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.

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.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

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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

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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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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

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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

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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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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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The high: performing for a sold-out crowd.

The low: learning my show, the one I’ve been writing and composing for five years, the one that has had three readings and two workshops and is genuinely ready for production, was not being offered a slot in the upcoming season.

The reason I was given: budgets cut 8%, my show was the fifth of the season, first to go.

The truth: who knows. I don’t know if it was ever truly being considered.

The more uncomfortable truth: I’m not sure that matters.

The embarrassing part: I cried at the meeting.

I didn’t have time to dwell on any of it. I had a weekend of performances ahead of me and an ear infection that had other plans. So I made a decision. I took a small dose of prednisone, just enough to keep up with myself and belt out those high D’s.

I can already feel the imaginary judgy people in my brain shaking their heads.

My internal response to them: Fuck off. You have no idea what it’s like to live in this body.

Too much? Maybe. Maybe not. You decide.

I chose myself. Again. As I keep having to do.

What I’m Actually Waiting For

Here’s the honest version: I’ve been waiting for some authoritative entity to sweep me up into the clutches of their budgets, their huge email list, their guaranteed built-in audience, their weekly health and pension, and a venue full of designers and creatives who can help my work explode.

I’m starting to accept that’s not coming. Not yet. Maybe not ever in the way I imagined it.

I once pictured this show opening off-Broadway just as I turned fifty. A perfect number for my storybook life. Creating buzz the way Alex Edelman or Jacquelyn Novak did with their solo work. Hip theater, great press, the whole thing.

But those people are on their own path. They’re younger, not ill, they live where the action is, and they’re stand up comedians. I’m a musical theater performer singing all my jokes, raising kids in Northern California, negotiating with a body that wants to stay small.

Do I sound bitter? Maybe a little. I’m working on it. It’s not their fault. I made different decisions based on what life had to offer me.

The Actual Question

Do I keep waiting for some authoritative agency to produce my play, which could take another two years? Or do I produce it myself, get it on tape, let it become part of my creative portfolio, do a proper ta-da, and move on to write the next thing?

It’s not so simple. In the back of my brain has always been the notion that this show could take me somewhere real. And weirder things have happened.

But here’s where I actually am this morning: the right side of my face is swollen. The ear infection is back. I may have built up a tolerance to the antibiotics, which is its own special problem. I pushed my body beyond its capabilities for one night of solid entertainment and my body has shoved me back into submission, as it reliably does.

This is my creative cycle. It has always been my creative cycle.

I’ve made a kind of gamble with my life. To live bigger on the front end, still performing, still creating, still pushing and asking and learning, with the full understanding that I may get permanently sick on the back end and reach an earlier finish line than most.

Sounds dramatic?

Well. I’m literally dramatic for a living.

I’ll go see another doctor who doesn’t know me. Explain my thirty year illness from the beginning, again. Take a drug. Get better for the time being.

And then I’ll try to soothe my soul with art.

It’s the only thing that really works. The only thing that calms the anxiety of a restless soul trapped in a body that keeps changing the terms of our agreement.

So that’s what I’ll do.

Again.

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Here’s what I want to remind you about creativity: it requires a commitment to your own bizarre instincts.

Was leading 220 people in a spontaneous rendition of The Lonely Goatherd objectively strange? Absolutely. But for those three minutes we created something that existed nowhere else in the universe. Just us, yodeling like idiots in a tiny little theater.

That’s magic. Even if it’s messy magic.

The Tightrope

Last night I performed for 220 members of my community. Not some anonymous crowd. My people. And there’s a stark difference between playing to strangers and prancing around with a microphone and lights in front of people who sort of know you as the woman in town who is an actress and produces her own concerts. Cringe. 😬

But it went really well. And I want to resist the urge to say oh it was no biggie, this is just what I do. Because no. It was hard work.

The memorization. The ticket sales. The rehearsal with the band. Working out charts. Doing new material on the fly. Having my daughter perform with me. Nine voice students. An audience singalong. And let me just say, it is a tightrope walk trying to channel your most authentic self while maintaining professional quality while keeping things buoyant enough that nobody feels the weight of your anxiety that you only had one rehearsal with the band because anything more is too expensive.

Whew. That was a long sentence. The concert felt a little like that too.

The Morning After

And then, because this is how the human brain works, I woke up to the vulnerability hangover.

That voice: that bit dragged, right? Everyone noticed when the mic cut out. They’re definitely in group chats right now dissecting how full of myself I am.

I’ve been around this psychic merry-go-round enough times to recognize it for the carnival ride it is. After two decades of this I know when something worked. This worked. It was scrappy, but it worked.

Part of me desperately wants to justify all of it. To explain why I do this. But that’s just my ego trying to control how others perceive me. And I’m not interested in being someone so stuck in what others think that they stay put until they cease to exist.

The Kintsugi Argument

It’s easy to get caught up in producing work that, as Henry Oliver from The Common Reader puts it, leads people to pretend to enjoy art for social reasons.

But I think what we actually need is the unpolished kind. The Kintsugi kind. Kintsugi is the Japanese art of repairing broken pottery with gold, silver, or platinum lacquer, emphasizing the beauty of the imperfection rather than hiding it. The history of the object made visible rather than erased.

It helps us to see someone standing in the spotlight, slightly terrified, doing it anyway. The unfiltered human, not another airbrushed performance run through a filter, autotuned, carefully charted to look spontaneous.

I’m guilty of that too sometimes. We all are.

So yes, I may have forgotten the second verse. Forgot to bring my readers out for the singalong. Couldn’t read my set list because the font was too small. Kicked over a water bottle. Forgot the order of things.

But I showed up.

Fully.

Weirdly.

As myself.

And you know what I’m thinking? That’s the whole point

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This week I’m performing for my community. My peers. And it feels completely different than performing for strangers.

When I’m hired to perform it’s usually at a theater, or representing some organization, or playing a special event. There’s a personal element that gets removed. The stakes feel lower.

This week the stakes feel higher. Much higher.

Because these people don’t know me as a professional performer. They know me as volleyball mom. Dog park lady. Dance fitness instructor. The woman who always has “play practice.”

I used to get annoyed when people asked how “play practice” was going instead of rehearsal. Now I’m trying to see it as a badge of honor. How many people get to do at 49 what they loved doing at eight?

A few of my literal neighbors are coming. The ones curious about why they hear so much singing from my house. My son’s volleyball team parents. My voice students’ families. My dental hygienist, who I asked while her hands were in my mouth. A huge group of women bringing their reluctant husbands who will inevitably find themselves moved by the end. Just a whole bunch of people from our community who bought tickets.

And I really, really want to show them what I’ve got.

The Freeze

Here’s what’s been happening though. I’ve started freezing up over learning my lyrics. It might be an age thing. It might be anxiety. There’s a lot going on in my family life right now and it’s creating a low, who am I kidding, a mid-level roar of anxiety underneath everything.

So what do I do with that?

I turn to old school techniques I learned in my training and teach my students. Because artistic growth often hides in the smallest details and true mastery emerges when you go one step beyond the obvious thing.

When I walk the dog I recite lyrics like Shakespearean monologues. Exploring the story arc within a single song, experimenting with pacing and emotional beats, often in a whisper. This intimate practice lets me mold to the work rather than forcing the work to conform to me. It connects the lyrics to the brain and the body simultaneously. And honestly this applies to anything you want to elevate, a speech, a presentation, a difficult conversation.

The artistry lives in the seemingly insignificant choices.

The Stanislavsky Part

This is where my acting training becomes surprisingly useful beyond the stage. The same techniques I studied with masters like Uta Hagen and Sanford Meisner, breaking performance into beats, clarifying intentions, selecting precise tactics, can transform virtually any profession.

Are you a Pilates teacher? How do you walk into the room? Are you intending calm focused confidence or light hearted whimsy? Both are valid. Both yield completely different results. Most instructors of any kind never think about this. It’s an opportunity of artistry missed every single week.

Here’s how I’m applying it to my opening beat at this concert:

My intention: set the tone of community, family, connection, local roots.

My action: my eighteen year old son, confident and well spoken, will introduce me.

My tactic: I’ve worked with him to craft a welcome that’s not too rehearsed and not too off the cuff. Balanced between improvisational and focused.

He’ll introduce me. The band strikes up. Audience claps. I hug him as he hands me the microphone and exits. I take the stage.

One well thought out beat. Intention, action, tactic, result. Audience warmth. Enough for them to lean in and invest.

If a formal organization hired me for this concert I would need to be fully memorized. So if I’m hiring myself, well. Same rules apply.

I can do it. Everything takes more time when you’re older. More time to heal. More time to get out of bed. More time to memorize.

Better get to it. Two more days and then it’s showtime.

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If you've ever tried to stay calm while waiting for someone else to decide the fate of something you made, this one's for you.

I’ve poured five years into a play. Written it, composed it, orchestrated it. Handed it to the people with the power to produce it.

And now I wait.

I’m not good at waiting. Within about forty eight hours I had already announced to my family that I should probably start an Etsy store selling dog treats. My husband’s response was immediate and flat: “Don’t start a website.” Fine. Dream killer.

So I wait.

Except I’m Not Just Waiting

Because while I’m waiting to hear about the play, I have a concert to produce. Completely self-produced, at a fairly large theater, almost sold out.

I want to be clear about what self-produced actually means because I don’t think most people know. It means I booked the venue and took on all the financial risk personally. Purchased event insurance. Did all the marketing and sales myself, this time focusing less on social media and more on actual human community connection. Chose the material. Booked and rehearsed with the musicians. Organized charts into section parts, which I had never done before and which involved an organizational complexity I genuinely struggle with.

The goal is to make all of that look easy.

It is not easy. That’s why most people don’t do it.

But I’m growing up. My body revolts when I panic-produce and I literally cannot do that anymore. So this time I took more time. I allowed for a more intentional approach. And it’s working.

The Real Work

And then it’s back to waiting on the play. Seasons are being decided right now and I want to be one of the ones picked. I’m saying the quiet part out loud.

This is where the real internal work begins. Because there’s no point in worrying. The outcome will be the same regardless of whether I spiral or stay calm. This is what 1194 days of meditation is supposed to help with.

Yes, I brag about that. A lot.

And yes, I have panicked twice, okay maybe three times, at ten minutes before midnight when I suddenly remembered and shouted something unprintable, woke up my entire household, and raced to my room to keep my streak alive. I acknowledge that might mean I’m missing some of the point. But I’m still the one with 1194 days. So.

The concert will happen. The play will or won’t get picked up. I’ll keep making things either way.

That’s not resignation. That’s just what this life looks like from the inside.

One thing at a time. One pearl on the string.

Still waiting. Mostly okay.

Molly’s Current Obsessions A little treat for making it to the end.

📖 Reading: Mind Your Body by Nicole Sachs. Practical, honest, and genuinely useful if you deal with chronic pain or anxiety.

Also re-reading The Wisdom Pattern by Richard Rohr because some books you just have to keep coming back to.

🎧 Listening: In Your Own Backyard: The Kristin Smart Story. Late to this one but it did not disappoint.

✨ Wildcard: Moises app. Recommended by one of my voice students. Lets you play any song in any key, at any speed, removes vocals and instruments, and will give you the chord structure just by listening. Life changing for rehearsing.

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If you've ever made something you're genuinely proud of and had no idea if the world would ever see it, this one's for you.

I‘ve always wanted to be an artist with a voice that commands attention. Not through volume or force. Through truth.

The director of my solo show turns 80 this year. She’s internationally renowned, an actor, an Artistic Director, a woman who carved her path through theater with raw determination and real sacrifice. Through her I learned that ambition isn’t a dirty word. It’s the backbone of art that matters.

What we’ve built together lives and breathes. It pulses with rhythm, pushing and pulling, racing and pausing, soaring and diving. On stage it becomes a mirror. Audiences see fragments of themselves in every moment, every movement, every breath.

This is my work. Our work. I’m so proud of it.

The Final Chapter

As I review the countless drafts and we gather our strength to send this thing out into the world, I can feel we’re entering the final chapter. The completion feels both imminent and surreal. The journey has been longer than I could have imagined. Five drafts, six iterations, or has it been a lifetime? But somewhere inside all of that I found something I didn’t know I was looking for.

My voice. Unmistakably, unequivocally mine.

I’ll try to say this without ego: it’s fucking good. It represents every ounce of artistic truth I have at this moment in my life. It is exactly what I’m capable of right now.

And I may be running out of time for this kind of work.

Every day I wake up to a new body, a new illness, a new ache or creak. Currently I’m dealing with either a frozen shoulder or a torn ligament, I’m waiting on an MRI. Which means I’m having trouble playing piano. Which is somewhat essential when you write a musical.

She knows about running out of time too. At 80 she’s deep in her third act, fully aware of what remains undone and what she still wants to see exist in the world. We’re both striving to get this to the finish line. Together.

We’ve acknowledged, out loud, the possibility that the world might never see this piece. That knowledge doesn’t diminish our conviction. If anything it sharpens it.

The risk is enormous. To invest this much energy, thought, compassion, time, and soul into something that might never reach beyond our rehearsal room is genuinely terrifying. This is why so many people step back from the edge. The fear of failure is real. Failure remains possible.

I’m standing at that edge right now.

Some might call it foolish to risk this much for art.

I call it necessary.

And I’m not stepping back.

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If you've ever lain awake doing the kind of arithmetic that has no good answer, this one's for you.

You wake up at 4 AM and your brain immediately starts running the numbers.

Husband out of work since August. Turning 50 this year. Son graduating. Twenty fifth wedding anniversary in September. Two 401ks cashed out because we have run out of money.

Yeah. That.

I didn’t really go back to sleep.

The Free Fall

I’m in one of those periods where everything feels like it’s grinding toward some kind of explosion. The economy. The country. Health insurance. Friendships. The general vibe of the entire planet. I’ve been watching Paradise on Hulu. Great show. Feels uncomfortably close to current events. Anyway.

I wrote this quote in my notes recently and keep coming back to it:

“Certainty is mindless. Uncertainty is the rule, not the exception.” — Ellen Langer

Which is either deeply comforting or deeply unhelpful depending on what time it is and whether I’ve eaten.

I have thought recently about whether my kids will live out their full lifetimes. God, that’s dark. I know. But the thought exists and I’m not going to pretend it doesn’t. Something about naming the darkest fear out loud makes it slightly less powerful. Slightly.

Oh, I also just forgot how to spell tsunami and had to look it up. So there’s that.

The Other Thing

What’s strange and true at the same time: I am also, somehow, really coming into myself this year. Editing down my life to find what and who and where actually matters. Growing in ways I couldn’t have anticipated when all of this started.

Both things are real. The free fall and the becoming. They’re happening simultaneously and I’ve stopped trying to resolve that contradiction.

I’m just trying to keep my head above water. That’s why I write. Tomorrow will be better.

P.S. Tomorrow wasn’t better. Because no sleep. But the day after that was. Things get better. Things get worse. Certainty is mindless. Uncertainty is the rule, not the exception. Still here.

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

📺 Watching: Paradise on Hulu. Unsettling. Excellent. Highly recommend if you enjoy feeling vaguely prophetic.

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If you're also only just now figuring out what growing up actually means, you're in good company.

I said “oh, grow up, for f*ck’s sake” to my eighteen year old the other day. One of those parenting moments where you drop the nice mom act and hope a blunt phrase will magically transform your teenager into a functional adult.

Spoiler: it doesn’t work.

I was also, secretly, saying it to myself.

The Uncomfortable Truth

It’s weird to realize you’re only beginning to actually grow up at 48, almost 49, when you assumed it would happen around 30. But I think this is genuinely when most people finally start to get their act together.

Some don’t.

A lot more than I realized don’t.

It’s depressing as hell.

Look around. So many people just let greed, ego, and dopamine hits run their entire existence. I’m not talking about politics. I’m talking about actual humans everywhere, including some of my own friends, stuck in permanent adolescence with zero signs of evolution.

And it means I have to let them go.

I’m trying not to be dramatic about this. I’m failing. Being dramatic is literally my job description. I’m a musical theater actress. I see life in this heightened way where normal conversations should probably burst into song at any moment. To some people that’s annoying. To others it’s magical. I have made my peace with this.

What Growing Up Actually Requires

At 49 I feel this pull toward real ownership of myself in ways I’ve been quietly avoiding. Personal authority. The actual grown up kind. The kind where you stop letting other people’s opinions run the whole operation.

My grown up self knows what I’m here to do. Take everyday experiences of growth and self-discovery and turn them into art through dialogue, song, and people dancing their feelings. That’s it. That’s the whole thing.

But my inner child, worrier, fame monster keeps trying to pull me back. Make me smaller. More timid. Obsessed with what everyone thinks. I have to remind myself constantly to choose growth over stagnation.

So if I actually commit to being the author of my own life, what do I let go of? Do I reclaim the rights to my show sitting in a publisher’s catalog? Do I leave my acting union that limits me more than it helps, even though it gives me industry credibility? Complicated.

Life is just a series of experiments and pivots while you fumble toward yourself.

At 49 I’ve finally grasped something that should have been obvious years ago: this is my one precious life. And I’m about to shrink it because of what YOU think? What my kids think? What car I drive? What people who have never once taken a single risk think of me?

No thanks.

I’ve decided to grow up.

It’s not ideal timing, given that the world is basically on fire.

But we need more grown ups.

Obviously.

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If you're also quietly slipping away from the scroll and wondering if real connection still works, this one's for you.

I’m determined to sell out 220 seats in the middle of March. With flyers. And actual conversations with strangers.

I know.

I’m a musical theater actress who writes and performs her own shows. I should be all-in on social media, hustling in the digital marketplace, building my personal brand. Instead I’m carrying 138 half-printed flyers in my bag and talking to my barista about local theater.

No algorithms were optimized in that conversation. No engagement metrics were harmed. Just two humans discovering a shared interest in real time, without a single perfectly crafted Instagram story to document it.

The digital evangelists would call this inefficient. Why reach one person when you could reach thousands? They’re not wrong about the math. But they’re missing the magic. When I hand someone a flyer after a genuine conversation that paper carries the weight of a real connection. It’s not another sponsored post sliding past their thumb. It’s a tangible reminder of an actual moment we shared.

When they come to my show they’re not a metric. They’re the person who told me about their first theater experience while making my latte.

The Old School Approach

Here’s what selling out a show actually looks like without a viral moment:

I have students backing me up on a song, giving them a chance to perform in a professional setting. Instead of charging them for the prep lessons I asked them to sell six to eight tickets each. Four people from the dog park bought tickets after months of actual conversation. My mailing list is a beautiful mess of thirty years in the performing arts, an accumulation of dance classes, voice lessons, workshops, and performances. I don’t even know who half of them are. They know me though. It’s the opposite of targeted marketing and I kind of love that.

I’ve kept a small presence on Facebook and Instagram but outsourced the posting. It feels like maintaining a forwarding address while moving to a new home. Necessary maybe, but not where the real living happens.

What’s Actually Going On

Every other Substack article right now seems to be about leaving social media. We’re all writing our digital exodus stories, which is a little ironic, but it speaks to something real. People are fed up with the constant performance, the endless optimization, the hollow connections.

The wisdom we keep circling back to isn’t new. Build genuine relationships. Create value. Connect with your community. We just forgot these fundamentals in the rush to go viral.

The work deepens when you stop packaging your creative process into bite-sized content. My shows aren’t being written to be shareable or Instagram friendly. They’re being written to be good. To be true. To be worth a stranger’s time when they take a chance on a flyer from a woman they met at a coffee shop.

The real living happens in the unexpected conversations. The imperfect moments. The connections that can’t be optimized or scaled. It happens in theater seats and coffee shops, in handed out flyers and chance encounters. In the spaces between screens where humans have been finding each other for millennia.

Maybe that’s why so many of us are migrating offline. We’re remembering what it feels like to earn things. To build things that last longer than a news feed refresh. To have conversations that aren’t being monitored by invisible algorithms.

We’re remembering what it feels like to be human.

And no, I won’t be sharing this on my Instagram story. I might tell you about it if we meet for coffee though.

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