I arrived in the US
Twelve years ago today
It’s strange to think of that person
Landing in the freezing cold at Denver Airport
Clutching a folder thick with immigration paperwork
Feeling excited and scared about the next adventure

In the twelve years since
I’ve been married and divorced
Survived cancer
Had my heart broken
Lost two grandparents
Lost six friends to cancer
Been in two choirs
Moved 7 times across 3 states
Lived with 5 different people
And survived NJ Transit

I’ve worked a lot of jobs
Second-hand bookshop and farm volunteer
Babysitter
Receptionist atop fancy glass towers
Broadway usher
Teacher
Vocal coach
Writer
Actor
Fake patient
Stage manager
Director
Podcast editor, and an
Operations/staff assistant

I’ve done the Artist’s Way twice and
Built Filmed Live Musicals
Written and performed a cabaret
Written a book chapter 
Spent hours in the archives at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts 
Performed in Colorado, New Jersey, and New York
In plays, musicals, and immersive shows
Seen a show in every Broadway house
Taken class at Broadway Dance Center
Played flute and ukulele and piano

I’ve run, quite a bit
All around Fort Collins
Brooklyn, West New York,
Astoria, and Harlem
6 marathons
4 half marathons
And a handful of races

I’ve traveled to Acadia State Park and Atlanta
Salem and Boston and Washington DC
Traipsed around Connecticut
Honeymooned in the British Virgin Islands
Did a road trip from FoCo to New York
I’ve been back to Australia three times
And London once

I’ve frequented farmers markets
And made my own yogurt
Grown arugula and spinach and basil and chives
Strawberries and raspberries

I helped raise a sweet and ridiculous floof of a puppy
Learned Spanish and Danish
Learned to bake cheesecake
Learned to manage my depression

I grew my hair out again
Started eating meat again
Started morning pages again
Got my first tattoo
Tried contact lenses and
Finally got my drivers license

I’ve had my heart ripped out of my chest
I’ve been held and taken care of and spoilt rotten
I’ve met, and become friends with, some of the most extraordinary and beautiful people
From FoCo, Brooklyn, Carteret, Astoria, and Harlem
MSK, front of house, MasterVoices, SP land, and, of course
Buck’s Rock

And today, on the anniversary of my moving here
I performed a two show day
With a group of people whom I utterly adore
With a lead actor whose cast albums I have listened to on repeat
In a rarely performed musical by a composer whose work inspired my life path
With friends in the audience

And tomorrow I’ll direct a musical with a cast of sweet and precocious kidlets
And the next day I’ll start rehearsals for a new project with MasterVoices
And I think
It’s taken twelve years, but I’m finally doing the thing I came here to do
It just took a little cancer, divorce, gestures-at-the-world-in-2025 detour to get here

I think about what I want from the next chapter
To live on my own
To travel, and keep exploring my glorious city
To visit all the museums
To fill my days with music and theatre and writing
And delicious food
And time with friends
And glorious books
To keep tripping the light fantastic
And being so very thankful
That despite *everything* (again, gestures-at-the-world-in-2025)
I’m here.

​I am beside myself with glee
The re-discovery of purpose
Of coming back to myself
Doing the thing I came here to do
The thing I left the comfort and safety of Australia for
Singing and dancing and art-ing and
Tripping the light fantastic
THIS is what feels right
This is what feels good
I thought I’d lost it
Between cancer and living far from the city and divorce and heart break and not doing the thing(s)
But I’ve been doing my morning mmm’s
Morning pages, meditation, movement
And soaking up the last remnants of delicious summer
And tonight hearing British voices
Leading vocal warm-ups
Took me right back to Central
BA ba ba ba ba ba baaa!
CA ca ca ca ca ca caaa!
Vocalizing, loose shoulders, stretch to the side and feel your ribs pop pop POP!
Tummy breaths, activate the diaphragm
HA HA HA HA HA HA HAAAAA
Poke out your tongue
Feel ridiculous
Feel glorious!
It’s all delicious!
The missing of it
The living it of it
The loving of it
The returning to it
Back to self
The world may be a dumpster fire of hell
But there still is music
There still is art
There still is sky
And earth
And breath
Take it in and --

When you discover a meditation 
That is simple and profound and
Gently powerful 
The way it can shift your entire energetic being
And help you feel both grounded and light 
And you wonder how you ever lived without it 

Even though it was in black and white, and quite grainy
It was an emotional experience
Realizing that the dancers were just a few years older than Mum
Seeing the embodied dancers of voices I’ve listened to on repeat since I was 10.
It still amazes me that the stories of dancers in New York could resonate with a 10-year-old living 10,000 miles away.
That incredible Marvin Hamlisch score
Hearing the audience hear it for the first time.
Imagine being able to see A Chorus Line for the first time?
Remember seeing A Chorus Line for the first time?!
Remember being 10
Remember taking ballet lessons
Remember tights and leotards and having your hair in a bun and hair nets and hair pins and hairspray
Remember ballet shoes and cross over wraps
Remember practise shoes and the pretty satin shoes 
Remember the smell of the studio
Remember being awed and intimidated by the older girls 
Remember wishing you were an older girl 
Remember dancing in the living room and the light was your spotlight
(How did you know about spotlights?)
Remember the rush of joy.  

A part of me laughs reading about
Suleika Jaouad’s journaling practice
The seriousness behind it
The intentionality
I starting journaling
Keeping a diary
Because Elizabeth Wakefield in Sweet Valley High kept a diary
And, because she was the nerdier book-smart twin,
I wanted to be like her
I wrote in code for a bit
To deter prying eyes
But gave it up when my boyfriend (who was studying computer science) figured it out in a few minutes
I still remember the code
My high school friends teased that I would journal on my honeymoon
I did, for the record (haha)
And my (then) husband didn’t mind

I got my first diary for my 10th birthday
Hard cover, blue, with an art nouveau illustration of a woman clutching an armful of fruit on the front, and scented pastel colored pages
Thirty years later there are over 70 journals sitting on the bookshelf
“Lockable” dairies with pale pink pages
Exercise books that I covered with white paper and words cut out from magazines
Lovely leather-bound books with hand-made paper
Pretty cloth-bound books from fancy stationery stores
And even one I made at camp
Mostly there are notebooks of varying sizes,
Books that were easy to carry in my backpack
For writing on the bus or the train
Or, on lucky luxurious days, while hurtling through mid-air on a Boeing bound for someplace else
The pages are filled with angst and dreams, crushes and heartbreaks, joys and boring day-to-day minutiae
Ticket stubs and bits of brochures and seemingly significant fortune cookie predictions
The diaries are not particularly profound
They’re not the record of a historically significant person
I have no idea what will happen to them when I’m gone
But they’re my most prized possession

After I got sick I fell out of the habit
There was so much to say, I couldn’t say anything at all
But I did make an attempt of keeping up with morning pages
A habit started in my mid-twenties
And now I have 31 spiral bound 5-subject notebooks to accompany the journals
Pages and pages of streams of consciousness scribbles

And if I think about it, I also have over a decade of blog posts to add the pile
Poems and scribblings and reflections
Tracing my desire to find the beauty, find the joy, find the light
Amidst break-ups and falling in love and moving away and falling love again and moving away again and cancer and to trying to find the light again

It has been delightfully fun to follow the prompts in Suleika’s book
My favorites so far have included
Write with your non-dominant hand (Marie Howe)
Write a paragraph about the funniest thing to happen to you from the perspective of an inanimate object (Kiese Laymon)
What would you write if you weren’t afraid? (Dani Shapiro)

What would you write if you weren’t afraid?

When you spend a sunny late spring afternoon
Hanging out in Central Park
In a shady spot beneath tall trees
With a lovely group of folks
Some you’ve known for a few years now
Others you just met today
And you eat pizza and cookies and candy
And chat about theatre and shows and Beyonce
And tie-dye clothes with brightly colored ink
You feel like you are five again
In the best possible way
And you head home
With a heart full of light.

I had a wish
To live in a place
Where I could eat breathe and sleep theatre
Talk about theatre all day long
Immerse myself in a world of musicals and plays and art
And how do you know what you want til you get what you want and you see if you like it?
Well I’m here
And pardon my French
But I fucking love it
I’ve had the most excellent fortune
To see literally hundreds of shows
And it never gets old
The thrill of walking into a theatre
And wondering what magic awaits
To be handed your playbill
And rifling through the names
Oh I remember her from -
I loved them in -
And increasingly
Having had the pleasure of actually working the people on the stage and behind the scenes
Going to the Performing Arts Library to watch archival recordings on a weekly basis
If my sixteen year old self could see me now!

The warmth of lit beeswax candles
Single flames burn brightly atop
Tall and skinny, gold and yellow stems
Standing in white sand
Aesthetically pleasing, and fire safe
The front of the altar is lined with silver foil
The priest swings a thurible and the
Sweet smell of incense
Fills the air
A cantor with a rich tenor voice
Sings to a bass drone
To quote Mr Minchin
The music is nice, but the lyrics are dodgy
People gathering
On a Sunday

​Walking to Hudson Yards
On a chilly New York evening 
Turning the corner
And being surprised 
By a festival of fairy lights
The trees all decked out with miniature bulbs 
The walls of the mall glittering golden light and 
Miniature hot air balloons rising out of the concourse
And around the corner
An installation of light bulbs and wood
Fashioned to look like a bonfire 
The delight of places for people to sit
And eat
And watch

When a stranger
Offers hope 
And lifts your spirits ​