No Matter Where You Roam, Know Our Love Is True.

What a month this has been, readers.  What a year, really.

Yesterday, I returned from yet another trip to Louisville to spend time with some members of my adopted family.  For those of you out of the loop, let me fill you in on "the family".

Being a chubby, prepubescent girl in the middle of the suburbs with affinity for all things old, it was quite clear that I wasn't going to be making friends my own age.  This is where the internet comes into play.  Before MySpace, even, I was on message boards, seeking out friends with similar interests.  My particular obsession was The Beatles. This lead me down the roads of MySpace, then later Facebook, which lead me to meeting "the family" in person at a Beatles themed festival in Louisville, Kentucky called Abbey Road on the River.

All of a sudden, I had a network of support scattered all over the world.  If I were ever feeling blue, or lonely, or down on myself, I would just open up the window for the internet, and be surrounded by all of my friends.  Once a year we would gather for a week and have Beatle summer camp, basically.  No one judged you here.  Everyone loved.  It's what I imagined a real life family reunion would be like.  At the time of my discovery of these beautiful people, my life at home was not ideal.  My parents had split up a few years prior, and my dad had married a particularly nasty breed of woman.  It was only natural to seek out surrogate parents, sisters, brothers, aunts and uncles to supplement the void I felt.  This is where they came in.

In 2010, I kept seeing a name pop up in my "People You May Know" section on Facebook.  We had hundreds of mutual friends, so I sent her a friend request.  Her name was Carla, and I had vaguely remembered seeing her face around the year before.  I later came to find out that Carla mentioned to her long time love and soulmate, Jim: "This really young girl added me on Facebook.  But she's got some really nice shoes!" And thus, a new Beatle mom was born.

Over the course of the next four years, I spent several nights with Momma Carla and Poppa Jim as I dubbed them.  We went and saw shows together, met up for dinner whenever they were in Nashville, and kept in touch.  I even had a key to their house at one point.  In February of this year, I had just made a huge life change, and was celebrating that along with the Beatles' 50th Anniversary with a small section of the family in Kentucky.  There was a moment where Carla saw our reflections in the glass window of the ballroom we were in, and I remember her trying to get the lighting just right to capture the moment on her phone.  We drank, we danced, and we talked about how happy she was to be healed from her previous injury that left her arm in a cast.

Three weeks later, I found myself in Carla and Jim's house.  Carla had been diagnosed with a rather nasty case of cancer.  I felt absolutely thrown for a loop.  My Beatle family doesn't go away.  They're the only stability I am guaranteed in this life.  Why was this happening to her?  Like a dutiful daughter, I drove the three hours to come see her, and I will treasure the few days I was there.  She had a wound vac that she had to carried around (she christened it "Mona") and we joked about bedazzling it so it would be more Carla-appropriate.  I found it so funny, and so like her that even laid up in bed, she still wanted to make sure I noticed her new pedicure, and she wanted to hear about the date I went on the night before, asking me if he was too old like the rest of them, and did he have a job?  With her stitches, blood, guts, and packed wounds, she was still more concerned about me.  We binge watched "Orange is the New Black" for two days, and I came back home.

Fast forward to another three weeks.  I am in the hospital of the University of Louisville the week of Abbey Road on the River.  It didn't seem right.  How on earth could the festival go on with one of my moms in a hospital bed?  Our friend, and absolute saint, Jill was sitting with her, and we joked about busting her out of there so she could at least see The Beach Boys on Sunday night.  Even in the state she was in, she was still concerned that I saw her sparkly sandals, kept her up on the latest gossip in my life, and told me she loved me.  That was the last time I saw her alive.

Another three weeks go by, and I found myself in a remote part of Kentucky. I sat with some of the family in a pew at her funeral.  And just yesterday, I returned from the most beautiful celebration of her life.  Jill graciously opened her home to everyone, and we ate, drank, danced, and cried.  Oh, how we cried.  I have never felt more gracious to know a human being than I did in that moment. Here we were, a house full of people from all walks of life, all crying, holding each other, and laughing over the life of one person.

The next day, I was one of the first ones awake.  I looked at Jill's wall in her entryway.  She has everyone that walks through the door sign her wall.  Consider it a yearbook of sorts.  As I finished scribbling my note, I looked over and saw where Carla had signed:

And it brought me a tremendous amount of comfort.  ALWAYS together.  Nothing could ever separate  us.  We were still a family in spite of distance, time zones, and money.  Why would one of us on the other side change that?

On the way home, I was playing back the conversations in my head I had with everybody.  This has not been an easy year for anybody I know by any means.  There have been deaths, divorces, huge financial loss, and much more.  As I started to tear up a bit, I popped in Revolver into the CD player.  Carla's favorite Beatles was George, and as most of you know, the opening track is "Taxman"--a bonafide George track.  As I skipped over to the song I wanted to hear, the heavens opened up, and it started to pour.  I'm talking, violently pour.  Without thinking, I looked up and said "Gee, Carla, I know that George is your favorite.  If I go back to 'Taxman', will you knock it off?" and as I went back to Track 1, the rain immediately ceased, the clouds parted, and the sun shone brighter than it had all day.

That's our girl.  Always.  

A special thank you to Jill for letting me and the rest of the motley crew crash at your pad.  Thanks to Bea for the glorious vegan food, to Misty and Jeff for the beautiful tunes that I hopefully didn't destroy too badly with my drumming, and to the rest of my family for giving me what no one else has ever been able to.  Remember: No matter where you roam, know our love is true. 

Me And My Arrow and Finding My Life's Path

Hey, readers.

Do you ever have those moments where you just throw your hands up as you look to the sky and say "Alright, Big Guy! Give me a sign! Let me know I am on the right track!!"  I did about a week ago.  Let me rewind for those of you who aren't caught up with me.

At the beginning of February, I quit life as most of the world knows it.  Now, when I say "I quit life." I don't mean I checked out.  It was quite the opposite.  I checked in to my body.  I slowly but surely started to purge all that was toxic from my environment in every sense of the word.  This involved one big step:  Quitting my day job.

Now, I wrote about the process of quitting my job.  I was miserable there.  I had a few bright glimmers of hope for the human race every now and again, but it was an environment that one couldn't thrive, and if you were hoping on accomplishing your own dream?  Forget about it.  I could sell sand to the Egyptians, but no matter how hard I tried, no one seemed to notice or care.  Add that on top of a mounting list of problems in the company I was working for (legal and ethical) plus problems building up in my relationships (romantic and otherwise) I would come home every day and be exhausted.  I used to cry before going to work...just because I felt like I was dying every hour I spent in that building.  How do you even begin to explain that to someone?  I put on a cheerful demeanor along with my eyeliner, and walked out the door with my head held high. No one was going to know what was effecting me.  No one.  After nine months of feeling stifled, unappreciated, and flat out exhausted, I left.  No amount of money was worth my sanity.

When I started telling people that I wanted to leave and focus on myself, people thought I was bat shit crazy.  They still do, actually.  How could someone so young be so mentally wiped out?  Are you sure you're not just lazy?  You must have a huge ego if you think normal work is beneath you!  These are all things that have been said to my face.  Usually met with an eyebrow raise, a slight laugh, and a head shake.  How could you understand?  No one ever has.


This stems back to five year old Payton.  I remember sitting beneath this giant tree in my elementary school during recess.  This tree was hundreds of years old, and the way the roots grew down to the soil, it created a perfect little seat for me.  I would smooth down my dress and plop in between its natural arm rests it had created for me.  It was here that I would dive into my world.  I had a book with me then always (still do now, actually) for such cases when I want to check out and "quit the world".  I would peer from behind the pages and my hair at the children as they ran around and played arbitrary games like Power Rangers or whatever else.  At five years old, I would mumble to myself "I am not like you."  This became my mantra.

As a young adult, I find myself doing pretty much the same thing.  I was recently put into a situation that I was terribly uncomfortable in...a normal twenty-something venue surrounded by people my own age.  As I watched them nurse their cheap beers and go on and on about stuff I neither knew about nor cared to know about, I had that same feeling, and wish I hadn't left my book in the car.  "I am not like you."

You know those parents that tell their kids they are beautiful and special all the time?  I didn't really have parents like that.  They told me once in a while, but seldom did I ever think the sun shone out my own ass.  However, I always had an instinct inside of me that I was not destined to sit behind a desk.  I was not meant to take orders.  Upon making my big decision, I did something very normal for me...research.  I looked at the lives of all of the women I admired.  Big, small, artists, regular women...all sorts.  What was their common thread?  They all had the same voice inside of them.  The first page of Barbra Streisand's biography said it best:

And I always knew I wasn't going to be behind a desk.  So, I did what any normal twenty something woman would do.  I signed up for life classes online.  OK, so not normal when most of my peers are out swigging cheap beer talking about how Kurt Cobain is my generation's Lennon. (yeah, right.) Anyway, I signed up for these life classes.  Other women would sign on at the same time, and we would listen to a lecture.  Cindy Crawford of all people was the one person who woke me up.  She did a class on finding your life's passion.  Seeing as most of my heroes have died in a five year span of my age I am currently in, there has always been a sense of hurry up for me in finding mine.  I had my pen and paper out, and was ready to learn.  She asked a set of questions along the lines of this:  What is your passion if you have found it? Mine is communication and creativity.  Easy enough.  I love to communicate WITH creativity.  The second one was "Where do you want to place your energy?" I wanted to place my energy in healing.  Healing takes time.  When someone comes down with the flu, we don't expect them to wake up the next day and be ready to run a marathon.  When someone undergoes an operation, we don't anticipate them to be ready to swim the English channel.  Why is it that when it comes to mental and emotional healing, it's looked upon as being lazy?  I needed time and space to devote my energy to healing my heart, my mind, and my body after the trauma and the dis-ease I had put it through.  I wanted to devote my energy to taking care of myself, to doing yoga, to writing, to working on things that made my heart and soul well.  

The next was "Why not?" Why not devote my time to healing myself so I could focus on my passions?  Uh, duh? The fourth question, however, hit me like a load of bricks.  "Are you comfortable on your own journey?  Not everyone will accept it."  If I had a dollar for every time someone accused me of being an egomaniac, arrogant, snobby, and a complete and utter idiot for trying this path out, I would have been able to buy a giant building in the middle of downtown Nashville (in which I would then paint a giant mural that spells out TOLD YOU SO in psychedelic lettering) I have had to go through more borderline traumatic experiences with people who claim to love me screaming at me for trusting in my choice.  But had I accepted it?  No.  The greatest people in the history of the world have all had naysayers.  Was I comfortable with being amongst them?  Absolutely.

So how am I getting by?  Photo shoots (in every aspect...modeling, styling--something I really love because it makes people feel good about themselves), hosting live rock n roll trivia (another passion), and popping in and out where someone needs something that I am capable of doing.  I've added up my months, and what's hysterical is that I usually end up making more than if I ever did sitting behind that stupid desk...consistent?  No.  But it usually evens out.  It's not all fun and games. There have been days where I've skipped a few meals, and I have acquired a love for eating chickpeas for dinner...but to be fair, they are delicious.  But the true wealth is in knowing that I have been given so many opportunities that most people would never get.  I have ample amounts of time to dedicate to my spiritual practices, I have some of the most wonderful and talented friends from all walks of life, all over the world....friends who are incredible rockstars at life that I can drop everything I'm doing to be with.  And most importantly, I don't have the "I hate my job." syndrome.  

What "a day at the office frequently looks like"

And this too. 

How do I do it all?  Faith.  Honestly.  Like I said in my previous post when I was speaking about the bird that doesn't fear where its next meal comes from, or where it will fly next, or how will it get there.  I know that I will always be taken care of.  In my heart of hearts, I know that I have a purpose, a reason that passion was put in my life, and a reason for being here.  I know in my gut that as long as I am trying, I will be fine.  There are some days where I don't know if I can go on the way I am.  There are days where I wish I had the ability to go out and find a rich partner to take care of my financial needs like some of my friends have done.  There are days where you just need a sign...that's where I was.

One of my favorite "signs"--a card from one of my very best friends.  It says "Life has two rules: 1. Never give up. 2. Always remember rule number 1." 

So, here I am, bitching and moaning about needing a sign.  I was sitting at the coffee shop (the same one I cried over cheese on my sandwich because I was untrue to myself, and kept all my feeling welled up and they came out at the worst time possible) pre cheese incident, I was surfing around on the Craigslist free section (because, surely if I am feeling so blue, a new-to-me piece of furniture would help, or at least be an art project) and I see a post for a dog.  "1 year old Malt-zu will be taken to shelter tomorrow if no one gets him." the ad read.  Surely, not.  And then, I opened up the ad, and saw the most beautiful face I had ever seen.  My boy. Here I had given up the search on finding a dog to replace the hole my family pet had left two years prior...here he was tapping me on the shoulder, so to speak.  I rang the people up, and they said their children were sick of taking him out, and that if no one got him, they were taking him to a shelter which was notorious for being a kill shelter.  The next day, he was sleeping next to me.  I named him Arrow. One, for the Harry Nilsson reference, and two, because an arrow has to be pulled back in order to spring forward.  I feel like it was appropriate for the year I have gone through so far.  Here was my sign.  Everything was working out just as it is supposed to.  

You know you're on the right path when you end up in the same place as your childhood hero slash crush.  And they want you there. 

They say you know that you know when you are on the verge of a spiritual healing when you can feel bliss.  I've had glimpses in the past few days. I've been cooking more, focusing on my yoga practice, reading like I used to, and finally the songs that used to make me cry, I can sing along to now.  Today, Arrow was in the passenger seat after a busy day.  I looked over at his little face, all happy to be out and about.  We had the windows down, and I was sipping on an iced coffee that a handsome and thoughtful man had bought me...and I just laughed.  I laughed, and I smiled, and I felt so happy that I could burst.  Sure, I would have probably enjoyed the ride better if the air conditioning in my car were working properly on this hot summer's day.  I would like to eventually be making that drive in a nicer car one day.  But for now?  This was as close t heaven on earth as I could get.  Me and My Arrow, taking the high road...

As far as most people feel, I haven't been successful.  I rent a house with a roommate, my car (all be it paid off) is older, and now the AC has quit working, and my bank account has been in the negative more than once this year.  Would I like to change all of these things?  Of course.  Am I happy with complacency? Not in the slightest.  Am I working towards a bigger goal here?  Absolutely.  

The only thing I am constantly reminded of is to be present.  Be here now.  And keep moving on your path. 

Because I'm going to faith it til I make it.   

And remember, readers:

"You know you are on the right path when you feel like 'This isn't costing me my power. This isn't costing me my psyche. This isn't costing me my soul. I am not confused on a deep level. I'm not drained.' I can be tired after a day's work, but not psychically drained. I'm not losing myself. I'm not negotiating my sense of integrity. I'm not losing life. Why? Because you/re not betraying yourself in anyway. And you don't have to compromise who you are. When you do, you put poison in your own mouth. Every choice is either going to enhance your spirit, or drain your spirit. If you compromise yourself to the point in which you feel drained or depleted, then you've betrayed yourself." 

---Caroline Myss