room!) So for now, I walk.

A medium one: after 25 years, I’m considering closing the door on coaching voice and performance. I can feel it’s a big one. I’m probably not arriving in five minutes.

And a large, life-altering one: my husband’s father died suddenly — pancreatic cancer, three weeks from diagnosis to gone — and out of nowhere we inherited an estate that changes things for us in real ways. But before that, my husband lost his job. Interviewed for a full year. No job. Turned fifty. No job. Watched his son graduate. No job. Finally got a job. Then his father died. And now we’re moving back to our hometown — the town where he played soccer and I performed in plays, where he left notes outside my window that my father found the next morning. The town of us.

I also know exactly what happens when I don’t let a transition unfold. I run quick. When a new idea hits, my urgency spikes, I start pushing the outcome, and before I know it I’m sliding into a hypomanic frenzy. Then I crash. Hard. Usually into illness. My body has enforced this lesson so many times that I’ve finally started taking notes.

So why does white-knuckling backfire?

Because what feels like determination is usually anxiety revving beneath the surface. Anxiety cannot tolerate not-knowing, so it manufactures motion — planning, pushing, forcing, checking — to create the sensation of certainty. But certainty is an illusion. There is no version of a real transition where you get to see the road ahead. So the gripping never actually delivers what it promises. It just burns your fuel. In my case, it burns it all the way down to the crash.

Letting go is not the opposite of effort. It’s the opposite of forcing. And here’s how you can tell which one you’re doing — a test you can run in about ten seconds:

Forcing has a jittery, clenched, are-we-there-yet quality. It’s loud. It needs the outcome now, and it gets angrier the longer the fog lasts.

Unfolding has a quieter signal. It still moves — you still pack the boxes, send the email, take the walk — but it can hold the not-knowing without panic.

If you check your grip and find your knuckles white: that’s not information about the transition. That’s information about your fear. Loosen the hand. The road doesn’t appear faster because you’re strangling the wheel.

Here’s the practice I use.

Once a day, for one week, write a single sentence: “Today I am between ______ and ______, and I don’t have to arrive yet.”

That’s it. Name the two shores. Then give yourself written permission to be in the water.

Let me try it for myself so you can see. This is a real one:

• “Today I am between 25 years of coaching and the next phase of my creative life, and I don’t have to arrive yet.”

• “Today I am between being needed daily by my kids and being their home base from a distance, and I don’t have to arrive yet.”

The first blank is easy. The second blank is the interesting one — some days you won’t be able to fill it in, and that’s the point. You’re training yourself to stay in the sentence, in the in-between, without lunging for the ending.

You’re signaling to your intuition that you trust it. And if you signal to your intuition that you trust it, it will take you home. Eventually.

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You know the laugh. The professional one.

The laugh you deploy in meetings and at parties and in the school pickup line. It’s pitched a little higher than your real laugh. It arrives a half second early, before anything is actually funny, because its job isn’t to express joy. Its job is to make the other person comfortable.

If you have that laugh, you probably have the whole wardrobe that goes with it. The nodding face. The “I’m fine!” voice. The version of you that’s been sanded down until there’s nothing anyone could snag on. You’ve been shrinking yourself to fit the room for so long that you do it automatically, and here’s the exhausting part: it never once made you feel more confident. It just made you tired.

I want to tell you the thing nobody tells you about confidence. It’s not about pretending your audience isn’t there.

They’re there. They can see you. Pretending otherwise just makes you look like you’re pretending. Real confidence is the opposite move: you acknowledge they’re watching, and then you let them see the version of you that you’d normally keep behind closed doors. Not the inappropriate stuff. The real stuff. The way you actually think and move when nobody’s watching.

I say this as a professional watched person. I’ve been a performer my whole life and I’ve coached voice, acting, dance, and pretty much everything creative for 25 years. I have stood in front of audiences while chronically ill, while panicking, and on one memorable night, while thirty seconds from throwing up. So I know the hiding move intimately, because people like me are fluent in it twice over. Performers learn to hide nerves. Sick people learn to hide symptoms. I’ve spent decades doing both at the same time, performing wellness in the lobby and confidence on the stage, and I can tell you exactly what all that hiding buys you.

Nothing. It buys you nothing. And here’s the mechanism, because there’s a reason it fails.

Hiding is a full-time job. When you’re pretending they’re not watching, your attention is split between the thing you’re doing and the surveillance of your own cover. Some part of your brain is always running the checklist: is my laugh right, is my face right, do they suspect. That monitoring is expensive. It’s the same tax whether you’re concealing stage fright, a bad day, or a body that’s quietly falling apart, and your nervous system pays it in the currency you can least afford: attention, ease, presence. The cruel joke is that the monitoring is what reads as nervousness. Audiences, and by audiences I mean everyone, from casting directors to your mother-in-law, can’t always see what you’re hiding. But they can always feel that something is being hidden. The hiding is the tell.

Which is why the fix runs backward from what you’d expect. You don’t get more confident by concealing better. You get more confident by putting down the second job.

In coaching, I watched this at every level, with every kind of person, and it almost always started the same way: some form of letting go. Because talent isn’t really technical skill, though that matters too. Talent is command over your body, mind, and heart at the same time. Heightened awareness. The ability to read a room and adapt. Staying curious, loosening the rigid rules, not judging the instinct to be a bit silly or try on a weird metaphorical hat. Jung called a version of this shadow work: integrating the parts of yourself you usually hide. Not becoming a different person. Being all of who you already are, on purpose.

Here’s how you can tell which mode you’re in, and the test takes one second. Listen for your laugh. The professional laugh means the second job is running. Your actual laugh, the ungainly one, the one that’s occasionally too loud, means you’re present. Your laugh is a diagnostic instrument. Mine is, anyway. When I hear the fake one come out of my mouth, I know exactly who showed up to the room, and it wasn’t me.

So here’s the practice, and it’s small on purpose.

Once a day, in a low-stakes moment, let one unhidden thing through. Say “I don’t know that word, what does it mean?” Tell someone you’re nervous, and then proceed anyway. Take a real pause before answering a question, the kind of pause that says you’re actually thinking. Laugh your real laugh and let it be too loud. One item per day. You’re not renovating your personality. You’re just letting one true thing out on a day pass and watching what happens.

And what happens, almost every time, is this: the person on the other side offers a little piece of themselves back. A kind of thank you. Realness is contagious in the exact way that polish is not.

If you want to go further, here are the three questions the most confident people I know are quietly asking themselves. Full disclosure, these are the exact questions running through my head when I’m on stage: What do I actually want here? Why do I want it? How am I going to get it? Notice there’s no fourth question about how you’re coming across. That’s the whole trick. They’re not performing a perfect version of themselves. They’re just present.

I’ll be honest about where I am with all this. I’m still learning it, at nearly 50, after a year that taught me the hard way what a lifetime of performing through everything costs. Letting people see me nervous turned out to be the easy part. Letting people see me sick, letting them see me rest, letting them see me cancel: that’s the advanced course, and I’m in it now.

But I keep coming back to what happens in the room when I stop pretending. The audience leans in. They always lean in. Nobody ever leaned toward a person for being seamless.

So stop pretending they’re not watching. Let them see who you actually are.

👇Watch what happens next. Here’s me, live on stage, not knowing what the hell I’m doing, forgetting my lines, going through it anyway, and making the audience howl with laughter because they were seeing something fresh, alive, and a little bit wrong.👇

Proof that letting them see you doesn't always go the way you planned.

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There’s something you’ve been meaning to announce.

The show. The shop. The self published book. The newsletter. The thing you made that requires, at some point, telling people it exists. And every morning it’s sitting there waiting for you, right behind the reasonable fears (the money, the “what’s for dinner,” the friend who hasn’t texted back and what did you do wrong), and it produces a very specific dread: the cold sweat of empty seats. The mental math of failure. If I announce it, people will watch me try. And if they watch me try, they can watch me fail. 👀

So you’ve been thinking about it for two more days. For about a year now.

I know this dread personally, because I wake into it most mornings. I’m a performer who produces her own work, which means every project starts with me announcing a concert and then lying awake doing logistics-flavored catastrophizing. Did I forget insurance? Can I sell wine? Can I get a wine license? This is what making things actually looks like. It’s pretty unsexy.

Over the years of producing for myself, I’ve learned a lot about the fear, and it changes what to do about it: the fear is not measuring your project. It’s measuring an imaginary audience.

When you picture announcing your thing, your brain doesn’t picture the actual people who might come. It pictures Everyone. A vast, judging Everyone, watching you promote yourself, noticing your empty seats, discussing your failure. And Everyone is a crowd no nervous system can face. Of course you freeze. You’re not procrastinating on sending an email. You’re declining to walk into the arena (as Brene Brown says).

Except the stadium isn’t real. There is no Everyone. There is only ever Someone. One person at a time, each deciding on their own whether your thing is for them. And a nervous system that panics at a stadium can handle a Someone just fine.

Let me show you what it looks like in practice, because I sold out my last concert this way.

I got to work chipping away like a prisoner with a plastic spoon. One customer. One ticket. One song. One conversation. Throughout the month, I talked to people I thought might be interested in what I make. Not “interested in me,” that feels too naked. Interested in what I make. Each time, I’d pull out a postcard, (printed on good paper so people can feel how committed you are), and wait for their response. That moment is a little scary, but it’s Someone-sized scary. Manageable.

And one of two things happens. Sometimes you get the polite dead smile. 🫤 That’s not fun, but that’s usually not rejection.

That’s more like information: not your audience, and that’s okay. You can’t win ‘em all. Actually, you can’t win most of them, but keep going because…

Sometimes their face changes and they say “Oh, I’d love to come,” and it’s like finding your people! One person brings another for a night out. Two becomes four. You’re slowly building your army of true fans, sleuthing your way through ordinary days, sharing your passion without feeling like you’re selling insurance door-to-door in your own life.

Now, the honest costs. Some people will be annoyed. I’ve lost friends who think I promote myself too much, and that stings in a lasting way. What can I say except: it’s the only way to do my work. To invite people into it. You don’t have to say yes. But I have to ask. It’s hard not to take this personally. In general I tend to have a chip on my shoulder about friends who don’t support my work. It’s happened a lot. But there is some real childhood wounds when it comes to what I do. When you sing and dance for a living, some people just simply don’t like you shining. I get it. But not enough to stop it. I’ve learned at this point to seek out friends who are really grounded in their own mastery of work. I find they’re way less competitive with me. This is obviously a post I need to write. I think about it a lot, and I haven’t found the answer.

But let’s move on…oh wait, one more thought on this.

The hardest audience is the one that’s known you forever. The people who don’t quite see what you’re capable of, or worse, make you feel small for trying. “I don’t get it. How’s play practice going?” Mike Birbiglia, now one of the most prolific solo performers alive, once told his father he wanted to be a stand-up comedian. His dad said, “So you want to be a stripper?” Oof.

What do you do? You learn to keep your eyes on the open ones instead. The people who seem to need exactly what your particular spirit has to offer.

So here’s the practice, in two parts, both small.

Part one: pull the trigger in the morning. Whatever the scary send is (the announcement, the postcard order, the “would you come?” text), do it early, before the day wears you down. Courage runs on a battery, and mornings are when mine is charged and the dread hasn’t fully staffed up yet. The worry will arrive right after you hit send. Let it. The worry is just part of the creative act. It’s going to be there like a dog that followed you home. In my experience, the growth happens when you keep walking anyway.

Part two: when you catch yourself frozen, run the check: am I picturing Everyone, or Someone? If it’s Everyone (the vague judging crowd, the imagined pile-on, the empty-seat horror film), that’s the fear talking, and it’s showing you a stadium that does not exist. Shrink it back to one face. One real person who might light up. Then do the one thing that reaches that one person. That’s the entire day’s assignment.

Do that enough mornings in a row and here’s what happens. You look up 25 days later and there are 72 people in the audience. Seventy-two actual humans whose lives you might touch with what you made. Not online. In the flesh. Waiting for you to sing.

People get all worked up about having “only” 72 followers. But if 72 people show up? That’s different. That’s magic happening in real time. Everyone was never real. But those 72 Someones are as real as it gets.

That’s worth the fear, isn’t it?

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You did it!

You sent the pitch. Signed up for the class. Told them how you felt. Put the deposit down. And it felt incredible, like proof that you’re the person you always suspected you could be. You went to bed accomplished.

Then morning came, and you woke up a different person. Chest tight. Stomach hollow. The day ahead impossibly long. And one question circling like a vulture: what on earth was I thinking yesterday?

Congratulations. You have a bravery hangover.

Nobody warns you about this part. Every piece of advice about courage ends at the moment of action, freeze-framed on the triumphant send. Nobody mentions that the morning after. So people wake up in it and draw the obvious, wrong conclusion: this awful feeling must mean I made a mistake.

It doesn’t. And that’s what I want to hand you today: the hangover is not a verdict on the decision. It’s the bill due for the exposure. They arrive in the same way, and learning to tell them apart might be one of the most useful skills a creative person can build.

Let me show you mine, because I had one this week.

The day began with a surge of energy so electric I thought, this is it, I’m unstoppable! Then I remembered I’d taken Sudafed that morning, so the momentum might have just been literal amphetamines coursing through my system. But I’ll take it. Momentum is momentum. I sent off five pitches for my shows. I signed a contract for a solo performance in NYC, committing not just to the show but to selling the tickets and making it work financially. I wrote a check for the deposit, a tangible and slightly terrifying act that said: this is real. I ended the day with a sense of accomplishment so satisfying it could have been bottled and sold as ambition.

The next morning I woke up and the momentum had evaporated, replaced by something heavier and murkier. The questions piled up like storm clouds. What if no one buys tickets? What if I priced it wrong? What if nobody actually cares? Yesterday’s victories, with the Sudafed well and truly worn off, now felt like risks way too big for me to handle.

So why does this happen? Here’s the mechanism as I understand it from the experts.

Momentum doesn’t cancel fear. It just pushes fear aside just long enough for you to act. Bold action is essentially bravery on credit: in the heat of the doing, you spend exposure you haven’t emotionally paid for yet. Then you sleep, the action-high burns off, and overnight some diligent accountant in your brain tallies up exactly how visible you just made yourself. The fear that greets you in the morning isn’t new information about the decision. It’s the invoice for yesterday’s courage. And if you have the kind of brain that runs hot and crashes hard anyway, (as mine does), the swing can feel extra convincing.

I have two or three times (and maybe more than that) cancelled my plans based on this fear. I’m talking entire concerts.

Which raises the real question: how do you tell a bravery hangover from a genuine warning? Because sometimes the morning dread is right, and you did over-commit.

Two tells. First, timing and shape: hangover fear arrives the morning after action, and it can be an overwhelming sweeping feeling of phrases like… Nobody cares. This will all collapse. Who do I think I am. A genuine warning is specific and boring. The venue deposit is nonrefundable and I haven’t confirmed the date. If your dread can’t name a particular, fixable problem, it’s the hangover talking. Second, the response test: hangover fear shrinks when you take small action. Real problems don’t shrink, they clarify.

The antidote is action. Haven’t you heard that before…cause I have. I tend to take too much action, hence the reason I tend to cancel stuff. But, I digress.

Not big, heroic action, and definitely not undoing yesterday. Just the next small thing, done before noon.

Here’s mine from that morning. I opened my notes app. Figured out the artwork. Planned the pre-sale incentives. Researched the after-party. None of it monumental. That’s kind of the point: the hangover is the feeling of being overdrawn, and small completed tasks are tiny deposits back into the account. Send one email. Check off one task. Each small act chips away at the fear, the weight, the murk.

The practice, then, in one line: the morning after any brave thing, do one unmonumental task related to it before noon, and only then decide how you feel about the decision. Never evaluate yesterday’s courage while the hangover is still in your bloodstream. You wouldn’t let actual-hangover-you make major life rulings at 8am. Extend the same policy here.

By midday, most days, I feel lighter. The hangover isn’t gone entirely, but it no longer defines the day. And the feeling, remember, was never permanent anyway. It’s weather. A fog of self-doubt passing through. It might be back tomorrow by the way. I’ve been doing this for thirty years and it’s still very hard.

This is the rhythm of creative living: momentum, fear, action, repeat. It doesn’t get easier. It gets clearer. Bravery isn’t a one-time act. It’s a habit, something you do even when you don’t feel like it, especially when you don’t feel like it. The soaring high, the inevitable crash, the steady climb back up. Over and over again.

Thanks for reading, (mind ♥️ing it?),

MMB

My Current Obsessions A little treat for making it to the end.

📖 Reading: The Mountain Is You by Brianna Weist

📺 Watching: DTF on HBO Max

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I constantly feel the tug of life pulling at my sleeve with obligation.

That’s just life, I tell my kids. Life is full of obligations, suffering, and work, and the key to peace is addressing the tasks the soul needs answers to.

They stare at me like: God, Mom, you’re such a bummer.

They’ll get it one day. Hopefully faster than I did.

The soul wants right action. The hard part is figuring out what right action actually is. That’s the ongoing, never ending, always iterating process that makes up a life. And honestly? Most people never really engage with it. They stay busy, asleep at the wheel, day after day.

I know that sounds judgmental. It’s something I’m working on. But it’s what I see.

And I get it. Because starting anything is genuinely hard.

I’m In Bed Right Now

Literally. Writing this from bed. Ignoring my kids, but in my defense they’re older now and fully capable of making toast. My bed is cozy. My tea is hot. My heat pack is doing its thing. Reading other people’s work is deeply comforting.

Other people’s work is wonderful, isn’t it? I read for inspiration. I read to find my teachers. I read to feel secure in the universe.

But in order to survive life, I need to make my own work. Today and every day.

The commitment to do one thing for one hour is fleeting for me. I am sneaky good at getting out of it. I will invent an entire project out of thin air just to avoid the creative project I’m actually supposed to be working on.

Just last week I had a full Summer Book Club ready to launch. Complete logo, rollout plan, full chapter analysis index. The whole kit and caboodle. Hypomanic much?

Then I realized I’d done all of that to avoid the online singing course I’m supposed to be building, which is for some reason terrifying to me. I texted my girlfriend Daya about it and she was not even a little surprised.

My bipolar 2 tendencies make this particularly spicy, because my brain serves up distractions in the form of genuinely exciting ideas. It’s not laziness. It’s a very enthusiastic form of avoidance.

The Real Problem: Commitment

It’s taken me half a lifetime, depending on how long I live I suppose, to develop anything resembling discipline. I live between so many worlds: mothering, performing, writing, teaching. Switching between them and finding identity in each one is a bit like code switching. Not the same thing, I know, just similar in energy.

The single biggest hindrance to a creative life, in my experience, is commitment.

Because if I commit to this thing, I might miss that thing. And what if THAT thread is the one that makes everything click? What if I’m supposed to be pulling on a completely different thread right now?

And then there’s the shadow stuff. The fame stuff.

I don’t want to be famous. I really don’t. I want to do good work. Stay on a mastery path. Build a sustainable audience that grows with me over time. Feed my soul. Make a living.

But my shadow? My shadow wants fame desperately. Craves it. Needs it. My shadow is always scanning the room, looking for who’s watching, cataloguing praise and envy. She’s chasing a dopamine fix that will never actually satisfy her.

I pull on that thread and it starts to make me sick. There’s a lot to say about this, which is exactly why I’m writing a play about it.

I wake from this particular dream daily and begin again.

If I let all of this accumulate, it adds up like death by a thousand tiny paper cuts, and my soul starts to weep. So I return to what I can do this hour. It’s the only way to combat the very loud strength of my own will.

The irony is not lost on me that the act of writing these words IS the work I’ve been avoiding. Here I am doing it anyway. One hour at a time, one word after another.

Maybe that’s what the soul has been whispering all along. Not to conquer the resistance, but to dance with it. Show up despite it. Let the work happen in the spaces between the fear.

The soul doesn’t need perfection. It just needs presence.

And sometimes presence looks like staying in bed with your tea and finally, finally writing it down.

My Current Obsessions A little treat for making it to the end.

📖 Reading: The Four Tendencies by Gretchen Rubin

🎧 Listening: The Funniest Conversation You’ll Ever Hear About Achieving Inner Peace | Pete Holmes and Dan Harris in conversation

Substack runs on ♥️ It literally helps more people find this. So if you got something out of this, press the little heart, share it with a human you like, or subscribe and never miss a post. I'll be here either way.

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If you found your way here, chances are your body or your brain has complicated your life. Maybe both. Maybe you’re the ambitious kind, the kind trying to make things, build things, become someone, while your health keeps other plans. Or maybe you love someone like that.

Quick note: This is the long version — my whole story. If you’d rather start with what this newsletter actually is and what you’ll get, begin here: START HERE

Either way, welcome. This is Between Sick & Well, and it’s built on one idea: every body is somewhere on the line between sick and well. Nobody gets to opt out of having a body. Some of us just live closer to one end, and we’ve learned things out here that everyone eventually needs.

This is self-help for sick people, written by someone who's both. Emphasis on the research. Yes, some of it is my own hard-won thoughts, but most of it is me hauling back the good stuff from books, studies, and the smartest people I can find. Self-help with receipts. I could call it personal development, but I'll embrace the popular term because I'm a pop kinda gal. I mean, I wrote Real Housewives The Musical for Christ's sake.

Here’s my story, so you know who you’re dealing with.

I first started getting really sick around age 18, which means I’ve been some version of my sick self for 31 years. The diagnosis took 25 of them. It finally came eight years ago, when my mom, a pharmacist, asked the right question while I was in the hospital with pneumonia. Turns out I make zero antibodies. It’s called Common Variable Immune Deficiency, a disease in which your body doesn’t make some or all antibodies. Mine makes none, so it hits me from every direction: respiratory, gut, and everything in between. I started intravenous plasma replacement therapy, and I’ve been on it ever since.

But that was after more than 30 doctors and decades of being sick and misunderstood. Somewhere in all those years, worn down and not feeling well mentally, I saw a primary physician who really wanted me to stop bothering her. She put me on Paxil. I didn’t know that SSRI medication can trigger a mood disorder. Mood disorders run in my family: bipolar and schizophrenia both, and um… a lot.

A year and a half of panic attacks mixed with elation and extreme weight loss before I was finally slapped with a Bipolar 2 diagnosis.

So I shouldn’t take Paxil, I guess.

There are many times I think I can’t cope much longer with illness. But of course, I do. And I do it very well! Professionally well! And that can be really tricky.

I walk a tightrope every day, trying to be nonchalant so as not to anger the health gods. A ridiculous ritual that has no real bearing on how I’m actually moving through the world, but here we are.

And at some point, after about three decades, you unlock a secret level in the game: acceptance. The kind where you finally understand this isn’t going away. Acceptance comes with a job. Once you stop waiting to be cured, you start noticing what makes you less sick and what makes you more sick.

Which work makes you expansive and which makes your body contract and implode?

Which friendships feel nurturing and which require so much compromise your body has become quietly resentful?

There are a lot of decisions to be made when you’re trying to save your own life.

That’s what this Substack is. The decisions, researched. Thirty years of daily illness means thirty years of rabbit holes. The books, the protocols, the 2am research spirals. I go down all of them and bring back things that have helped me.

But I have one more credential, and it’s the strange one: I’m a musical theater performer and I write musicals. My first, Becoming Britney about Britney Spears and the shaving the head incident. It is a lovingly attempt at understanding what happened to poor Britney. I won best performance at The New York Fringe Festival for this role. I also wrote Real Housewives The Musical which is available for worldwide licensing through Concord Theatricals in New York. Stage, voice, dance, all of it, for my whole life. I was born to strut.

Here’s what performing and writing at a fairly high level, while being sick, has taught me: the creative act is medicine. Not metaphorically. For the past five years I’ve been writing a solo musical about navigating chronic illness as a professional performer, and writing myself as a character is the one place I literally forget I’m sick. I pay the price offstage, yes. But onstage, in a state of flow, something rights itself inside me. All is well in my somatic body in a way I can’t manufacture anywhere else. I wrote that show to save my life, and I don’t mean that in an overdramatic way, which I’m known to be. The focus it required anchored my nervous system in ways therapy alone couldn’t.

That discovery is the engine of everything here. The stage, the voice, and the creative act have things to teach a body that won’t cooperate, and I’ve spent 30 years as a performer and teacher collecting those lessons. So around here you’ll get essays on the mess where creativity and illness tangle: telling your drive from your disorder, the bravery hangover, the efficiency trap, why hiding is more exhausting than being seen. Tools I actually use. Occasionally a monologue or a song, because sometimes the truest version of a story needs music. And coming this fall, Studio Molly, part two of this Substack, where the teaching starts: dance fitness for finding your balance, singing lessons, and other creative exercises built to heal.

One promise before you dive in. I will never write to you from the end. I’m not recovered, arrived, or optimized. I’m on the tightrope with you, working it out in public, and the question I’m walking toward is the same one I’d hand to you: whether your particular combination of experiences, the mess, the music, the medicine, the hope, has real value in this world.

I think it does. Mine and yours.

I’m getting there. Come with me! And please let me know in the comments or by sending my a DM why you’ve joined me and a little about you.

Until next time, (and please consider leaving a heart or sharing this to support me! Even better SUBSCRIBE…it’s FREE)

xx, Miss Molly Bell 🔔

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I have a hard time with people being mad at me.

I also struggle when I’m mad at someone. My instinct is to close the loop immediately, either by stepping up and admitting fault, even when I don’t really think it was my fault, or by pushing for a conversation that might allow the other person to apologize.

And then they don’t.

The hardest thing for me to do is nothing. Absolutely nothing. Just wait and see what evolves without my interference.

I’ve been trying that lately. It’s brutal.

The Friendships

I have a friendship that quietly fell apart over political differences, mainly around the vaccine debate. It’s a nuanced story with no clean resolution, but honestly I don’t think that’s the real issue. The politics feel more like a symptom of something larger I haven’t quite put my finger on yet. So I’m waiting. Not pursuing. Something inside me just can’t right now, and I’ve learned enough to recognize that as my intuition telling me to stay still.

I have another friendship that ended because the disdain coming from her direction became impossible to ignore. That one feels more concrete. More final. And yet I still feel the pull to reach out, to fix it, to say something. I don’t think I will. But the urge is there every single day.

Here’s the thing I keep coming back to: other people have their own authority. If they wanted to reach out, they could. They haven’t. They won’t. That should be enough for me to simply continue with my life.

But it gnaws at me. It really does.

The Waiting

This is where a daily meditation practice has genuinely helped. Not in a fixed-it-right-up way, but in a quiet, incremental way. It’s given me the ability to stay present with discomfort instead of immediately trying to outrun it. To allow the unease of an unresolved thing to just sit there without me poking at it every five minutes.

Maybe that tolerance for uncertainty is what individuation actually requires. The capacity to sit with incompleteness. To resist the urge to force resolution just because the open loop is making you crazy.

I’m 49 and I am only just now learning this. Make of that what you will.

Here’s what I keep reminding myself: perhaps it takes ten years for the person on the other end to wake up and acknowledge something went wrong. Perhaps I’ll soften over time, as I have before. I’ve been wrong plenty of times and I’ll be wrong again. But for now the most honest thing I can do is stand in my own beliefs and honor the boundaries I’ve finally, finally learned to draw.

This waiting isn’t passive resignation. It’s an active choice. A choice to honor my own process of becoming, separate from the needs and expectations of other people.

In a culture that prizes immediate resolution and constant connection, choosing to wait, choosing to let something be unfinished, feels almost radical.

Maybe it is.

MyCurrent Obsession: A little treat for making it to the end.

📖 Reading: Are You Mad at Me by Meg Josephson

Substack runs on hearts. It literally helps more people find this. So if you got something out of this, press the little heart, share it with a human you like, or subscribe and never miss a post. I'll be here either way.

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Everywhere I look, creative people are teaching others their craft instead of practicing it.

Newsletters about newsletter writing. Courses on marketing. Life coaching programs. Notion templates. Notes templates designed to make your content go viral. Content about content about content. It is endless and it is overwhelming.

And before I get too high and mighty about this, I am currently building a course to teach others how to use their body to sing. So.

Though in my defense, that does feel specific enough to justify. Maybe the reason I can actually commit to making that particular thing is precisely because of how specific it is. I’m not selling you a lifestyle. I’m teaching you how to breathe into your diaphragm.

But the larger pattern is real and it’s worth looking at honestly. Book writers teaching others how to write instead of writing books. Actors running workshops instead of performing. I’m a singer and a performer, and yet teaching voice lessons has become my most lucrative work. More profitable than the actual art.

We need teachers. Of course we do. But it feels like we’ve hit a tipping point where creators need to turn inward and ask a genuinely uncomfortable question:

Am I creating something of value that will add to the world? Or am I doing this because the creative, tangible, weird work I actually want to make will take forever to sell?

The Harder Question

I don’t want to say we’re all preying on people’s vulnerabilities. On their deep desire to make something meaningful with their lives. But maybe, if we’re being honest, that’s at least part of what’s happening.

I keep butting up against this: what I’d rather be doing than teaching another voice lesson is creating something that resonates with an audience. The very thing I originally set out to do. The thing I trained for. The thing that keeps me up at night in the best and worst possible way.

The problem is people would rather have a blueprint than engage with the actual work. They want the formula instead of the mystery. They want to learn your process rather than let your art wash over them, sit with them, wrestle with them, and inspire something entirely their own.

And somewhere along the way, we creators got trapped teaching the steps instead of dancing.

I don’t have a clean resolution to this one. I’m in it too. But I think naming it is at least a start.

Are you making the thing? Or are you teaching people how to make the thing?

Both matter. But only one of them is why you started.

Mys Current Obsessions A little treat for making it to the end.

📖 Reading: The Idea (the seven elements of a viable story for screen, stage, or fiction) by Erik Bork

🎧 Listening: I love love love who run Story Club with George Saunders. If you haven’t yet, go listen to his graduation speech on kindness and send it to 20 of your closest friends and enemies. Please do that. We need it.

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Every morning, the first thing I feel is fear.

Basic fear first.

Stupid stuff like: Should I spend $300 I don’t have on digital graduation portraits of my son? Or face the eternal damnation that is answering “what should we have for dinner?” again.

Why isn’t my friend talking to me?

Did I do something wrong?

But then the real fear creeps in.

Today it’s announcing a concert, knowing this one decision will avalanche into a thousand more.

Selling tickets.

The cold sweat of potentially empty seats.

The mental math of failure (too much to produce/not enough tickets sold) that keeps me up at night.

Did I forget insurance?

Can I sell wine?

Can I get a wine license?

This is all part of producing your own work. The unsexy bits nobody talks about.

I do it anyway. Or I try to do it anyway.

Or maybe I think about it for two more days, then pull the trigger.

I always pull the trigger in the morning, when I’m most brave and haven’t had the day’s exhaustion set in yet.

And of course I immediately start to worry.

The worry is just part of the creative act. It’s going to be there, like a dog that follows you home. But the creative growth happens when you keep walking anyway.

And then? I get to work.

Chipping away like a prisoner with a plastic spoon. One at a time.

One customer.

One ticket.

One course.

One song.

One painting.

One essay.

One dinner that isn’t takeout again.

Just… one at a time.

I sold my last concert this way.

Talking to people throughout the month who I thought might be interested in what I do. Not “interested in me”—that feels too naked. Interested in what I make.

Each time I pull out a postcard (nicely printed on good paper so people can feel how committed you are), I have to wait for their response. That’s a little scary, but mostly inconsequential. They might light up, or they might give you that polite-but-dead smile. If it’s the latter, that’s not your audience. And that’s okay.

But when it does work—when someone’s face changes and they say “Oh, I’d love to come”—it’s like finding your people. It feels like you’re slowly building your army of true fans.

One person usually brings another for a night out.

Two becomes four.

You sleuth your way through the day, finding creative ways to share your passion without feeling like you’re selling insurance door-to-door in your own life.

Some people will be annoyed.

And this is enough to stop most of us. But try not to let it stop you. I’m not always great at that myself.

I’ve lost friends who think I promote myself too much. What can I say except—it’s the only way to do my work: to invite people into it. You don’t have to say yes. But I have to ask.

But here’s the hardest part: Growing past your local community, or the people who have known you forever. They don’t usually see the vision of the work you’re capable of. Or worse, they actively make you feel small for trying to grow. Like: “I don’t get it. How’s play practice going?” Or as Mike Birbiglia tells it, when he told his father he was working toward becoming a stand-up comedian (now one of the most prolific solo artists of all time), his dad said, “So you want to be a stripper?”

Oof.

The whole world feels annoyed and overwhelmed right now. It’s brutally hard to reach people these days. That’s disheartening as hell, but you learn to keep your eyes on the open ones. The people who seem to need what your particular spirit has to offer.

Then you look up 25 days later and there are 72 people in the audience. Seventy-two actual humans whose lives you might touch with what you created.

Even better, they’re not online. They’re in the flesh, waiting for you to sing.

People get all worked up about having “only” 72 followers online. But if 72 people show up to hear you sing? That’s different. That’s magic happening in real time.

And that’s worth the fear, isn’t it?

I think about these questions to jumpstart my creative day:

What’s the fear that greets me first thing in the morning, and what’s one small step I might take despite it?

Is there a creative project I abandoned because of fear? If I had pushed through just one more day, what might have happened? Should I go back to that idea?

Who are the “open people” in my life who genuinely value what I create? How can I focus on serving them?

What’s the smallest creative “one at a time” step I could take today that might lead to my own version of “72 people in the audience” a month from now?

I was dreading my husband’s 50th birthday.

He’s been out of work since August. The world is sitting on tenterhooks waiting to see how Trump will further upend things, and hiring freezes are everywhere. We’ve lost a quarter of our retirement fund — the one we’ll need in about twenty years. 😬

The financial uncertainty had left me wanting to do... nothing. No plans. No celebration. Not right now. Not like this.

Blaaaaaaaagh.

So imagine my delight when he had one of the best birthdays of his life.

We met for coffee after school drop-off and dog walking. Worked from home for a bit. He went for a lunchtime bike ride. Then we joined parents from our son’s volleyball team at our local pizza place, a group that would never normally come together, united only by the shared joy of watching our kids get really good at something. Volleyball parents, I’ve discovered, are a particular breed. The sport is competitive, but because it’s newer than soccer, the parents haven’t lost the plot yet. They’re easy-going. Friendly. Dare I say, balanced.

After pizza, we watched the game. My husband stood on the sidelines playing hype music between sets. “The Final Countdown” featured heavily, a running family joke courtesy of Arrested Development. My son laughed and did a little dance on the court. Pure joy.

I was on mic duty (we’re in nationals now, cue Glee music 🎶) and I asked the whole crowd to wish him a happy birthday. They cheered. He beamed.

We won the game. 🏆

We came home, heated up his birthday pie, and watched a murder documentary. Perfect evening.

My kids each wrote him a letter for his 50th. I’d nudged them beforehand. This has been a hard year for dad, go beyond what you’d normally write. My son wrote about gratitude. About the drives to every game, just the two of them. About his dad showing up as assistant, hype man, and archivist, energy chews in his pocket, tripod set up to record matches so they can bond over replays, making sure he’s eaten before warmups.

All the things my husband’s own father never did for him.

He wasn’t raised by mean parents. Just unaware ones. Not really awake at the wheel.

So he took dead aim at being the most present father I know. So present that I’ve ended up as the disciplinarian, which has caused its fair share of friction. But watching my son write that letter, I understood every tradeoff.

My daughter’s letter was different, a chronicle of six years of bedtime inside jokes. Little things. The things only two people know about each other.

I catch myself comparing our life to others sometimes. Friends whose husbands work for ethically dubious companies that make them a fortune. One friend asked for fine jewellery for Mother’s Day (I didn’t even know that was a thing) and is so unhappy she berates people for not answering texts quickly enough. Second house, possibly a third on the way. Miserable.

I’ve started to feel a little guilty about how much I actually like my husband.

But no. I’m doubling down.

50 can mean a crisis, a reckoning, and then a rebirth. But that rebirth only lands because of the years of quiet, unglamorous, often thankless work of showing up for your family. The chores of love that feel meaningless in the moment and then, one day, become everything.

It pays off.

Happy birthday, honey. Thanks for being you.

But also, if you wanted to get a job, I wouldn’t be mad about it. 😘

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When I was thirteen years old, just one year older than my daughter is now, I stole my dad’s 1967 convertible Cougar and took it for a joy ride around the neighborhood.

A brazen attempt at being older. I looked like I was eleven. So I have absolutely no idea why I thought this would work. Did I genuinely think my neighbors wouldn’t notice a little blonde middle schooler slumped down in the driver’s seat of a vintage convertible the size of a boat?

I got to a dead end and had to make a three point turn.

One turn. Back up. One more turn. Back up. One more... crunch.

I hit someone’s mailbox.

I got out of there fast, drove home, somehow parked the boat back in the garage, and waited to see if anyone noticed.

He did.

Not because of the banged up headlight. He assumed that happened in his work parking lot, which I still don’t entirely understand. Maybe he was letting me off the hook. What actually caught me was the New Kids on the Block keychain I left in the driver’s seat.

He confronted me. I burst into tears and claimed I knew he hated me now. He didn’t overreact. I was in trouble, but he was calm about it.

He grounded me for the weekend.

And then he took me to Burger King for hamburgers, french fries, and vanilla milkshakes.

Instead of a rigid punishment, we just spent time together. Talking about life and philosophy, something my dad always insisted we do, dipping fries into vanilla shakes like it was the most natural thing in the world.

The Synchronicity

I’m 49 now. My son is leaving for college. My daughter is almost thirteen.

And recently, on a walk, it hit me: I am almost the exact same age my father was when he was diagnosed with lymphoma.

That diagnosis started a ten year journey that ended with his death at 58.

Sitting at Burger King with him, something in his bones must have known. That he should loosen up about the car, about the mailbox, about all of it, and just be with me. That this was his time with me and he shouldn’t waste it being rigid.

My dad’s illness looked a lot like a midlife crisis from the outside. He bought the Cougar. He bought a bunch of furniture so he could write a book. He started to retreat from the family. Reading, writing, searching, pontificating on the meaning of life, musing about art and religion and the human experience as he quietly worked his way toward the end.

I understand now why he bought all that furniture. Why he wanted to write a book. He never did. Because he didn’t feel good.

He felt lonely.

I understand that now more than I’d like to.

The Night Side of Life

I’ve been sick for 31 years. Since college, age eighteen, the same age my son is now. A slow burn of illness that wound its way through my body and became my daily companion.

I wake up most mornings around five thirty. Immediately, before I’m even fully conscious, a wave of anxiety creeps in. I close my eyes and breathe.

The thoughts come fast. You forgot to renew your driver’s license. Did he buy his prom ticket? Is her homework done? Am I a bad mom? Will we still have health insurance? Is my lymph system working? Am I going to be diagnosed with lymphoma at the same age my dad was?

Breathe. Begin again.

Susan Sontag wrote that illness is the night side of life, a more onerous citizenship. That everyone born holds dual citizenship, in the kingdom of the well and in the kingdom of the sick.

I read other people’s words to lift me out of the loneliness of my aching body. Because illness is lonely in a way that’s hard to explain to people who haven’t lived inside it.

I spend most of my days convincing myself I can get through this one. Just this one. And then I can sleep.

I know it makes people uncomfortable when I say this may be my path. “Don’t talk it into existence,” they say. But holding two thoughts at once comforts me. This life is imperfect. Impermanence is the only real rule. I can know that and still keep going.

What I Know

Each decade I grow sicker. And also more resilient. More myself. Closer to the me, the I, the self that has been quietly forming underneath all of it.

I hope my children will read my work one day, the way I read my dad’s when I want to feel close to him. That’s part of why I write it.

The only thing I can get myself to do right now is create. I feel me calling me. I don’t know if the urgency I feel is time passing faster than I’d like, but I don’t question it anymore. I just know to keep going. Keep creating. Keep individuating, toward myself, toward whatever comes next.

Double down on courage. Keep making the thing.

That’s all I’ve got. And somehow it’s enough.

P.S. My dad died never knowing I was the one who knocked out his headlight. I whispered the confession to him after he was gone, standing beside his body, the words barely audible even to myself. I’m not sure he heard me from wherever he is. But karmically, I feel the scales balancing as my own children surely pull their silent pranks on me. Some cosmic ledger somewhere has marked this debt as settled.

My Current Obsessions A little treat for making it to the end.

📖 Reading: 🎧 Conversations With God by Neil Donald Walsch

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“You need to get a real job. Like at Home Depot. Do what needs to be done.”

These words came from a well-meaning friend after my husband was laid off in August. Silicon Valley tech jobs aren’t exactly growing on trees right now, and after 18 years of our carefully constructed life, him bringing home the salary, me managing the home and pursuing art part-time, the foundation cracked.

Their voices echo in my head at 3 AM when the doubt visits.

But I can’t go back.

The Unraveling

Six years ago my own life came apart spectacularly. I lost 25 pounds during a year and a half long manic episode. Got slapped with a bipolar 2 diagnosis. Spent three years with a therapist and psychiatrist. Tried medication and hated it.

I pulled myself out of that spiral by writing a musical.

I know how that sounds. But creativity is my craft. Singing, acting, dancing. I do it all. I do it well, better than most. And my body betrays me at every turn. I live with Common Variable Immune Deficiency, a disease where my body doesn’t make antibodies, which leaves me sick most of the time though you’d never know it to look at me. Arthritis and inflammation have made dancing largely unbearable. My right arm and shoulder now limit my piano playing.

I’m a physical mess who doesn’t look like one. A great actor at hiding various ailments. If you asked my friends and family they’d tell you I talk about my health WAY too much. And honestly, I judge people who constantly talk about their health problems, so I’m sure others judge me the same way. The irony is not lost on me.

But here’s what I know for certain: I use creativity as spiritual medicine. Does it work? Some days I’m certain it does nothing at all. Other days it feels like the only thing keeping me here.

The Cultural Script

We’re celebrating 25 years of marriage this year. Our marriage’s quarter-life crisis, right on cue.

The cultural script when financial disaster strikes is clear: abandon your dreams and do whatever it takes. Practicality trumps passion. Security over self-discovery. And I gave up a huge portion of my life to the patriarchal arrangement of mom handling most home responsibilities while dad works outside the home. Eighteen years of that. Another six to eight to go before our youngest is launched.

I’m grateful I was able to work part-time as an actor, playwright, and teaching artist during those years. Those roles helped me come into myself as an artist, something I’ve always had difficulty calling myself. And I’m just beginning to find it.

So now, at the exact moment convention says I should sacrifice the creative work, I’m doubling down instead.

The Leap

I’m not saying I won’t make money. I want to sell my art. I’m singing at a funeral next Monday for $700 and I consider that my art. A practical service I can charge for that also feeds me as a performer. That’s how I want to make my living. With my artistic talents. Not teaching theater in a high school or working at Home Depot. That would kill me faster than... (falls off cliff) ...oops. See? Dead. 😵

My husband has his own work to do right now. He’s experiencing what James Hollis calls the middle passage, his own midlife awakening just beginning. This crisis, and it does feel like a crisis even knowing there are much worse ones in the world, will help him grow into himself if he lets it. That takes discipline. It takes faith. It takes guts.

I don’t always fully believe that creativity makes me healthier. Some days I wonder if this commitment to art is just another form of mania. Am I being irresponsible? Selfish? The doubt settles in my chest and sits there.

But my body is going to keep breaking down, faster than average. That reality pushed me to understand something clearly: I get one chance to be me.

The path less traveled is bumpy, unmarked, and sometimes genuinely terrifying.

But it’s mine.

And I’m not going backward.

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My chronically ill body couldn’t withstand the spotlight’s glare.

Before the interviews ended and the social media noise quieted, my health would collapse under the weight of attention. Fame, for me, isn’t just complicated or unwanted. It’s potentially lethal. My body has made that abundantly clear.

And yet.

Every lyric, every video, every play, every creative decision I make is haunted by the same question: will this get attention? At 49, I still haven’t learned to separate accomplishment from recognition. They’re fused together in my brain like inseparable twins, even though I know one of them threatens my survival.

My younger self chased anything that promised visibility. Jumping between passions, hobbies, business ideas, anything that might make me seen. My current self pretends to be wiser. Claims to focus solely on the art. But honestly? Most of the time I’m lying to myself.

The addiction to fame isn’t something I’m overcoming. It’s something I’m drowning in daily while pretending to keep my head above water.

So I’m writing a play about it.

What Fame Actually Is

The word comes from the Latin fama, which in ancient times meant both respected reputation and gossip simultaneously. It entered English in the 1200s and has kept that essential double meaning ever since. Widely known. For better or worse.

I use the word deliberately. It’s saturated with meaning we all instinctively understand.

And I’m not alone in this craving. If the desire for recognition weren’t a universal human condition, social media simply wouldn’t exist. We all want to be seen. Some of us more desperately than others. Fame, idolatry, the hunger for acknowledgment, these have always been woven into the fabric of culture, politics, entertainment, and history. This isn’t new. It’s just louder now.

Sometimes I question whether I even want it to disappear. The hunger for recognition feels like a fundamental part of my identity as an artist, toxic as it undoubtedly is. My current guru James Hollis talks about fear and lethargy waiting at the foot of the bed each morning. For me, and I suspect for a lot of us, fame is right there beside them. A close, dangerous cousin.

The Only Remedy I’ve Found

Redirection. That’s it. That’s the whole strategy.

For those one, two, maybe three hours when I’m actually creating something from nothing, when I’m fully inside the process, I can relegate fame to the background. Not banish it completely. Trying to do that only strengthens its grip. But background it, just enough to do the work.

The magic is in the making. It always has been.

Which is why I’m making a new show. It’s called Molly Bell’s Not Famous, a follow up to my show Molly Bell’s Hysterical, which explored my life with Common Variable Immune Deficiency and Bipolar 2. These shows require serious incubation. I hope this one doesn’t take five years but I’ve learned not to rush them. The previous show hasn’t sold yet but it has gained real traction, and I’m reminding myself that matters.

Something is trying to express itself. It always finds a way.

The only remedy that breaks the illusion, even temporarily, is forcing myself to wake up from it. Over and over again. Every single day.

Wake up. Create. Background the noise. Repeat.

That’s the practice. That’s all I’ve got.

And somehow, annoyingly, it keeps working.

A Note On How I Made This

For anyone curious about my process: I wrote this in the morning and recorded the voiceover on my dog walk, which is the only place I’m genuinely unselfconscious about how I sound. You’d think that wouldn’t be hard for me, being an actor, but delivering your deepest darkest thoughts out loud is a different thing entirely.

I imported it into Logic Pro, spliced and layered voices, added reverb, drone textures, piano passages in C major, and surrendered to whatever emerged. The visual is a photo of me at around age eight that sits beside my bed. I deliberately didn’t scan it professionally. The imperfection felt right. It’s my daily reminder that creativity once existed without ambition. That I once made things purely for play.

That’s the version of me I’m trying to find my way back to.

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You know the look.

Someone watches your show, reads your piece, listens to your song, and then says with genuine bewilderment in their eyes: “I don’t know how you do it. I could never make something out of nothing like that.”

And you smile and say thank you and move on. But something about it sits a little sideways.

These are often people who by every conventional measure are far more successful than me. Custom homes. Robust 401ks. Vacation chalets. Big Tech wealth from Google and Meta and Apple that has created a financial stratosphere I will never personally inhabit.

They attend my concerts. Watch my plays. Lurk on my content. And many of them will never once say “that was fun.” Not a comment, not a text, not a simple acknowledgment that they were there and it moved them. The consumption without contribution thing is real and it is its own particular kind of lonely.

But the bewilderment is genuine. Creation, to them, is mysterious. Almost magical. Something that happens to other people.

And I find that heartbreaking. Because it doesn’t have to be.

What They’re Actually Asking

When someone says “I don’t know how you do it” they are not asking about technique. They’re not asking about process or discipline or where I find the time.

They’re asking about meaning.

They’re asking, without knowing they’re asking, how to access a kind of fulfillment that their custom home and their robust 401k and their vacation chalet have not provided. They’re standing in front of something I made and feeling a hunger they can’t quite name.

And to that I say: it takes guts. It takes faith to put yourself out into the world and say I made this. It takes a particular kind of courage when nine out of ten people in your life never mention it. Ever.

My life is built on transforming nothing into something. I’m moderately successful, not to any level of critical acclaim, but my creative practice sustains my spirit, supports a life with children, soothes my body from an immune condition, and calms a mind prone to hypomania. Each thing I make is simply another pearl on a continuously growing necklace.

Phil Stutz talks about this in the documentary Stutz. He calls it the String of Pearls. A line, then a circle, line, then a circle. Each circle is one action. And here’s the key: every action has the same value. Getting out of bed and doing the thing that day. Not sizing up the effort or ranking its importance. Just putting the next pearl on the string. That’s it. That’s the whole practice.

How You Actually Start

Creation isn’t magic. It’s practice. It’s showing up day after day even when inspiration feels like it moved to another zip code. It’s making something small and then making it again but slightly better.

Start with imitation. Copy what moves you until your own voice emerges in the spaces between influences. Give yourself permission to make terrible first drafts. Every master creator once made beginner work. Every single one.

Begin with five minutes today. Make something, anything. A doodle, a paragraph, a melody hummed into your phone. Tomorrow do it again. String enough of those moments together and you’ll discover what every creator knows eventually: the act itself generates energy. Creating doesn’t deplete you. It fills you up.

The world needs more creators. Not just of art but of solutions, connections, and new ways of seeing. The courage to make something from nothing might be the most important thing any of us can develop in an age of abundance that somehow still leaves so many people feeling completely empty.

So when someone looks at me with that bewildered expression and says “I don’t know how you do it,” I want to look back and say:

How could I not?

My Current Obsessions A little treat for making it to the end.

📖 Reading: True and False Magic by Phil Stutz

Watching: Stutz on Netflix (Jonah Hill’s Documentary on his psychiatrist, don’t miss it!

“The [String of Pearls] is probably the most important thing, motivationally, you could teach yourself. You just draw a string of pearls. There’s a line, then a circle, line, then a circle. Each one of those circles equals one action. But here’s the thing. Every action has the same value. I am the person that puts the next pearl on the string. That’s it. Just getting out of bed and doing what you have to do that day and not putting, like, a size value on the effort. They’re all the same size.”

Phil Stutz, Stutz

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I’ve had countless ideas in my 49 years.

Some I dive into headfirst. Others haunt my mind for years until I finally gather the courage to try them, reluctantly let them go, or my uncooperative body makes that decision for me. My ideas take their sweet time to blossom, unfolding alongside the messy business of being human.

Here’s what that actually looks like:

I had a baby.

While nursing said baby at home, I conceived a musical about Britney Spears. So naturally I cast my infant in the promotional materials. Me as Britney, him as her son. Because motherhood clearly hadn’t compromised my judgment.

We wrote that ridiculous musical. It was actually brilliant, but still ridiculous. Rehearsed it. Flew to NYC to perform it. Brought my now eighteen month old to New York for a month of performances, because nothing says reasonable life choices like combining toddler management with off-Broadway ambitions.

Won best actor, somehow.

Couldn’t collect the award because illness kept me bedridden. My body’s favorite party trick: impeccably timed betrayal.

Went home to Northern California. Staged the musical again. Got sick again.

Tried for another pregnancy. And again. Got sick. Another miscarriage. My fourth, maybe fifth. I’ve honestly lost count. My body has never been reliable, except in its unreliability.

Revived the Britney musical. Had an idea. Explored adoption. Abandoned the adoption process, something felt wrong. Accepted that one child would complete our family.

Staged the musical again. Had an idea. Got a dog. Simpler than another child, though not really.

Performed the musical again. Had to stop when pregnancy complications resurfaced. Battled the theater over rights and royalties. Won.

Successfully carried my daughter to term, with help from an IV superfood that strengthened my body enough to nurture her. My veins: reluctant participants in the miracle of life.

Had another idea. Wrote another musical. Got sick. Predictably. Staged the musical. Sold the musical. Stayed sick.

You get the picture.

A stop-motion film of creation interrupted by biological mutiny.

Sometimes my ideas seem deceptively simple at first. It’s impossible to predict where they’ll lead. They transform. They collide with illness. They survive anyway, usually in a form I didn’t originally intend, which is often better.

I just create while life keeps happening. I will create up until the point life stops happening. This is what helps me cope with a body that constantly challenges my brain.

Make art during tantrums. Create while tethered to IVs. Have the idea in the middle of the night and write it on your hand because you can’t find a pen.

I have countless ideas. Life has its own agenda. We negotiate, though life clearly has the upper hand in these discussions.

It hasn’t won yet.

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