Tara Schuster - Glow in the F*cking Dark: Simple Practices to Heal Your Soul, from Someone Who Learned the Hard Way

Im careening down Highway 40 in the Mojave Desert as night threatens to engulf the day. Blistering wind floods through my cars open windows, whipping my unwashed hair around my face in stinging lashes. Through the strands, I clock my surroundings: nothing but gnarled Joshua trees and never-ending sand melting into a blur, and the world looks alien, like Dr. Seusss version of the moon. I need to get out of here, to launch off the road and break through the atmosphere and into outer space, because Earth is not tolerable right now. I jam my right foot on the accelerator and watch the cars speedometer push from eight-five to ninety, and now ninety-five, as I feel less and less in control.

WHAT IS HAPPENING TO ME? I scream to no one as I bang my hands on the steering wheel. But, my hands? They dont appear to be my hands. Though I recognize my beloved rings and my shoddy, self-done manicure, my hands appear to be hovering a few inches off of the steering wheel, in no way connected to my body, which isto say the leastfreaking me the fuck out. And actually, my whole body feels like its floating above me like a morbid kite, making me nauseous. But Ive barely eaten in the past two days, so what would come up? All of my insides? I sure hope so, because that seems a whole lot better than what Im experiencing now.

How can I feel this sick, this out of control, this soul-level bad? I wonder. Because in some pretty fundamental ways, my life is damn good. In fact, for the past decade, I have worked like hell to heal the emotional wounds inflicted on me by my parents during my neglected-shit-show-psychologically-abusive-mess-wreck-disaster of a childhood. I might have grown up in a house where things came to die, in a din of my parents never-ending screaming, chaos, stress, and money troubles, but I have worked to bring radical self-care, healing rituals, and self-love into my life, and it has changed me. It really has! I re-parented myself into a flourishing adult who is, most days, not having an out-of-body-panic-attack-doom-spiral experience. Ive even written a book about it. So why, oh why does every cell in my body, every single tissue, feel like it is being wrung dry? And why cant I feel my hands?

Well. Heres the thing. I just lost my job. My executive position at Comedy Central, where I have worked for over a decade. One-third of my life. It was my happily-ever-after job. The thing at which I pointed to show that, Yes, I was a neglected child who had to overcome my ingrained beliefs that I was worthless, that I could never give up my addictions to weed, booze, and boys, that I could never stop treating life like a series of crises to be endured, but LOOKit turned out all rightIm a successful adult, Im living the dream! People introduced me as Tara Schuster, Comedy Central like it was my married last name. But its gone now. The financial fallout from the pandemic shut down our whole department. Im remarkably lucky to have savings, no kids to support, no mortgage to pay, and to not be in any real danger. But I have to tell you, its been hard.

The toughest part has been figuring out how to structure my days without someone else telling me what to do. I went from showing friends with pride how many overlapping, brightly colored meeting boxes made up my Outlook calendar to maybe having one Zoom every few weeks if I could coerce friends to hang out. I went from waking up thinking about what I had to accomplish at the office and how I would strategically zigzag my way from task to task with MAX efficiency, to lying in bed, wondering if I had the stamina to go to the grocery store. I have been working since high school, taking summer jobs, weird internships that were more like indentured servitude (one was billed as an opportunity to learn about playwriting but turned out to be a master class in removing filthy storm windows from the walls of a decrepit theater, which, by the way, I did gladly), so it feels disorienting to have no schedule. And, if Im real with you, my job was my entire life; I hung most of my self-worth on it. And now, for the first time, Im completely alone. Cooped up in my one-bedroom apartment during a global pandemic with my fractured identity, my raging anxiety, and about one ton of dried black beans that I had to fight for.

And so, two days ago, because my life is a petit disaster, and because the way I deal with distress is by DOINGby going, moving, fixing, by KEEP ON ACHIEVING, WOMANI googled How can I help in the 2020 election? and clicked the first result: You can help in Arizona! So just like that, I decided to move to Flagstaff, way up in the mountains, where the Internet tells me I am needed. Light research revealed that it