Emily is driving and there is something wrong with the tires again. We're at 5000 ft and descending. The car is swerving all over the road and we can't figure out why. We just got 2 new tires put on and this is getting exhausting. We should have rode horses.
“No Doubt is awesome,” Emily says.
“Yeah, totally,” I respond absentmindedly.
Actually I hate No Doubt. I mean, I can listen to them, and I think Gwen Stefani has awesome style, and her voice is even okay, but I just don't like them at all.
This is how my life has changed. When No Doubt first came out, the thought of them made me sick. Their girl-power anthem seemed so watered down to me. I was listening to Bikini Kill and Team Dresch and I knew what real feminist music sounded like. I had a shaved head and a septum piercing and a girl power tattoo and I lived in a basement for $90 a month in a house with 7 girls. We'd go the the Bins in Portland and get home and admire our sweater vests and baseball shirts. “Oh my god, that's so rad, “ we'd gasp.
Now I live in a van with 7 other girls and I say things like “No Doubt is awesome”. When we make $300 a week we feel loaded. When someone pulls a glittery, sparkly, trashy, skin-tight new costume from the Leo's factory outlet store out of a bag I gasp. “Oh my god, that's so beautiful”. Who am I? What have you done with Shayna?
Actually, I'd take the me now a million times over the 90's riot grrrl version. She was fully nuts. Certifiably crazy. Now, I'm only crazy for fun, and sometimes on accident. I often think of how sad I was then, how every bad thing would seem like the end, and every kind of bad thing would seem like a kick in the gut. I didn't even want to make it out of that time alive.
And now I run a freaking circus. I leave town for 5 weeks to do my art. I get my picture in the paper. I'm not saying this to brag. I look back at that time in my life with such relief that I had the resilience to pull through it. I'm so grateful that there were parts of my life that I loved enough to keep going for and that those parts have become what make my life awesome now. I had to work really fucking hard to get out of that rut, but I'm so glad I did. It makes it hard for me now to sympathize with people who don't think they have anything worthy of their lives. I'm so bootstrappy. I just want to smack people sometimes and say “snap the hell out of it!” You have no idea what lies ahead or what turn your life will take. It could go in infinite directions at every moment.
It's why everything scares the hell out of me, too. Flying, driving, riding in the van. Every second of travel makes my heart race, and in a panicked way, not an exhilarated way. Eight girls driving down a mountain pass in a van with screwed up steering is the kind of shit cable news programs thrive off of. For a moment we quietly imagined the memorial service that would be thrown for us if our lives went in that one terrifying, infinite direction. We laughed about the types of performances people would do to commemorate us. Then Emily told us to snap the hell out of it and we did, a bit relieved to take an order so firmly delivered.
Hanging from bits of cotton and steel, though, doesn't scare me a bit. In those moments I feel like no other moments exist to be afraid of. I know every hand placement and the right second to make it happen. I look forward to performing to relieve my mind from the almost constant dull ring of doom that still exists droning at the back of my days. Somethings change as I get older: my taste in music, clothes, ability to deal with personal crisis. Somethings stay the same, but just get blurrier: my girl power tattoo, my eyesight, my overarching and endless fear of my final infinite moment.
Who would think “aerialist” is the perfect career for dealing with it?
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