Just Like Starting Over

This was my goodbye letter to 2009, one of my life's toughest years. This year now, 2016 has been a collective tough one, having lost so many cultural heroes and icons (for me the loss of Prince, Carrie Fisher, Leonard Cohen and Gene Wilder were particularly sad). But no amount of loss will take the place of the awfulness of finally coming to terms with the fact that my wonderful brilliant husband and companion, Paul Williams was never going to get better. No amount of my wishing and fixing would bring back the broken neuro-highways of his brain. This post in 2010 was the beginnings of acceptance that my life, our families life was forever changed. And there is some degree of relief and peace in that acceptance. 


January 2010:
I'm happy. Really, I can't remember the last time a change of decade made me so happy. It's like looking at the house you've been living in for the last 10 years-- on the outside-- for the first time, noticing its windows and doors have fallen off and it's on a cracked slab-- and wondering how you did it.

I really feel like I'm starting over, all over again. I've noticed, I do seem to run my life in 10 year cycles, though involuntarily, with the end of times happening on the nine year and

starting anew on the one.

For example, a New York boyfriend and I broke up at the end of 1989 and I started my new life in 1990 moving back out west. Or.... Paul and I broke up in 1999, lived apart for a year, I found a new life for awhile in Los Angeles, dated some interesting guys had some fun times, wrote songs and then a year later Paul and I found out we still wanted to be together. 

The first time I crashed on a nine year was in 1979. I was in an unknown garage punk band and living in Hollywood (aka Hollow ood), we called ourselves The Stoopuds. I lived with the guitar player who was 23 and his girlfriend Jane, who was 45 in a studio apartment on Hollywood Blvd. Life sucked, but so what. I thought that was the "dues you must pay" to make it, or at least to be a real punk like our neighbor Darby Crash. The dues I paid actually turned out to be a severe depression I fell into after the bass player tried to kill himself with a safety blade razor and got into a car wreck because I wouldn't be his girlfriend. So much for making it at 20. I moved back home to little Ramona and tried to pull myself out of my first depression without medication. I did do it, but it took about 5 years. Antidepressants work so much better and you don't have to lose all those precious years. But I didn't know that back then. 

At any rate, I'm at the start of a new cycle. I'm feeling excited and hopeful, things are looking up. In September I'll be touring Italy and in June Alexander and I are going to the east coast for a family and friend vacation (and probably a few shows). I've got the start of a new album brewing, having written about six new songs in the past six months. It's finally getting easier to do things for myself, having spent so many years care giving. 

Some of my friends expected me to cut loose and start partying and dating once Paul got placed in a nursing home but it didn't work that way for me. The past six months has been a kind of inward journey which has been good for my writing. I think I felt bad, even guilty, living an independent life while my partner was losing it to dementia in a stinking nursing home. I suppose it's the survivors guilt syndrome. Just give me a year and maybe I'll become a celebrity party queen like Tiger Woods adulteress, Rachel Uchitel, who lost her first husband in the World Trade Center attack on 9/11.....or not. At any rate, life starts anew.

Happy New Year 2010. 

hugs and kisses, cindy lee b