this isn't what i thought i'd be doing

on embracing shifts in a creative life

In Lincoln Center's north plaza, there is a grove of London plane trees. The trees run parallel to the opera house. Among them, my daughter likes to pretend we’re in the woods while we wait for her brother to emerge from his ballet classes across the street. It's a strange forest, one that is also home to a reflecting pool and huge sculptures made of steel and bronze. 

Sometimes while we wait in the grove, my daughter draws in her notebook. Occasionally, I try to gather my thoughts enough to write something. Mostly I sit under the trees and watch people entering the plaza for an evening of whatever is happening on the other side of the opera house walls. Across the street at the School of American Ballet, my son stands at a barre and leaps across sprung Marley floors.

When I was little, I took dance classes in my elementary school's tiny library with its fluorescent lights and pale blue carpet. I pulled on my favorite leotard twice a week and earnestly performed choreography to Billy Ray Cyrus's "Achy Breaky Heart."

Even at that age, I wanted more than anything to be close to love, which for me has always meant being close to art. This is why I love sitting in Lincoln Center Plaza waiting for my son, and also why it's sometimes painful. I'm not here to see The Hours or Romeo and Juliet. I'm not here to perform. I'm here to wait and to carry the snacks and tend to the small people I love. 

I felt this same ache the first time I took a long break from making plays. I felt so tender, I couldn't even bear to be near a theater. The proximity was painful when I felt so far from what I loved. 

I've been thinking about something that happened in the plaza earlier this spring. I sat beneath my favorite London plane tree and beside me, my daughter had her art set spread on the gravel. She drew a rainbow while I watched people gather around the fountain, the theater-goers moving toward the opera house entrance as the sun set, performing arts students lounging on the lawn, a pair of boys running toward the ballet school carrying plastic bags full of pointe shoes. I heard someone call my name. 

It was a director I knew in my past life, who now works at Juilliard. We hugged and caught up. Then she turned to my daughter and said, "Do you know your mother is a brilliant actress?" My daughter said, "No." All three of us seemed a little surprised by the moment. All three of us seemed a little sad. 

The encounter made me think of Marina Abramović's 2010 performance, The Artist Is Present—the moment she looked up to find herself seated across from her former lover, Ulay. It was an unexpected reunion, a reminder of the art I used to make, a form I thought I'd be part of forever, a sudden confrontation with one of the great loves of my life. 

This isn't what I thought I'd be doing—writing. This artistic life is very different from the one I always envisioned for myself. I've spent the last few years renegotiating my relationship to art and my creative practice. Renegotiating, reconsidering, repairing. I'm coming to understand how I respond to closeness, distance, love, art. It's slow work. 

There are new questions in my life, ones I'm learning to love and ask frequently: Is this challenging me? Is this nourishing me? Can I let this go? Can I let this shift? With these questions has come a rediscovery of what it means to have a creative practice, how to let it move, how to let it grow.

There have been times when I’ve purposely keep myself far from art, thinking it would shield me from disappointment and hurt. Closeness is difficult and painful, but so is distance. Making art can be difficult and painful, and not making it even more so. A part of reconsidering my creative practice has meant choosing closeness even as things reposition. It has meant choosing art, though I may not know the next form it will take. These are the risks I want.

My son is learning these lessons of release far earlier than I did—how to be grateful for brilliant seasons and how to anchor ourselves in our practice when there is a turbulence. He was not invited to return to the ballet school in the fall. The formal letter stating the school's decision cited his ankles as the reason. 

When I shared the news, I thought he might decide to take a break from dance, but he immediately asked if there was another studio he could join. "I do my favorite dancing with you in the kitchen, anyway," he said. He already knows there is beauty in the different shapes our creative lives can take.