Sometimes life themes find you. You are a mirror for the experiences you attract, so I guess you also find those themes.

Everything I’m doing right now seems oriented around finding and expressing my true authentic voice and self. Every Tuesday evening, I gather with a group of fellow writers, mostly women, to listen and critique each others’ assignments. By critique, I mean mostly compliment. It makes me realize what as asshole I was throughout all of school. I would not only debate everyone in the class. I would also tear the teacher down too. Healthy debate.

My first day felt like time travel. I walked into the little brick West Hollywood building and rounded the corner to enter a suite decorated with all sorts of art, writing posters, and an accumulation of artifacts probably dating back at least a decade or two. Eh, maybe three.

Jack Grapes the instructor was there to greet me. “Ah! You’ve been all around the world!” he boomed and welcomed me with an equally boisterous handshake. My email communications with him included him needing to mail and remail packets to places because I was no longer receiving mail at my apartment in NYC and a check sent by my friend because I was out of the country, wary of sending a check from Cambodia.

“Welcome to the Los Angeles Poets & Writers Collective,” said the TA, Lisa Segal.

Uh I’m in Los Angeles? Oh right, LA. Just got here yesterday. Uh-duhhhhhhh.

I sat in the little corner couch and ate several string cheeses while I observed the rest of the group.

We spent about half of the class manually going over everyone’s addresses and email addresses, making corrections. I was jet-lagged, and I thought my brain might explode. No one else seemed bothered by this gross inefficiency, but I thought I might lose it. I understand review but line by line with everyone there? And why were there so many mistakes? GAH! Breathe. Stop being such a New Yorker corporate wench.

I started to wonder about the writing class. Then I remembered Liz.

When I left my job in May, I went to San Francisco and spent a lot of time with my friend Liz, who was in the midst of finishing up her MFA in creative writing. Liz is a larger than life type of person—tall, blonde, Amazonian. She is probably the most authentic person I know to an extent that’s almost jarring. Her Californian intonation is real, and she has a booming, friendly arresting voice that accosts anyone in her path from the Lyft driver to the person in line for coffee or even the barber who might be across the street in his shop across Valencia.

I was just starting to emerge from a place of darkness, and she helped me feel like everything was going to be okay. She made me feel like it was okay to step off the corporate track. That it was okay to spend days not really doing much if that’s what you wanted to do with your time. She took me to Crossfit, took me to get matching jumpsuits, took me to get kale salad and French fries at Trick Dog. I felt like I could just be. At that point, we hadn’t seen each other in 10 years, and we had had sort of an unspoken fade out, but it was okay.

I talked to her about wanting to write, make art, and be creative to restore myself and to be me again. She suggested a drawing class with a guy named Michael in the Mission, a few blocks from her place.

I told her I either wanted to move to LA, Buenos Aires, Barcelona, London…and I’m sure there were other cities on that list.

“Oh duuuude. You know what you should totally do? OMG yes. You should take this writing class in LA with Jack Grapes. Honestly, it will change your life. It is so good.”

She had taken it several times in San Francisco. She had also taken the drawing class 11 times or something. I didn’t really understand why you’d take a course over and over again, but I think I’m starting to understand the value of repetition or taking another angle on something or just being at a different place in your life to apply concepts.

So there I was reaffirming my commitment to the class, remembering Liz.

The conversation was long-winding with many twists and turns, literary references. I was excited because it reminded me of my love of literature and thinking about the power of words and language to move people. I thought about my Columbia comparative literature days. I thought about philosophy and the English teachers in high school who helped me see all of history in the beauty of prose. This was about going deep. I was no longer in the world of bullet points, and it was making me deeply uncomfortable…but in a good way (mostly).

The first assignment was to write like we talk. That is the building block of good writing. It’s not about an overabundance of adjectives and adverbs. It’s about gripping the reader with the truth of who you are.

The message of the course so far. We write to answer these questions.

What is the story of my life? What is the truth of who I am?

And from this premise, we allow all of ourselves and our stories to flow from that. Everyone has incredible stories to share. It’s giving me courage.

Because it’s LA, there are heiresses, actresses, love coaches, crisis counselors, and all sorts of other characters in the room. There is one older woman in a wheelchair who’s going through recovery. There’s a man who just left his job (maybe more?) and lives on a boat now. There are some famous people.

But when we’re all in that room, all of those identifications strip away. We are all just people with stories to tell, open to learning and listening, there to support each other. And the truer the stories get, the more we realize how connected we are in our experiences and in the essences of what makes us human – the joys, the fears, the rejections. The belief that we’re all inadequate, even though we see from the third-person perspective that it’s just manifestly not true at all. Beholding all your worst fears expressed in another person in that way is connecting, healing. It invites in me the urge to share more about myself that I’ve been comfortable doing before. A few layers deeper.

Ohhhhh, so this is what finding yourself is all about.