A Tale of Three Mirrors

While packing to move to Los Angeles, I broke a mirror.

And not just any mirror, but a beautiful silver bridesmaids gift of a compact mirror in the shape of a heart. My name is engraved on the case, and I met the friend who gave it to me two days before my sixteenth birthday. It was a minor miracle that I made it to her wedding in the middle of film school, and being asked to sign her ketubah was one of the more touching moments of my life.

When I broke it, I gasped aloud in horror. And while part of my mind was thinking "Don't think it! Don't think it; you'll make it come true!" a deeper part of me imprinted on my soul, "Seven years bad luck. You're leaving Florida, you're moving to Los Angeles, and you just broke a mirror, and it's seven years bad luck."

I tried to shake it off as silly superstition, and I never told a soul about that mirror. I just knew, in that moment, I was beginning a long, hard road. I hoped the next years wouldn't be too rough. But sometimes they have been.

Year seven started this August 2008.

I know it's ridiculous, but it feels like a home stretch. It feels like a tide is turning, doors are opening, and my world and my spirit are brightening. And it's not like I haven't been trying all this time. It's not like I tried to make it take seven years for Los Angeles to feel like home. But here I am.

Home.

I'm so excited to see what the next years bring.

The book I'm adapting - foolishly, without holding the rights - is full of mirrors. The narrative shattered, the film hiding within. I haven't optioned it, because I'm not completely sure I can craft the story successfully. It's a book about identity and love and good work. It suits me, and it's the first time I've actually longed for my writing sessions. With everything else I've got going on, I think I'll make it to the midpoint by the end of 2008, and I think a solid draft will be done by August 2009. Right at that seven-year point.

My screenplay of mirrors.

And last week, I read a mirror. From Psychology Today, The Creative Personality: Ten paradoxical traits of the creative personality. (h/t Green LA Girl) Reading it, I fought the urge to highlight just about every sentence. Reading it feels like discovering someone's been spying on my innermost being.

Back in Florida, I called it "Odo Syndrome." This feeling that I never met anyone like me, but I really, really wanted to. Now I know exactly what I mean, because it's laid out in this paper in ten points.

At the very least, I now understand why I so deeply believe that truth lies in dichotomy, in two opposite things being true simultaneously. Because it's in my very nature.

But, the paper has given me new things to think about as well. This passage gave me pause:

7. Creative people, to an extent, escape rigid gender role stereotyping...

...This tendency toward androgyny is sometimes understood in purely sexual terms, and therefore it gets confused with homosexuality. But psychological androgyny is a much wider concept referring to a person's ability to be at the same time aggressive and nurturant, sensitive and rigid, dominant and submissive, regardless of gender. A psychologically androgynous person in effect doubles his or her repertoire of responses. Creative individuals are more likely to have not only the strengths of their own gender but those of the other one, too.

In my writing about sex & relationships, I resist a gendered take when possible, preferring to focus on the ways in which men and women are similar. And I do tend to think that as humans socially evolve, the above will be more and more true for more and more people. I'm fascinated by how different generations are in this regard.

But going forward, I'm going to be open to people's more gendered experiences, and try to learn about that, too.

That said, I'm not giving up my preference for co-ed functions anytime soon.

Mostly, I found the mirror of this article reassuring and inspiring. I'm not completely crazy, or even if I am, here's external motivation to stay the course, to keep working towards my bliss, and to keep searching for like souls.

Because we live here in L.A.

And while broken mirrors may be harbingers of rough times ahead, working through rough times brings the rock and joy.

I have beautiful little mirror compact in the shape of a heart that was given to me by one of my oldest friends. The mirror inside is cracked in two. Turns out, that makes it even more precious.