​I’m someone who realizes things kind of slowly. I move very fast and often even kind of impulsively, but the deeper realizations are usually cooking long before I even really know what’s going on. I’ve learned this through therapy, through knowing that I have a temper and having to work on that, through my work with embodiment, and most, especially in my marriage. And thanks to our beloved Orna, I’ve also learned recently that this is pretty normal:)

I definitely didn’t know that I ever wanted a marriage, a long-term relationship, or children. But I left Spain in 2018 knowing that the life I had gone there to claim — the life of the lonely artist — really just wasn’t the life I wanted anymore. I wasn’t sure what I wanted instead, I just knew that I had found Los Angeles to be a really interesting place. Interesting history, interesting nature, and certainly interesting people.

I moved back in September 2018 and took a while to get settled — though ironically, I moved back into the exact same apartment I had left. I got a couple jobs that felt stable and nourishing, started cultivating friendships again, delved deep into five rhythms culture, and reconnected to the nature around me that had drawn me back. And then about six months later, I had the sudden realization that I wanted to date. And wanted to date men, which was a little bit of a shift. But like I said, I don’t really make a habit of questioning when I’m moving — I just move with the instinct.

As one does to widen the scope, I went online.

And truly, almost immediately, you leapt out at me. A strong, angular, creative-looking man flying through the air. I was immediately intrigued and swiped right. Conversation ensued that was definitely titillating. We chatted for a couple weeks before agreeing to meet on June 1st to go see Cirque du Soleil in San Pedro.

You were my first and only Tinder date.

Early on, I look back and see myself as so guarded. So very walled off. And I kind of have to ask myself why? I think my prior experiences with relationships had been a little scarring and I wasn’t really sure how to start again.

I remember our first date so vividly. We went to this wonderfully old-school Italian restaurant before the show, and when we parked he realized you had forgotten your wallet. There was such a cute, quiet gesture — you patted your pocket and I watched you go through this little series of emotions in real time. Slight panic, recalibration, embarrassment, problem-solving. It was honestly incredibly endearing and intimate to witness.

Over the years I’ve learned that you are actually quite guarded about your emotional world, but at the same time your feelings are written all over your face if one knows how to read them. And I think that tiny moment on our first date was actually my first lesson in understanding you.

The restaurant itself was fun, and I remember noticing your hands a lot. You have incredibly beautiful hands — very strong and sturdy — and this gorgeous Eye of the Storm tattoo that I found mesmerizing.

Then we went to the circus, and at one point you thoughtfully suggested we get up before intermission to use the restroom. Which sounds minor, but it was again just so incredibly on point - thoughtful, observant, quietly wise. The kind of person who anticipates things and takes care of people without making a performance of it. I think on some level I recognized very early that you were someone I could trust, which was actually huge for me.

And maybe because of that — because I knew I wanted to learn more about you, to really let myself marinate in your aura a little bit — we didn’t even kiss on that first date. Which is honestly a little parochial for me. But I think it had everything to do with the fact that I was deeply intrigued and didn’t want to treat whatever this was like something light.

But we embraced.

My birthday was the next week and I went to a workshop in Orange County — Aguedra Saavedra. It was a good workshop! But I got food poisoning there, which resulted in me canceling our planned second date (I was definitely spacing things out in the beginning for some autonomy and headspace too, I think). Then I ended up going to a festival in Albuquerque for a couple weeks, so our second date didn’t happen until late June, which was quite a gap.

You very sweetly offered to cook me a belated birthday dinner.

I remember rigidly telling myself: “Don’t sleep with him, don’t sleep with him,” choosing a floor length sundress instead of a favorite miniskirt ha ha. Mostly because I felt like I wanted to reconnect with who you were as a person before complicating things with all the physical chemistry stuff.

One of the most beautiful things, though, was how we connected while I was in Albuquerque. We got into a pattern of texting constantly, and honestly I felt like I learned more about who you were through those chatty texts than I even had on our first date.

The second date was amazing.

I had trouble getting to your place downtown, so at some point you told me to just drive by and you ran out and got into my car. When I saw you run out of your building, it had been long enough that the sight of you was genuinely refreshing and endearing. You’ve always had this really unique and chic sense of style and such an incredibly earnest expression. The shape of your head, your widow’s peak, his glasses — I do vividly remember how this made me smile as you ran toward my little Corolla parked at your kerb.

It was such a romantic and thoughtful dinner. I think you made some of your specialties: really good mashed potatoes and chilean sea bass, as well as this unique and delicious blackberry cake that you still makes almost annually.

And somewhere in all of this, without fully realizing it yet, my life was splitting wide open.

Because despite all my declarations from my early teens of “I’m not getting married,” despite pretty much sticking to that ethos for years — when I met you, something fundamentally shifted. Your description of what you wanted out of a relationship just kind of blew my mind. I remember realizing: whoa… who the heck wouldn’t want that?

That, compounded with our unique compatibility, has forged one of the most profound bonds of my life.

And I think that’s the funny thing about this story: the genesis of our relationship was both a huge unforeseen life shift and also not unforeseen at all. Because somewhere deep down, I was absolutely ready for what we now have — a family, a lifetime connection, this enormous shared life.

Five years married and seven years together. You have split my life wide open and poured it full of more love and understanding than I could have conceived of back then.

My love, I stand by you for all our days. I stand by you through all the poops and tantrums, through all the ups and downs. In the words of the notorious André, you have taught me more than anyone I’ve ever met, and I can’t wait to see where the next five years takes us.

Farther together ❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️

So much of the ethos of “being American” links migration to liberation. But have those of us for whom these are not our ancestral lands lost something through our ancestors’ migrations? If so, what? Does “nuestra tierra” have any kind of significance for a contemporary cis-gendered woman of Northern European descent?

Donor conceived children, for a variety of reasons, often feel estranged from their roots. Genetic relatives can estrange themselves from their family of origin. What is the spiritual cost, what is the legacy of all of this migration and estrangement?

Resmaa Menakem says that “Black bodies were deliberately presented as straw men for white bodies to blow their ancient historical trauma through. What had been white-on-white (or, ussually, powerful-white-on-less-powerful white) trauma was transformed...into white-on-Black trauma, which was then institutionally enforced.” He writes about how this created a “false settling” in the bodies of poor white Americans. What has hundred of years of this “false settling” done to our sense of connection to our ancestral identities, our communities, our selves?

I’m excited and more than a little nervous to announce that a dream I’ve had for a long time is finally coming to fruition next week: I’m opening a studio in northern Santa Monica (Tongva Lands): Pilates CAN (my initials and essentially my life motto). I hope you’ll visit me in this inclusive space that I hope will be a haven of healing, growth, and new frontiers of every kind.