Intuition

Last week, I had lunch with my friend Linda.

We met at noon at Mauro’s Cafe, in West Hollywood, a restaurant that was previously owned by Mauro, one of the first Italians I met when I moved to Los Angeles, in 2010.

Linda and I had been meaning to meet up for a while, but not yet having a nanny, and having gotten shingles, it had been difficult to follow through. I am still nursing Catherine, so going anywhere for more than three hours still represents a challenge.

“We’ll both take the frisée with shrimp and avocado,” I said to the waitress, pointing at the last salad on the menu, “mine with dressing on the side, please.”

While we waited for our food we began to catch up on where our lives are at the moment. Linda and I met in 2013, when I was working at Lost and Found, a clothing store in Hollywood.

It wasn’t the happiest time of my life, 2013; I was newly sober, I was in love with a married man, and I envied all the celebrities that came to the shop and bought thousands of dollars in gorgeous clothes.

“How can you spend $100 on a pair of leggings?” I remember asking Sherrise, one of my favorite co-workers there.

Linda was a customer, and for some reason we had connected, one day when I was waiting on her in the men’s store, or in the home section, perhaps. Linda and I became friends, and when she moved to the east coast, and then to Canada, we stayed in touch by email, texts, and social media.

Eventually she moved back to Los Angeles, and now we were having lunch at Mauro’s café.

As the restaurant filled up (and became increasingly loud), our conversation became deeper, and in the week since, the topic of this essay became increasingly clear to me: intuition.

Lately, I have been listening to it a lot, intuition, that is. I haven’t been diligently following it, but what has become evident is that the more I pay attention to the voice of my instinct, or conscience, the easier it is to never lose touch with it. And every time that I do follow what my conscience suggests, I inevitably do the right thing. But let’s go back to my lunch with Linda, because it is from there that we’ll get to my letter to Tracy Anderson, and to this essay.

“I honestly don’t know what to do,” I said to Linda. We were talking about our careers. “The book is done, but I don’t know how to find an agent,” I continued, frustrated.

My instinct whispered in my ear. But I didn’t listen.

We moved on to another topic, and even though I was paying attention to what she was saying, the chatter became loud in my head.

“I need to tell you something,” I said. We had finished our salad and had ordered coffee.

“I was listening to you, but while you were talking I had a realization.” She didn’t look surprised, she looked interested — her eyes lightly brushed by charcoal eyeshadow, her short, dark hair perfectly framing her face. “The book is not done. I keep telling myself that I finished it, but I haven’t.” She smiled at me, almost as if she already knew. “I added old chapters of a book I was trying to write for an agent, but I know that they don’t fit in there.” A year ago I had started working on a food memoir for an agent that didn’t quite get my writing, so in order to keep that agent, I was writing what she wanted me to write, until I realized that I wasn’t being truth to myself, and that I wasn’t enjoying the project. I was ran by fear.

I eventually left the agent, and archived the work at the 20.000-word mark.

Until that moment, I hadn’t been listening to the voice in my head that was trying to guide me. I had heard it, but I had purposely ignored it.

I told Linda that every time that I listen to intuition I feel right, and I know that nothing bad can happen, whether in regards to business, personal relationships, or to the mundane. Have you ever found yourself at the grocery store, having changed your mind on an item in your cart?

“Put that back where you took it from,” I hear in my head when I think about leaving a jar of apricot marmalade in the produce isle. To me, that’s intuition, and it doesn’t have to manifest with grandiosity — it’s always the little things, the bigger ones are gravy, as they say.

After lunch, I got in my car and drove home feeling energized, and inspired. I felt as if something had finally come to the surface. All I had to do was go home, turn my computer on, open the file titled “Making Sense of Reality” and delete the essays that didn’t belong.

Before I hit “Delete” I thought about the word count that would go down, taking me further away from a book deal. But I selected the intruding stories nonetheless, and I deleted them. My book went from 40.000 words to 33.000; I felt free, and the obstacle that separated me from the page crumbled before my eyes as if it had never really been there. In fact, I now had the material for a new essay, this very one you are reading, a story that would add words that did belong, and that would make the book authentic. Perhaps six months later, but the real deal, a book I could be proud of, and that I would want people to have in their hands.

I mentioned a letter to Tracy Anderson; I am getting there.

During the last weeks of pregnancy I had watched InnSaei, a Netflix documentary about human connection by means of empathy and intuition. I had taken note of it and moved on, until it came back to haunt me, or rather to guide me and steer me toward a new way of living life.

Everything became clear when Catherine was born. What better example of intuition and instinct than a child? She knows when she is hungry, tired, angry, in need of love, of comfort, of freedom, of movement, or of stillness. We are born with the highest sense of instinct and intuition, but as we move through life, we lose it.

I wanted to learn from her. I wanted what she had.

As I began to pay more attention to my needs, to my instincts, and to my conscience, I realized that the answers I had been looking for had been there all along. I just wasn’t listening; I was looking for them in the wrong places, and I was often asking the wrong questions.

Nine months have passed since Catherine’s birth, and in a way, a new me has been reborn — a new me that stopped fighting life. I began to follow the Catherine in me, and I soon came face to face with a new Alice.

And here we get to Tracy Anderson.

On May 5th, 2018, I sent an email to the Tracy Anderson web team, and I asked them to forward Tracy a thank you letter. Her work had inspired me, changed not only my body, but also, and more importantly, my relationship with it. I had written a heartfelt letter, but nobody responded. “I shouldn’t have added that thing,” I kept saying to myself in the months that followed. I knew I had written something that didn’t belong, something that didn’t make the letter better, more profound – something I had written for the wrong reason.

Summer came and passed, and I completely forgot about the email.

On August 29th, I contacted her studio to ask a question about my membership, and without thinking much about it, I asked them to forward the old letter to Tracy, from which I had since removed the paragraph that didn’t feel right. It was 9:24 am.

At 10:52 am I received the following:

Alice,

Thank you for your touching email.

I have confirmed that you have only an annual membership.

Secondly, we are happy to forward your email to Tracy.

Warmest regards,

TA Online Studio Team

The day before meeting Linda for lunch, I had been debating whether to keep the commitment or go see Fleetwood Mac, band I love, rehearse. I knew what the right thing to do was, I knew what I wanted to do, and yet it took me until the night before to confirm with her.

Without our lunch I wouldn’t be writing this. Without our lunch it would have possibly taken me weeks, or even months, to delete the essays from my book. For when I do the right thing, that thing I know is right, nothing can go wrong.

Can you imagine where would we be if we listened to the voice of instinct, to our conscience? Think about it, we don’t really have to imagine it.