Blurring the Lines

I arrived in Central America burnt out.

The isolation and loneliness I developed in New York City during COVID never wore off. It was like I was permanently frozen in 2020.

Yet on paper, my life had moved on. I had two steady day jobs as an arts educator and a yoga teacher. And I was producing and performing my own one-woman comedy shows in New York and internationally. But I was unfulfilled personally. (I wasn’t even dating!)

I had just come off an Edinburgh Fringe run with my show Villain Era, where I publicly addressed years of online cyber bullying and harassment (after going viral to 17 million views on a YouTube show where I got the “villain” edit).

This accomplishment should have left me energized and leaning into a deeper form of advocacy, but reality set in: the show was a financial failure and I was in a deep personal deficit.

I did not have a path toward making a tour of the show sustainable, which left me feeling deflated. Shame settled in, bleeding into other areas of my personal life.

While an artist’s worth is not tied to financial success, industry acknowledgment or reward, we do, at some point, deserve compensation (material or otherwise).

As artists, we devote our energy – creative, emotional, physical, spiritual – to our craft. So, without a penny in return for that time, energy, effort and practice – it wears on the spirit, especially when a project can sometimes take years to develop.

I was so proud of my work, but I needed others to get on board and support it, not just with applause, but with investment. For years, I’d supported my work with my own finances.

Grants have always been competitive, but now with cuts to arts funding, I found myself unable to continue to work on my show due to lack of funds, which I never wanted to be the case. Ultimately, though, I couldn’t keep performing for free and decided I needed to take a breather from the show.

So, to rest and recalibrate, I decided to book a trip to Costa Rica and stay on a friend’s permaculture farm, in an area that runs alongside a river.

I was only planning to stay for a few days …

But, I fell in love with the jungle. Monkeys and all. Yes, I was stung by a wasp straight out of Jumanji, but it was a pretty wasp, and she was orange!

I cried when it was time for me to leave to go back to the States. My friend said, “Maybe you should just stay.” I didn’t know staying was an option! Was it? I had no idea how to make a life in rural Costa Rica work for me as an artist and teacher, but I was willing to try.

I booked another flight almost two weeks later to return and stay in a neighboring community about a 10-minute walk from my friend’s farm. This stay was only supposed to be a month – it became six months, and then I never left.

My family was confused: “What are you doing for work? You are living in a where? And what is ‘rural’ Costa Rica? Is that by the beach? Is that where the celebrities go?”

No.

No one could find my village on the map (surprisingly, neither can customs).

I had no car and I was the only single person for miles, because the area was dominated by families. I was the only single woman under 40. There were no single men – except one, who was emotionally unavailable. Oops, I dated him. (Yeah, I’m still in therapy for that one!)

So, when I arrived, everybody wanted to know what I was up to, but was interested in asking about what I wanted to contribute to the community. Nobody offered to show me around or give me a tour (except the emotionally unavailable guy).

My friend, who moved to Costa Rica because of the war in Israel, reflected back to me that life is about aliveness, and aliveness exists with people; although I am deeply connected to the land, that cannot be a substitute for real connection to other humans. She’s not wrong. (I read Into the Wild.)

So, she and I went to a vocal retreat together in Uvita. We sang and played the drums, and at that retreat, she witnessed me in my true joy.

Because I was surrounded by music intensely for four days.

I was raised singing, so the song circles we had in Costa Rica (sometimes by the fire pit and in Hebrew!?) healed something deep in me. I was the musical theater kid who grew up into a musical adult – but I had forgotten why.

And now, singing in Uvita with people my own age, my friend was (rightly) concerned that living alone in the middle of the remote jungle wouldn’t be suitable for me.

I cannot survive on pitanga fruit and talking to the cicadas alone. I get it.

The thing is, I tried leaving Costa Rica, and the tears wouldn’t stop. Like I was being ripped from the only home I ever knew – a womb.

But they were happy tears. I was experiencing real, unperformed joy, something I hadn’t experienced in years, and I wanted nothing in the way of that. My system was finally unlearning fight, flight or freeze under patriarchy and capitalism.

The word joy? It wasn’t even in my vocabulary, previously. It may as well be profanity in our current social, political and economic climate. With so much going on, how do we access joy … and how do we make art?

We sing about it, we make love about it, we dance about it, we look at others living in unimaginable times and we look to our ancestors and take notes.

And I did that.

I went swimming in the river, danced at the local dances, produced poetry performances. Throughout this process, I remembered what it was like to slow down and began healing my nervous system.

And that led me to write again. I began a new one-person musical comedy show called Cl*t Cult, about surviving the sexual wellness cult OneTaste, which I just performed at the New York Fringe, earlier this month.

I reclaimed the joy of creating. And living in an eco-community was the perfect environment to tap into “hive mind” and recall stories from living inside a high-control group dressed up as “community.”

While rehearsing Cl*t Cult, the founders of OneTaste were in trial in New York City, and a day before my show opened, the founder was sentenced to nine years in prison on forced labour charges.

Sometimes art imitates life, other times life imitates art – but I would argue, in my work, the lines between art-making and life are blurry. Life is Art. And I intend to keep it that way.

Featured image of Star Stone by Emilia Aghamirzai; all images by Star Stone.