Semiotics is a Crock!

Not Every Sign Points Right: Lessons from Messy Moments

Have you ever experienced an unexpected setback that opened a new path for growth? Share your turning point below!

I’ll go first…

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After bragging about my Dutch prowess only a couple of days ago, I feel I have to be honest about my recent flub. This isn’t the first time I’ve turned my life upside down to go abroad, nor is it the first time I’ve made a boner move.

My first experience with living abroad was right after college where I was lucky enough to study at the Moscow Art Theatre. We lived in dorms with Harvard grad students alongside young men and women who would go on to star on Russian soap operas. Our American group lived in a bubble, moving together and almost always traveling with a native speaker; however, I still managed to learn a few harsh lessons about what happens when you don’t understand your surroundings.

While approaching the Pushkin Theater for a production of Romeo and Juliet that would’ve made Judi Dench reconsider enjoying Shakespeare (blacklight, hula hoops, and clunky as fuck Russian iambic pentameter), I was pulled aside by several guards with Uzis because I looked like a Balkan separatist…or that’s what the translator said. A quick flash of my Moscow Art ID and all was finished but a memory that sticks in my mind.

That’s not the only time I’ve been held at gunpoint abroad as there was a very tense trip returning from a nightclub in Ocho Rios where our cab driver was splayed across the hood while the menacing guards paged through every bit of documentation on his vehicle.

It’s funny that I’ve had more experience with firearms outside of the US…

Many years after Russia and on the heels of leaving the broadway show with which I toured for five years (I used to undress men for a living!), I moved back home with my parents. My dad was descending into the dementia that would eventually take his life and I was at a cross-roads, trying to figure out where my mine was headed.

Working in entertainment is a strange paradox: you’re at work when everyone else is off because that’s the only time they’re able to come see your work. Touring life meant I was on the clock from 4:30 to 11 pm, except for weekends where it was twelve hour days, making relationships with anyone who wasn’t on your schedule rather difficult to maintain. Even in cities where I had friends and family, we hardly saw one another and most of the relationships I had were based on the fact that we worked together. I spent a lot of years in hotel rooms, observing real life from the margins and virtually, and I was ready for some living of my own. I wanted pillows no one else had ever slept on, to be able to buy a book without thinking of where I could stow it, and to have a real relationship.

For that to happen, I realized I probably needed to like myself more than I did.

I was bullied as a child, to the point that my parents moved us to a different school district. I didn’t really connect it at the time, and I’m sure my mother will correct me as there were definitely other family motivations (closer to her practice, etc.), but I know that my being called every homophobic slur in the book in the hallways of my middle school was no small part of it.

Even before I admitted to myself that I was the thing the other kids made fun of me for being, I spent a lot of years trying to convince other people that I was likeable. I developed the personality of tofu, taking on the flavor of what’s around, and was always glad to find a new group of interesting people to try to win over and befriend in hopes of finding a validation no one but myself could ever provide. There wasn’t a lot of “me” in any of those attempts, because I was too afraid that person was someone that no one wanted. I was so unsure of who he was that I masked him with whatever I thought the others would want to see.

I’m a good time when I’m “on” in public, but it isn’t my natural state and keeping up those appearances takes a lot of effort. It’s a minefield to try to construct a persona based on what you think someone else will respond to, and it is even more of a shitshow if you’re trying to do it to convince someone else to love you. In the few relationships I’d had before getting married, I was so excited that someone might pick me that I was willing to contort myself into any shape that would fill the space next to them.

I can’t imagine why that wasn’t instantly attractive…

My time of introspection and soul-searching also happened to coincide with the heyday of Eat, Pray, Love so…I rented an apartment in Rome with the intention of becoming the person I wanted to marry. Even if no one else ever showed any interest, I thought at least I’d be happy with whoever I was.

Absent any of the “normal” things that dictated the structure of daily life, new habits emerged. I slept until I woke up, I explored when I got the urge and stayed in when I didn't. I shopped the markets in broken Italian, and I visited Venice, Pisa, Florence, Sorrento, Naples, and the ruins of Pompeii. I climbed all seven hills and I walked from the Circo Maximo past the Baths of Caracalla along the Appian Way to the Catacombe di San Callisto. I visited the Vatican Necropolis and sat among the new novices and priests to watch the Pope celebrate Vespers in Saint Peter’s Cathedral (he rides in on a wheeled platform so everyone can see him). I ate adventurously, amazing the Aussies who shared my table in Venice by ordering tripe but I was too embarrassed to admit I didn’t know what I’d ordered, I’d only been certain that it wasn’t seafood. I visited god knows how many churches and made a mission of taking pictures of each of the insignia that decorate the trashcans to denote the various regions of the city.

In short, I lived.

I also ruined an entire load of laundry.

My appartamento Romano had a little top-loading combination washer-dryer-vacuum cleaner-engine hoist and there were a whole host of bottles above the machine. Fresh off years in theatrical wardrobe, I felt confident that I didn’t need to translate the Italian and poured a hearty measure from the bottle with the sparkling shirt icon all over my dark clothes.

For your information, in Italian semiotics, shirts sparkle when they’re bleached, not washed with soap.

On the one hand, this was an inconvenience because I had ruined two pair of pants and half my t-shirts. I was unemployed and trying my best to live the high life in Italy while not going crazy spending more than I could afford (I kept all the euros I had in a coffee cup on top of the kitchen cupboards). I could have chosen to be upset or blamed anyone but myself for what happened, but none of those things would change the fact that my brown pants looked like a roan horse and my blue t-shirt could’ve passed for tie-dyed.

Instead, in the spirit of my grand adventure, I finished my wine and went to the Gap on via del Corso.

I returned from Rome energized by the experience and with no interest in looking for a relationship maybe ever again because I’d discovered I was a pretty great companion. I settled into what I thought would be a long stretch of time where I figured out how to be an adult that didn’t live out of suitcases, but that was not in the cards. Within a few months, I met William (who was living in Alaska at the time!) and everything changed for the better rather rapidly.

I’d like to say he got that person I set out for Italy in search of finding. I wish he had met that finished “person I wanted to marry,” but I could not deliver then, nor can I now. So very many of the lessons I thought I “learned” along the way were only appetizers to the real work on myself that I would need to do (and continue to do) in order to become a better partner, friend, and husband.

In the lead up to the move to the Netherlands, William and my habit was to ask each other these questions every day, without fail:

1. Do you still want to be married? To me?

2. Do you still want to move abroad? With me?

Even when we'd had a stressful day and the answer to number one felt like a no, the practice helped us to shake off all the stress and stuff that was outside of the two of us and focus on what it was we were doing and the fact that we were doing it together.

Now that we’ve landed, the second question just makes us laugh.

Once again free from the confines of a day structured around working for someone else, we’re both working for (or perhaps on?) ourselves. I’m treading water until my copy editor finishes work on my upcoming manuscript but eagerly recruiting ARC readers and exploring distribution options that would allow me to bite my thumb at Bezos while still selling books. Across the drop-leaf table, William is hard at work planning his own business, an endeavor that makes our relocation and residence in the Netherlands possible in the first place.

At first, I fell right back into the old trap and tried to align my sleep wake cycle with a “normal” day. Instead, we are leaning in; napping when we feel tired and hunching over our computers when we’re not. It is almost three PM and I’ve been writing this off and on since noon. I’m still wearing the shirt I slept in last night, something the American me would have only done when laid out by a virus. I haven’t worn my Apple Watch with any regularity for the past month and I’ve stopped obsessively worrying over how many calories I burn each day. My 700+ day streak on DuoLingo is beyond streak repair.

And I don’t feel bad about any of it.

Our early Dutch days are loosely structured around a single errand or the government office we have to visit, giving plenty of time to chip away at the logistics of moving abroad and enough of the day to plan for when we can be in contact with anyone stateside. Yesterday, we began the search for an apartment and, as of this morning, our possessions have made it across the ocean where they’re being inspected by customs before being forwarded to a parcel locker where we will transfer them to storage until we know exactly where we’ll be renting.

I’m no longer thinking of each day as having a block of time I have to be ready to give someone else, instead I’m only thinking about what will best serve William, myself, and the two cats. Instead of reserving my focus, energy, and creativity for the enterprise of others, I’m using it to build something new for myself and my little family.

From the vast ocean of possibility, we’re panning for the gold flakes among the silt in the swirls of transition.

In the past, I was not someone who could handle this level of ambiguity, preferring to know every detail and to have enough time to consider the good and (the very numerous potential) bad things about every option. For the better part of my first forty years, I wound myself in knots, over-analyzing in the hopes of directing life as it unfolded, only to learn how little reality cares to conform to my expectations.

This move has done wonders for my need for control.

I couldn’t make the USDA website work, I can’t change that our VRBO isn’t a residence at which you can legally register, nor can I guarantee that everything will work out the way we want it to from here on out. I can’t magically understand everything about how Dutch society works, nor can I move faster through any of the hurdles that stand between us and a more permanent-feeling situation.

But I can smile and soldier on in the face of obstacles. As hard as it is, we have to be in flux for a little while longer. We can’t change a lot of information about our US-based accounts until we have a Dutch bank account (you can’t sign up for Disney+ in the Netherlands with a US credit card) and you can’t get a Dutch bank account without a permanent address.

In order to get everything sorted out, we will have to learn all of it little-by-little, through what I am certain will be an occasionally painful and/or costly process of trial and error.

When I went to Rome in search of who I would be when I grew up, I was still thinking there was an answer waiting somewhere. I believed there was a key that would unlock all the mysteries and set me on “the path” to success. I was still naive enough to think that happiness was a tangible object, a point that could be reached.

Thinking about it that way only makes it feel farther away because happiness isn’t a prize that’s won, it’s a transient emotion that’s harder to grasp than a squirming cat. The real joy for me has come in discovering contentment. It looks a lot like happiness, but it’s easier to achieve, sustain, and delivers even more richness.

Instead of being unhappy about all of the uncertainty around me, I’m contented that we’ve come this far. I’m resting comfortable in the knowledge that more will happen, things will change, and we have been able to manage everything that’s come our way. We got residence, we sold our house, we managed to bring the cats on an airplane.

Yes, the apartment has the frightening Dutch stairways and the radiators smell of hair and smoke…but we are in the Netherlands. I could focus on the parts that aren’t right or that remain uncertain, though all that will do is ruin the excitement of the fact that we’re here.

We have repotted ourselves and now have to endure the time it takes to adapt to the soil.

I know from the physics of gravity that what goes up will eventually come down. I’ve learned from life that the where and how of their falling into place were never going to be my choice so all I can do is embrace what comes.

I also would very much like to report that I learned my lesson in Italy when it comes to translating the symbols on packaging but, here in Rotterdam, we are washing our dishes with what I now understand to be Rinse-Aid.

You should see their streak-free shine.

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