I love my life.

I realize that this statement is no great surprise to anyone, but sometimes I still feel like it bears repeating. I occasionally have to remind myself that many people lead (to quote Penny Arcade) “lives of quiet desperation”…I know that wide swaths of people aren’t doing what they would most love to be doing in their lives. While it’s true that I myself am not doing as much of what I love as I wish I could, the fact that I have at least come so far as to KNOW what I love and to do it at all seems sometimes to be a fair distance ahead of the curve. I am very blessed in that following my heart has never been difficult for me, nor has it felt anything other than natural.

Working my day job at Maxfield’s, customers have told me (with a shocking degree of frequency) things like “oh, I wish I could be as free-spirited as you” or “I wish I could pull off a hairstyle/outfit like that”…every day I see (and serve) dozens of people who work in jobs that don’t fulfill them, stay in relationships that don’t satisfy them, and enslave themselves trying to please corporate masters who will never give them the validation they crave.

Last night, as I sat at a table at Hamburger Mary’s with my friends Deidre, Mark, and Dino (more famously known as Monistat), we talked about the arc of our shared histories of more than a decade, and where our lives have brought us. It reminded me of something that NYC performance artist, composer/musician, and delicious drag freak Taylor Mac wrote about on his Facebook a while back.

Unfortunately, Facebook’s current technology makes it extraordinarily difficult to dig up older posts, so I’ll have to paraphrase, but he was telling a story about back when he was attending acting classes here in LA as a young artist, when there was a guest speaker who told them about networking. This guest said (something along the lines of) “It’s true that you do have to go to the parties that the rich and powerful assholes invite you to. What I’m here to tell you, though, is that once you’re at those parties, you don’t have to spend your time socializing with the assholes. Seek out the people at these parties who you feel a creative connection with, and nurture those relationships. I guarantee you that in fifteen years, those people will be the ones on top, and those rich assholes will be yesterday’s news.” Taylor went on to basically verify that this bit of wisdom has played out exactly as the instructor had told them; all these years later, the ass-kissing and desperation to curry favor with the cold and powerful elite yielded very little, whereas the truly deep and artistic (I recall he referred to them as “gooey”) relationships that he’s carefully tended since that time have now yielded the most satisfying fruits of his creative labors, and formed the primary basis of his career.

This all goes back to what I was writing about yesterday: the movers and shakers. The dreamers of dreams. I’ve felt like an outsider all my life, but I never (ok, rarely…I was an angst-y teenager once) felt like there was anything wrong with me for being different. And when I went out into the big world, I consistently met other people who were outsiders–and those are the people I was most drawn to, related to the most easily, and put most of my energy into getting to know.

So as the four of us–a woman who manages a global club and music franchise, a drag queen who calls Margaret Cho his best friend, a guy who writes and produces music in partnership with his well-known DJ/singer boyfriend, and me–piled into a car to go to The Eagle and see more people from our shared San Francisco history, one of whom was hosting the night’s event there and another who just relocated here to utilize his new PhD as a college professor. Not bad for a bunch of people who were widely considered losers back in High School.

It isn’t my intention to tell you all this just to brag. I sincerely hope that what I’m pointing to with these words rings true to you, and that perhaps you might feel encouraged to follow your bliss maybe even just a tiny bit more than you have. Nights like the one I had last night are potent reminders to me of just how powerful a thing that is.