NAKEDJEN

Tag: Grief

  • Still Here. Barely.

    I shaved my head last Monday.

    Not for fashion. Not for a dare. Not for reinvention as some shiny little brand strategy.

    I did it because my body needed a receipt.
    Because my heart kept whispering, we are letting go now, and I needed my scalp to sign the paperwork.

    Gizmo died.

    Sundance ended. Not just the festival, but the way of it here. The particular Utah snowglobe version where I knew the back hallways, the green rooms, the secret shortcuts, the faces that needed feeding, the ones that needed a tissue, the ones that needed a firm hand on the shoulder and a “drink some water, babe, I’ve got you.” Ten days of taking care of everyone… and then suddenly the lights go out and you’re standing in a quiet room full of empty chairs, holding a lanyard like it’s a relic.

    And Burning Man? I closed that chapter too. I am not going back this year. I can feel the hinge click. I can feel the door seal. I can feel the desert wind on the other side and I’m not stepping into it. I’m finished. I’m choosing something new even though I don’t yet know what “new” looks like.

    Also, because life has a sense of timing that is either comedic or cruel (or both), my credit card got compromised. So this morning I drove to the bank, bald as bald can be, and I started thinking about what it would be to make a documentary of my life.

    Not the highlight reel. Not the montage where the camera pans across costumes and concerts and glamorous chaos.

    More like… the witness list.

    Because if you really wanted to tell the story of me, you would have to find the people I have helped along the way. The ones who would say: she showed up. She filled the gap. She made it happen. She walked into the mess and started organizing the corners. She brought the water. She brought the snacks. She brought the extra phone charger, the spare hoodie, the peppermint oil, the hand on your back when you were about to fold.

    I’m the fill-in-the-blank fairy.

    Sundance Fairy.
    Fluffer Fairy.
    Share Your Sandwiches Fairy.
    Missing-person search Fairy.
    “Let me just handle it” Fairy.
    “Here, eat something” Fairy.
    “Breathe with me” Fairy.

    And I never, ever, ever accept payment. I have built an entire life on the belief that if I keep giving, the universe will keep providing, and maddeningly… it does. It really does. Doors open. Tables appear. Someone hands me exactly what I need right when my hands are empty.

    I’ve trusted that so hard that it became my religion.

    Even back on Grateful Dead tour, even in those long-ago days when everything was loud and wild and starry and half-improvised, I was still taking care of people. I made Clyde’s Cookies on tour, vegan, organic chocolate chip cookies, because I needed a way to support myself, yes, but also because it was a survival mechanism. A nervous system strategy. A way to stay steady in the swirl. A way to love people and the planet at the same time. Those cookies ended up in cafés all over Santa Cruz even when the Dead weren’t touring. Little brown-sugar love letters in a world that moves too fast.

    I have been in service most of my life. I don’t say that with a halo. I say it with the honesty of someone who knows service can be both medicine and the perfect hiding place.

    Because here’s the part I’m trying to tell the truth about:

    Right now, I feel broken.

    Like… really broken.

    Not “I’m having a hard day” broken. Not “I just need a bath and a nap” broken.

    More like: I cry over silly things. A song lyric. A dog on a porch. A stranger’s hands. The way light hits a kitchen counter. I cry because my heart is full of endings and my body doesn’t know where to put them. I cry because I can’t fix any of the big things right now, and I am a person who has built a whole identity around fixing. I just can’t seem to find the Nakedjen superglue AND the duct tape.

    The world is hurting. It really and truly is. There is a real revolution happening and I am paying attention. I am not looking away. I can feel the instability in the air like static. I can feel the grief in the streets. I can feel the fear. I can feel the fire. Sometimes it feels like the whole planet is holding its breath, waiting to see who will choose cruelty and who will choose care.

    I want to be the person who chooses care.

    I am still that person.

    I’m just… shaky.

    I’m alive, but barely. Tender as an overcooked beet. Raw in a way that surprises me. Not numb, not detached, not checked out.

    Just open. Too open. All nerve endings.

    So this is me, leaving a little note on the community bulletin board of the internet:

    Hi. It’s Nakedjen.
    My head is bald. My heart is bruised. I’m still here.
    I don’t know what’s wrong with me, but I know something is happening in me. Something is changing shape.

    If you’re reading this and you’re also crying in grocery store aisles, or feeling oddly fragile in the parking lot, or standing in the doorway of your own endings… come sit by me.

    No fixing required.

    Just the quiet promise that we are not alone in this, even when we feel like cracked glass.

    And if the universe has been kind enough to keep meeting me in the moments when I’m empty, then maybe it will meet me here too.

    Maybe it will meet all of us here.

    One breath at a time.

  • Badump. Badump.

    Tomorrow is my birthday.


    I’ll be 62.


    And yes, it is also my father’s birthday.


    Ironically.
    Not ironically.
    Kismet.
    Habit.


    A cosmic joke we’ve both been in on since the first day I opened my lungs and learned the sound of his name.


    It is all I’ve ever known, sharing a birthday with a man like him.
    And this year, as we all know, the birthday came with teeth.This year was very difficult for both of us.
    Me and my father.
    Two birthdays. One weather system. Climate change is absolutely real.


    He almost died while I was sitting in Bali, on the other side of the world. I was waking up to roosters and temple smoke and offerings arranged like tiny prayers in palm-leaf trays. He was intubated in a hospital outside Baltimore, tethered to machines, his breath being borrowed. I was on the phone with my sisters doing the sacred arithmetic of panic: the shoulds and coulds and woulds.


    Then I made a decision that still feels like the only one I could make.


    I decided to live my life way out loud.


    I decided to wake each morning and bow and pray to the Bali gods and goddesses in the best way I have been taught. I decided to place my hands on my own chest and hold my father’s heart in mine like it was an instrument I could keep tuned through devotion.


    Because his heart is my own.
    Let’s be honest.


    I am not being poetic. I am being literal in the only language my body trusts.
    Isn’t that what we do, ultimately?


    We keep each other’s hearts beating. No matter where we are.
    Isn’t that what love is?
    One beat here. One beat there.
    One beat in this chest answering a beat in that chest.
    Call and response.
    A long-distance holy communion. Take this beat. I’ll give you mine.

    I can feel it even now.


    His heart has a way of announcing itself.
    Sometimes it wakes me up in the middle of the night like a knock at the door. Sometimes I stop short in the middle of a busy intersection and forget the world has cars. Sometimes I stop dancing and just stare off into space because the beating gets so loud I have to listen.
    Sometimes I have to just stop.
    Because the beat is bigger than the moment I’m in.

    Badump. Badump. Badump. Wait for it….Badump.
    One beat here.
    One beat there.
    Way over there.
    Wherever he is.


    It isn’t easy sharing a birthday with a man who lives his life so loudly, so gregariously, so unapologetically. A man who has always taken up space as if space was created specifically to be taken up. A man who can turn a room into a story just by walking into it with that half-cocked grin.


    The encyclopedia could probably use his photograph, worn and tattered and sepia toned, under the definition of: life lived beyond the edges. Full of hell. Full of laughter. Full of trouble. Full of impossible charm.

    Close-up selfie of an older man in glasses smiling beside a woman smiling, both leaning into the frame.

    This little nut did not fall far from that tree.


    This is the part where I refuse to make myself small.
    Because tomorrow is not just my father’s birthday.
    It is mine, too.


    I made it to 62.


    I made it here with my own two feet and my off-key singing and my insistence on showing up again and again and again. I made it here with love in my fists. I made it here with my heart out where people can see it, which is a dangerous way to live, but it is the only way I know. I walk into the fire, never away from it.


    I have marched.
    I have fussed.
    I have fought for what’s right.
    I have loved people so hard it felt like my ribs were going to crack open and let the light out.
    I am still here.


    So, Albert. Happy birthday to you, you CRAZY (all caps) beautiful human.
    I mean it with all the love. With all the heartbeats. Every single one. Mine, too. Badump!

    Here we are again, for another spin around the sun.

    I can’t even believe it.
    I really am so grateful.

    Two birthdays.
    One world.
    Two wild hearts.
    One echo.

    Tomorrow, if you’re reading this, pause for a second.
    Put your hand on your chest.
    Feel your own drum.
    Notice the beat that has carried you through every single thing you thought might take you out.

    Then go live your life out loud.
    Keep someone’s heart beating, if you can.
    Let them keep yours.
    One beat here. One beat there.
    Badump.


    xo
    Nakedjen

    P.S. Why today? Because Sundance. It’s basically my birthday party, my church, and my annual emotional car wash. I’m volunteering (!!!) and will be in Park City for the duration starting today, so I’m kicking the celebration off early and holding the bittersweet right alongside the glitter.

  • Her Name Was Renee Nicole Good

    Her Name Was Renee Nicole Good

    This Did Not Have to Happen

    (and this is where I am placing my attention today)

    Her name was Renee Nicole Good.

    She was a prize-winning poet.
    A legal observer.
    A woman who spent her life taking care of other people.

    Yesterday, she was killed while doing exactly that.

    She was not armed.
    She was not threatening anyone.
    She was not looking for a fight.

    She was there to witness. To observe. To make sure that what was happening was seen and recorded and not erased. She was doing the quiet work that keeps the rest of us honest. The kind of work that rarely gets thanked and too often gets punished.

    This did not have to happen.

    I can’t stop thinking about how familiar she feels to me. A good life, but a hard one. A person who stayed tender in a world that rewards armor. Someone who showed up, again and again, even when it cost her something. Especially when it cost her something.

    We are living in a time when violence feels ambient. Like weather. Like background noise. It seeps into places that are supposed to be safe. Churches. Schools. Sidewalks. Courtrooms. Places of worship. Places of care.

    And our nervous systems are wrecked by it.

    If you feel jumpy, exhausted, angry, numb, or scared, you are not broken. You are responding appropriately to a world that keeps asking us to metabolize the unbearable and then move on as if nothing happened.

    What makes this loss so heavy is not just that Renee is gone. It’s that we’ve been taught to accept this as normal. To respond with sorrow but not with change. To call it a tragedy instead of naming it for what it is: the foreseeable result of choices we keep making.

    This is not about politics.
    It’s about how we value human life.

    It’s about whether we are willing to protect the people who show up with notebooks instead of weapons. Whether we believe that witnessing, caregiving, and accountability deserve safety. Whether we are brave enough to say, out loud, that this way of living is not okay.

    Renee was not reckless.
    She was not naïve.
    She was not trying to be a symbol.

    She was doing her job.
    She was doing her calling.
    And she should be alive today.

    So here is my very human, very non-partisan ask:

    Slow down.
    Pay attention.
    Refuse to normalize what is breaking us.

    Talk to your people.
    Check on your neighbors.
    Support the caregivers, the observers, the poets, the ones who show up with open hands instead of clenched fists. Choose de-escalation when you can. Choose care when it’s available. Choose to notice.

    This is where my Love Is Still Beating practice comes in.

    Every day, I’m committing to naming ten real, verifiable good things that happened in the last 24 hours. Not to deny the grief. Not to look away from the fire. But to remember that love is still moving through us, even now. Especially now.

    Today, one of those ten is this:
    People like Renee exist.
    And they matter.

    Say her name.
    Honor her life by refusing to accept her death as inevitable.
    Let your heart stay open, even when it hurts.

    This did not have to happen.
    And we are allowed to demand a world where it doesn’t keep happening.

    **********

    Here’s what you can do, today:

    Pause before you scroll.
    Check on someone you love.
    Offer steadiness instead of outrage.
    Support people who choose care over force.
    Pay attention to what keeps your heart open.

    This is how we push back against a culture of violence.
    One regulated nervous system at a time.