Slip thin rubber gloves onto both hands, touch your fingertips together. Ask yourself, Is it contact, this sensation? Or is it the ghost of it, your memory of what it feels like to have your fingers touch? My chalky white pill, my life condom, it rubber gloves my head, my heart, the wind brushing against the tips of the hair of my skin. My life condom keeps me safe; I squint through its latex film comfortably. The world hurts less, the whip my brain uses against my heart has its material morph from barbed leather to rubber strings.
But black olives exert less tang against my tongue, I cry less during movies, and days blend together because they don’t require as much will to survive. I feel a lot of gorgeous, ugly nothing.
Sometimes I feel brave. I break my white pill in half, just to remind myself of what my body is like. It feels so delicious, at first – the sun hotter on my face, the ground pressing insistently against the bottoms of my feet. I lay down and feel food moving through my belly. I can concentrate the whole of my sensation to the tip of my nose, my lips, my toes, my shins.
I keep breaking it in half, day after day. I start to notice my posture. Is my neck straight? I crack it. I see flaws, people bother me. Thoughts bubble up, stomach buzzing and chest constriction once more become the lens through which I experience the world, my mind hones its eye into a laser, it glows brighter with each passing moment, cutting through everything it sees, finding weaknesses – true, honest flaws in lovers, in work, in my diet, in exercise regiment, in my life … why do I do things? Questions, doubts, always. I feel my back and my hair bobbing as I fail to hear what my mom just said on the phone, my thoughts swirling in shame around what it is I’ve created over the past two years, what sacrifices so many have made to prop up something that feels in that moment so simple, so basic, unsurprising, formulaic, strangled by structure and fear. These are the thoughts which threaten to drown me when I need to make creative decisions for Lemonade Blessing.
Living with a feature film is the task of living with oneself, the weather of your thoughts, for weeks upon months upon years. You must show up to set, the edit, the mix stage, the color suite, regardless of whether your mental state is sunny, pale fog, or pouring rain so heavily you can’t see much further than your face. The film needs truthful creative decisions, regardless of how you feel about the script on that day. Before embarking on my first feature, I had heard so many stories of fearless conviction in the face of failure, the dogged auteur cutting down a thousand no’s before encountering the yes which propelled them forward. In my case, I wish the canon of filmmaking had made it clearer how many of the no’s would come from the space between my ears. I wish there was more writing about the lengths one must go to quiet the mind without squashing the heart.
So I take the other half of the white pill, I sink safely underwater, my body embraced by Saran wrap. I can end the shooting day, finish the sound mix, export the color grade, but feel weak and safe, mourning the possibility that my choice might be between a life of pain and a life of little feeling at all. I live in this oscillation, between thinking that my anxiety is the truth that I ignore, that the world is brutal and punches me and cruelly gives me pills to make the blows hurt less – and thinking the opposite, that I’m so lucky to exist in a time when I can get help, I don’t need to become an alcoholic like my ancestors to deal with the wriggling hole in myself, life shouldn’t hurt, it’s sad to be a bit numb, but you can get so much more done, you can be so much more helpful to others when you’re stable. From “I’m an artist, I should bare it all and face life,” to, “I don’t know if I have the will to feel and see the world the way my natural self does.”
This compulsive interrogation of self ends up in the work, for better or worse. Lemonade Blessing contains the whipsaw tonal shifts of my inner voice – hard cuts from mother embracing child to a masturbating teen, tender first kisses cut short from intrusive thoughts. The sacred and the profane are smashed next to one another, but can they coexist?
Featured image shows Chris Merola with actor Jake Ryan during the making of Lemonade Blessing; all images courtesy Chris Merola.
