Lately I’m this bizarre vacillating emotional emotional emotional appearing non-emotional tough-as-nails person. Everyone keeps saying, “So tough, so tough, so hard, so guarded, so many walls, so tough,” and then I find myself crying to a stranger hitting on me in the street. Is that contradictory? I don’t know. There are created characters, exaggerated characters like Chelsea Handler and Sarah Silverman and in my comedic persona, I identify with these strong females. I like personas. They are strong. But being soft, sensitive, vulnerable, human is so core to who I am. I could never deny that. I don’t think it’s contrary. It just is. It’s not appropriate for a performance (unless it’s, say, a one-woman show, I guess), but I think it’s lovely to express on a Web site like this. That’s what blogs are for, right? To try to get the heart of something personal and real in a warm-up kind of way that might then touch someone else and make a planet of so often very lonely and disconnected and bitter and scared and jaded and hurt and broken souls feel some sense of connection.

So tonight I talked to a friend who I have known since I came to New York, who is like this Metric song that is playing in my ears right now, “Twilight Galaxy.” She gets it. She’s one of those friends who you can be yourself with, who is with you when you have to say the most terrible or the most afraid things, and she just loves you. One of our favorite jokes is to say the bitchiest, most terrible, most high school petty mean thing and then tag on at the end, as if it makes it all New Agey and cool, “Love and light!”

“She’s an idiot. Love and light!”

“I hate him, and he represents everything bad about humanity. Love and light!”

“I hope she gets sent away to an all women’s prison where there’s a riot in the cafeteria and she gets knifed in the back. Love and light!”

See, you can get love from your parents and strangers and old friends and exes and prayer and lack of prayer and meditation and hope and a Google search. But it’s the true good soul friends who lift you up, who bring you from darkness to a sense of light. Who help you laugh at the fear, or at least laugh with you at the fear, and help you get through to that other place. That place where even though you don’t know what is next, you at least know that you are not alone on this journey. That’s all we want sometimes is to know that we are not alone on this journey. And we call our parents, I call my parents, I talk to my mom, and she stays on the phone with me as I brush my teeth, and I wash my face, and she loves me and I tell her how my foot touched my windchimes and we pretend that it is the spirit of my Uncle Bob, her brother, who was the funniest, he was always the funniest, and he died young, at 40, he used to do the funny ad campaigns for Nike, and when I was moving my apartment around, the windchime starting chiming, and there was no wind, nothing, and I said, “That’s the spirit of Bob.” That’s just what I decided, and now I clang it with my foot, and my mom says, “Oh hi, Bob,” and we laugh, and I called my parents when a mouse came out in the morning and I shrieked and I didn’t think I could go to the kitchen, I didn’t think I had the bravery, and I joked with my friend, the one that I wrote this email to, I joked with her that a mouse or a cockroach is enough to make you get in a relationship with the first man that you see, just so that you are not alone. Just so you don’t have to be so scared dealing with this thing that for some reason can be scary. And then you laugh. The two of you laugh, and everything is okay again. Sometimes that’s all you need. And sometimes it’s helpful to express these things. Sometimes it can be just bottled up inside and you don’t quite know where everything is going, you know that it’s exciting and good, but it doesn’t stop it from being scary sometimes. Because you want to make the right decisions and you want to risk and dare and be true to yourself but sometimes you need and love and cherish your friends more than you’ve ever cherished and loved before.

So thank you for reading all of this, and for reading the note below, and mostly, thank you for really continuing to try.  Wherever you are at right now,  I hope you know, it’s all going to turn out great.

“…Dear YOU, thanks so much from the bottom of my heart for your friendship. I just wanted to tell you how dear you are to me. I seriously cannot imagine life without you. You are so beautiful, kind, and open. I can’t even express to you just how lovely I think you are. I’ve gotten to know you so well over these past few years, and it just never fails to amaze me how close and connected I feel with you in my life. I’m seriously welling up with tears in my eyes writing this. Now I will go cry to a stranger ha ha. So thank you. Thank you, thank you, thank you. I do like giving cards to others but I don’t do that for just anyone. I do that for you because you have been so meaningful and dear and kind and lovely and supportive and THERE for me. I’m so grateful for you just being there. Because it’s really not easy to live sometimes. Sometimes it’s so hard. You know that. This isn’t meant to sound tragic — I just mean, to get by. But there’s one thing I know, and that’s how much I cherish you. You help bring out some of my best writing, you encourage me, you make me laugh out of darkness, and you give me the strength to be single. You give me the strength to do so much of what I do. I sometimes don’t express this enough, and it feels really good to express this in gratitude to you. Because you’re just the most dear person, and I can feel so much good energy and bravery and friendship in you. You make me not ever feel ashamed, but you also make me feel like I want to be a good person and take care of myself. I’m so grateful for that. I’m so grateful for knowing that in addition to my friends and my family and all the strangers hitting on me randomly in the street in the world, that you are there for me. You make me happy that you are alive. You make me happy to know that you are really on my side. You make me glad to dare and to risk and do so many of the things I do. You make me want to be my funniest, happiest, best, most energetic, wickedly brave self. You help inspire bravery in me which is one of my biggest goals in this life. I so want to keep being brave. I want to be brave, and you help me be brave. Thank you so much. From the bottom of my heart, I’m sending you love and light.”