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Can you believe it was hard for me to sit down and write this?
The second I got home from New York that Sunday, I ran to the bookstore. That’s not an exaggeration. I parked my car after 4+ hours on the road, tossed the McDonald's bag in the trash, wheeled my unpacked suitcase into the bedroom, and bolted down the street for some beat up Susan Sontag, hoping a deluge of art in its most remedying form might freeze time.
Then Monday night, I went over to my friend’s apartment to cook dinner and hang with the girls. You have no idea how perfectly rigatoni vodka, eggplant parm, and Nathan For You shake up for an escapist cocktail. (Or maybe you do.)
Normally I’m psyched to tell the world everything they never wanted to know about an experience I loved. But this was the rare occasion of dreading the comfort of my own home. Coming home meant accepting that it’s over. That it may never happen again.
Last weekend, I attended Cheryl Strayed’s “Wild Awakenings” writing workshop at the Omega Institute in Rhinebeck, New York. I keep telling people that I didn’t expect it to be as transformative as it was, trying to fabricate some element of surprise. Who wants to be that arrogant, untrustworthy storyteller who’s like, “I just KNEW that shit was gonna change my life?” But here is my admission that I kind of did. I believed, in the most remote corner of my heart, that I was embarking on something special the second I booked my spot.
That Friday afternoon, I loaded down my dented, mocha-colored Buick. I felt positively fucking insane gazing upon the mountain of belongings in the back seat. Stuffed backpack on top of stuffed suitcase on top of entire bedspread on top of peanut butter leather interior that’s seen better days. It looked like I just caught Andrew cheating and hit the road for good. If you’ve ever read Cheryl’s memoir Wild about hiking the Pacific Crest Trail, you’ll understand the parallel: her overstuffed backpack, lovingly named Monster, becomes a full-blown character in the story. My Buick was my Monster and the road was my PCT.
There was no turning back.
The Campus
October. Hudson Valley. Those words alone can take your breath away. An autumnal dreamscape of orange and green envelops your being. Feelings of presence and nostalgia collide. Omega Institute is tucked in the woods. Driving down the main road that cuts through campus, the tension of driving ~5 hours when my trip was supposed to take 3 & ½ completely neutralized. I crunched out of the gravel parking lot in some old Reeboks and felt my lungs expand. Think sprawling campground meets liberal arts college meets Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater. (Indeed, this was somewhere with a library named for Ram Dass.) There were little white cabins everywhere with porches to drink coffee on. Random circles of Adirondack chairs, where people sat and read in between classes. Gardens. Art installations. Even a fox running around, getting so close as to say “this is all a dream” before sneaking into the woods.
Within cabin 71 was my dorm: some 40 sq. ft. in a friendly shade of pale yellow with a twin bed beside a wide window, and a large black and white print of a flower on the wall. Beside the bed was a lamp and a nightstand with a matching folding chair, both a kind of old, weathered walnut—relics of a past that would soon fuse with my own. It felt like somewhere a writer should be. The “room of one’s own” Virginia Woolf championed. The shared bathroom down the hall, however, told me all I really needed to know about this place. When you let the stall door slam, it makes a soft, nearly inaudible thud because the metal is padded by rubber. Silence. Stillness. Space to escape the grated metal city streets. I was as calm in the bathroom as I was at the Sanctuary.
Ah yes, the Sanctuary. To walk by it and not pay your respects felt like asking for bad karma. The opening to the Sanctuary is a big, wooden, triangular arch that leads you to a slate staircase that twists through the woods. Between the steps and the Sanctuary itself there is a platform for sitting, thinking. A small pond with flowing water that produces the same melody I select on an app when I can’t sleep. And when you reach the top, you arrive at an architectural masterpiece. Wooden. Mid-century. Japanese. There are Buddhist statues and more ponds, all green with bright orange koi fish gliding around. And inside, a meditation space with an enormously high wooden ceiling that comes together at a point in the sky, and beneath it, rows of black cushions on a beige-carpeted floor. A wall of gray rocks coils in the shape of a wave that sets a perfect backdrop for your spiritual guide.
It is the quietest place in the world until someone falls asleep and starts snoring.
Maybe the most important place on campus is the dining hall. The dining hall looks like a big, country home with a big, country porch, until you enter, essentially, an elementary school cafeteria for women who were once named Linda but now go by Calypso. There are huge, colorful quilts hanging from the walls. Round, dusty blue tables that force you to sit with strangers and exchange life stories. The beautiful thing about taking a course at Omega and staying on campus is that all your meals are free. Buffet style. Locally sourced, farm-to-table. Ninety-five percent vegan. The food was so good and so abundant, I’d show up to each meal and gorge myself like I hadn’t eaten in a year. It felt like the most natural thing in the world to spend my day learning how to write, refueling frantically between classes on cajun tofu and black bean tacos and elote pasta salad and fresh plums. There was every tea under the sun and trust me, this place attracts the tea-drinking type. Fresh apple and orange juice. An endless supply of coffee. The dining hall is where I met some of the most interesting people I’ve ever encountered. Where we’d linger after our evening session until 8 o’clock talking about brain tumors and mushroom trips and New York City.
The dining hall made me wish I was forced to eat with strangers all the time.
The People
The first people you encounter at Omega are the parking lot crew. They look like PhD students who work at Whole Foods, all clad in earth-toned linen and crochet. They sweetly request you pull your car up so they can unload your luggage and take it to your dorm for you. The burden of my Monster became someone else’s, and they were elated to reassure me that yes, it was really happening… they were taking my fucking luggage to my dorm.
As I shuffled off to dinner that night, I wholly expected to eat alone. Tables were filling up and I sat undisturbed, mostly fine with it after the long day’s travel. But up walked Mandy and Theresa, two women in their late 40s/early 50s who made me feel at home. Theresa was a mom from upstate, a fan of Cheryl Strayed who hoped the workshop would move her to write beyond her journal. Mandy was a trained shaman from Baltimore, an ultramarathoner with a running blog who was learning to practice hypnosis and had her first child at 45. She was there because she “loves scaring the shit out of herself,” and because she plans to host women’s retreats back in Baltimore and wanted to study the logistics. We talked about time as non-linear, other lives that are playing out in alternate dimensions, all within five minutes of meeting.
That night, we had our first session with Cheryl from 8-10 PM (more on that soon). We had to follow a writing prompt and share our piece with a neighbor. That’s where I met Leanne. Leanne is New England embodied. The kind of eyes and smile that you know you’ve seen glittering on some cobblestone street, warm as an argyle sweater. For a living, Leanne works in the wedding industry for a lighting company. She got that job after working in sales for a major florist in Boston, and I just don’t know if there has ever been a more charming trajectory. When I asked Leanne what brought her to the workshop, she said she didn’t consider herself a writer, but that she was a fan of Cheryl and felt called to come. When she read me her piece, though, commanding as ever, grief poking through ever so slightly, I knew she was called there for a reason.
The next morning, I had breakfast with Kay and Jen. Kay was a social justice attorney from Nashville who’s so exhausted by work that she traveled by plane, train, and automobile (I’m not kidding) to make the weekend happen. Kay talked about writing like she’d never picked up a pen in her life, but in the best way. On top of helping low-income families every day, she’s a mom herself, and she was desperate for something she could do solely for herself. Everything was enchanting to Kay and by proxy it was to me, too. Jen was a Brooklynite whose hair I could not stop staring at. Dark brunette, pin straight, blunt cut to her chin with bangs so perfect, she must keep scissors in her purse. She looked like an indie singer of the Angel Olsen variety. Jen was a PhD student in some cool, interdisciplinary, urban studies kind of field. She also builds theaters, and is an active Mormon. What are the odds?
When Lanie sat down at our table that morning, I was that mix of intimidated and curious one feels in the presence of great art. Portland, Oregon. Armpit bush. Ocean eyes. She was French Impressionism: someone’s interpretation of nature in its most beautiful form. (Mine, really.) Women like Lanie move through the world with convictions that at once disarm and empower you. She will denounce fascism in a valley girl voice and that’s the kind of paradox we all aspire to, isn’t it? Lanie lost both of her parents one after the other. She and her husband have taken on the role of caregiver for her younger sister, who has a disability. She was a brilliant force of literary feminism, all politics and book recommendations and genuine, belly laughter.
On Saturday evening, Lanie and I met for dinner. Two non-vegans, we relished the butter chicken over basmati rice—the only meat we’d see all weekend. Two women sat down with us, giggling like they’d come to the workshop a package deal. It turns out they had just met at that moment. Angela was a marketing executive living in Manhattan’s luxurious Chelsea neighborhood. Courtney was a trapeze artist from SoHo, who had a brain tumor removed, and who’d recently taken 13 grams of mushrooms in one shot. We talked about Gen Z… and millennials… and Gen X. Found commonality and shared laughs over too much coffee.
I met a lot of women Saturday. I knew I was exactly where I should be because I remembered all of their names and their stories without pause. (This seems like bare minimum social conduct, but it is big for me, as I’ve struggled with memory loss since going on medication.) Janet from New Jersey grew up desperate for the perfection her mother demanded. Getting caught and punished for making out on her porch would be one of her most formative memories. Katelyn from Canada would choose her gardening shears as the sole item to save from a burning building. Erica quit her longtime job as a writing professor in Missouri, burnt out from bureaucracy and low pay. She kept that secret from her colleagues for an entire month before her last day when she fled the scene, liberated and off to a better life. And then there was Mia. Mia and Dia had all the things in common and could not screech “I LOVE THIS FOR US” enough. Mia is engaged to a man she’d broken up with multiple times throughout her twenties—her soulmate whom, she knew in her heart, she could never truly give up on. Hers was a story that felt so regular against the tales of rape and divorce and death we’d hear all weekend. And yet, it was gripping. I was rooting for them as though they were running from the law, and really, they were just two people, my age, rebuilding from the growing pains that’d pushed them apart. I think that’s what the weekend would teach me more than anything: that all stories are vital, however big or small, because together, they shape our humanity.
The Work
Day 1
When I got to the Main Hall after dinner that night, my immune system was tanking. You know that lurking malaise that dares you to step out into the cold with wet hair and bring it fully to head. The long day on the road and anxiety of getting settled in an unfamiliar place, alone, was a lot. But when Cheryl took the stage, I sort of fan-girled myself back into health. There were about 300 of us there in person, and about 700 more on Zoom. I couldn’t stop myself from crunching numbers in my head, trying to calculate how much she rakes in from one of these things. Is this what making it looks like?
The workshop would be split up into six parts:
Letting the story be told
Letting the story be brave
Letting the story be deep
Letting the story be revelatory
Letting the story be alive
Letting the story be tangible
The first night was devoted to “letting the story be told.” Cheryl lectured on various sources of story (wounds, journeys, epic transitions, interests/passions/obsessions), and had us write ourselves a letter of advice on owning our own. It was the least academic session of the workshop—an intentionally free-flowing start before really getting to work. In hindsight, I can recognize the laid-back nature of the exercise. But man, when she said “you have 10 minutes to answer the prompt,” I froze. I scrambled to string together words and phrases I’d been gathering in my mind since we sat down, things that I thought might sound clever to a stranger. No such luck.
When I read my response to Leanne, I was mortified. I was certain I’d answered the prompt wrong and I felt like the only psychopath there contemplating the “right” and “wrong” ways to answer a prompt that is completely open to interpretation. But we were all in our own heads, there for various reasons, vulnerable to strangers. Six people were selected randomly from the room and on Zoom to share their responses. When I heard what other people could churn out in 10 minutes’ time, I went from feeling mortified—an emotion born from my ego’s wish to appear talented—to humbled. I was among writers. Serious writers like me whose stories are their vocations. I learned that night that I was not there to be praised, to share with 1000 people and bask in the glow of their claps and “woo”s.
I was there to listen.
When our session broke around 10 PM, I climbed the hilly, paved roads through the dark woods to my dorm among hoards of other campers, guided by various flashlights. I took my makeup off and brushed my teeth and sat up in my twin bed, comforted by my black bedspread from home, scribbling feverishly in a little blue journal about what had just happened. Being humbled as a writer is maybe the best thing that can happen to you, especially in a learning environment. Instead of wanting to improve to feed my ego, I’d spend the rest of the weekend wanting to improve to feed my soul. My soul, which became the spectral representation of the collective soul we all contribute to as artists. I wanted to learn everything I could about this craft that I love because that is my dharma, and dharma cannot exist without service to others.
Day 2
I awoke at 6:30 AM to the sounds of my cabin-mates readying for the day. The first session wasn’t until 9 AM, but Omega offers free yoga, meditation, and tai chi classes at 7 o’clock each morning. I told myself I would take full advantage of that and make the weekend as spiritual as it was technical, but that went out the window the first night when I realized I was there to be engrossed in writing (which really meant staying up way too late with a pen in my hand and being way too groggy to pretend to love stretching). I got showered, did my makeup at the sink beside an older woman, maybe in her 60s. We kept running into each other in the bathroom, so I decided to break the silence. She wasn’t as nice as I’d expected, sort of gave me weird eyes as I transformed myself into something Bratz doll-inspired for a writing workshop in the woods. It took all of me not to be like, “It’s called range, sweetie, look it up.”
Day 2 felt like being back in school in a way I didn’t know I was craving. From the moment we arrived at our morning session, it was sleeves up. “Letting the story be brave” charged us to cultivate courage by putting it all on the page, even if only we will read it… even if we don’t like it. We learned about the drafting process and establishing credibility with each iteration. Being an illuminator for stories born in dark places. “Letting the story be deep” taught us how to write with consciousness—how to make connections between seemingly disparate things in our lives, and within the context of the greater human narrative. This is where we challenged our motivations and perceptions of past experiences. Where we learned core truths of ancient tales, how to use paradox, the beauty of dramatization, and so much more. “Letting the story be revelatory” established the concept of the “emotional plot,” i.e., plot is what happens in a story, and revelations, or the emotional plot, tell us what those happenings mean.
… Am I boring you yet?
You’re not here to get a secondary lesson in narrative development. You’re here to learn about the blood-stained, tear-soaked work of 1000 strangers baring their ragged souls to find truth in writing. Over these three days I would hear a woman tell her rape story to spoken word rhythm, giving thanks to the MDMA therapy that broke her trauma. I cried my eyes out when a woman told the story of her 51-year-old sister who is dying of cervical cancer, who is being cared for by their 80-year-old mother who never taught them about reproductive health, let alone taking care of their bodies. A charming, nerdy older man over Zoom shared the most beautiful tale of keeping his dad’s memory alive by maintaining a tomato plant from his garden in his New York City apartment—the way he had to pollinate the plant himself with a tiny paint brush every day, the way it went from a hopeless pursuit to a feet-high monster bearing dozens of tomatoes. I learned what the word talisman meant and how one woman’s chosen talisman was her chainsaw, which she used to saw down the branches in her yard that blocked the sunlight—a task she begged her husband to do before he walked out on her. Mothers told stories of their daughters who are now their sons and we all cheered, a chorus of supporters who could feel the love bursting from the complexity.
Yes, these stories were big, packed into miniature, speed-written bildungsromans. The kinds of secrets that bind strangers for life.
Day 3
I wasn’t ready to leave Omega. Wherever I was, this sleep-away camp-college hybrid of 99% women who hugely and innately cared about each other, it was the utopia I’d dreamt of. A place I could be myself and embrace others in their fullest forms.
One of the prompts for our final exercise was “write about something that happened since this workshop began on Friday.” I’ll leave you with what I wrote in my notebook in those 10 minutes, in all its incomplete, imperfect honesty:
I felt really fucking silly as I loaded down my dented up Buick. Did I need to pack my whole life for a weekend in a dorm room? God, what business did I have attending in the first place? I don’t have an MFA or so many bylines and I took this marketing job so clearly my priorities are out of whack and should I just quit writing altogether? I guess the common thread among us writers is that we all feel like frauds. We have to bribe ourselves with late night cigarettes snuck between pages to remember who we are.
And so I arrived on these sacred grounds 4 hours and 45 minutes later (the trip was supposed to take 3 and a half) and something clicked. It wasn’t until our 8 o’clock session, where I shared my shitty piece with Leanne, that I realized what that something was. It was that there is no other way.
When you go through life feeling lost and empty and it feels like everyone’s dying on you at the same time. And you lose weight and you gain weight. And you take the second tab of LSD from a stranger and get on the ferris wheel. And writing is still there… there is no other way.
When you go through his phone and all the porn stars in his search history look nothing like you. And when you find yourself getting railed on a balcony off the coast of Sicily. And when you get t-boned in a busy intersection and narrowly escape death. And writing is still there… there is no other way.
And when you feel misunderstood by the people in your life. People who can’t understand why you’re always tired because you stayed up late, mulling over a single sentence. And writing is still there, begrudgingly, painstakingly… there is no other way.
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I feel the new energy, I see difference in your words, rhythm in comforting cadence. So delighted for your new pathway on an ancient road.
Also love “late night cigarettes stuffed between pages.” And every mention of psychedelics and staying up late mulling sentences haha. Great piece!