Illusions: Adventures of a Reluctant Cigarette Girl

I graduated college in the spring of 2008 which, if you recall, was a terrible fucking time to graduate college. The U.S. housing bubble had burst with abandon, honey—and the global economy was spinning out into a full-blown financial cuh-risis. It was cuh-razy.

Jobs were evaporating… not just into thin air but into the dusty, yellowed vortex of history all together. By September of that year, it began to feel like the mere idea of a job or a stable, salaried career (not a gig, not a hustle, not a series of W2 tax form tap dances) was a cute, impossible, too-good-to-be-true antiquated concept of yesteryear. It was a time when you took whatever work you could find, if you could find work at all.

I majored in International Relations with an emphasis in U.S. Foreign Policy. I’d written my senior thesis on the political leveraging and misrepresentation of women’s clothing as a means of justifying large military operations overseas. Come October, after months of rejected applications to what I felt were jobs worthy of my education and critical thinking, I was finally (read: tragically) hired as the Edison Nightclub’s “Cigar & Cigarette Girl.” To be clear, the word “girl” was absolutely in the job title. I was also the cloakroom attendant, the daytime administrative secretary, the stand-in Absinthe Fairy if Tiffany called in sick (read: Tiffany was about as dependable as an apparition), a cocktail server, a backup barback (say that ten times fast), and absofreakinglutely exhausted, honey.

It was after these endless shifts at the club that I often found myself sitting in my car at 2:30 am, parked behind my dilapidated (read: decomposing) 1900s Victorian rental, in a state of such physical and emotional exhaustion that I was capable only of turning off the ignition—but not exiting the car. I know it sounds hyperbolic to say, but sometimes I would sit in my car for hours after I’d arrived home. See, there is a space between parking at your house and going into your house that—IYKYK—offers a sacred type of silence that can only be experienced inside the distraction-less, meditative cocoon of one’s safely stationed vehicle. And after returning home from one particularly lonely and soul-sucking double shift, I decided I would use my Car Cocoon time to read a book instead of staring off blankly into the abyss for minutes on end (which was my usual course of action).

Per the incessant recommendation of my nightclub manager, Carl, I’d recently procured Richard Bach’s Illusions: The Adventures of a Reluctant Messiah. Carl, my manager, was a fifty-something former member of the United States Marines. He suffered from depression and PTSD, had a black belt in Taijutsu, and taught martial arts to any member of the nightclub staff that wanted to learn. He was also extremely well read.

“Richard Bach is much better known for his seminal work, Jonathan Livingston Seagull but trust me, Jules, Illusions is the one you need to read. It’s not religious or anything, don’t let the title sway you. You’ll appreciate it. Just trust me.”

Well, I don’t ‘just trust’ anyone, but I bought the book anyway. I had opened up to Carl on many a slow night about the agonizing state of affairs with my parents’ divorce, about the deep despair I felt for my mother’s worsening psychological condition, the unrelenting loneliness of being an only child inside the crumbling illusion of what was once our family, the wrenching betrayal of a world order that simultaneously promised me the moon while it proceeded to suffocate my soul… the realization that absolutely nothing—not even a hard-won degree or years upon years of academic achievement and “doing the right thing”—could protect me from the inevitable cruel and undeserved catastrophes of human living. Carl often listened to my mid-shift soliloquies with a smirk.

          “Listen bingbong, read the book. Illusions. Richard Bach. Just trust me.”

So, begrudgingly, I bought this extremely pretentious-sounding work of probably wholly unrelatable ‘philosophical’ fiction and decided to crack it open on this particularly terrible night during this particularly terrible year which was on the heels of a particularly terrible FOUR years of familial grief, trauma, and abandonment. And, well, I couldn’t put the damn thing down. It was… fantastic? Illusions presented me with two sentences that forever changed the way I looked at my given circumstances and my loved ones:

"The bond that links your true family is not one of blood, but of respect and joy in each other's life. Rarely do members of one family grow up under the same roof.”

This was, in fact, the very first time I had been formally exposed to the concept of “family” as something you could proactively choose instead of something you must passively endure. These two sentences gave me the permission I didn’t know I needed to reimagine what my family could look like, could feel like, regardless of who was on my actual birth certificate. Maybe I wasn’t doomed to a life of preassigned misery. Maybe my support network didn’t HAVE to include the people that made me feel wildly unsupported?! Was I capable of reserving some of the deepest-loving, most vulnerable parts of my heart for…friends? People who were unobligated to choose me back? If I was capable of authentically integrating a new definition of family to be inclusive of people I wasn’t technically related to, what else was I capable of reimagining or redefining that wasn’t previously thought to be a choice?

It's been almost twenty years since that moment in the car, since I read and reread those two humbly profound sentences over and over and over again. It’s been almost twenty years since I ran into my dilapidated 1900s Victorian rental house after a night of reading an entire book in my car and proclaimed to my beloved roommates, proudly and at the top of my lungs, that they WERE my family. It’s been almost twenty years since I quit the Edison Nightclub and chose my life instead.

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Juliana, or “Juju”—as she is known to her friends and family (chosen and given!), is an award-winning illustrator, creative director, and writer based in Oakland, California. For over a decade, Juju and her husband have been leading the Bay Area design house, Good Juju Ink, where their tiny-but-mighty team of creatives have produced some of the world’s best-selling greeting cards and stationery. She is profoundly humbled to be “Maman” to her two untamable, curly-haired little weirdos: daughter Josephine and son Caspian (both named after literary characters, bien sur!). And her favorite midnight writing partner is an outrageously floofy Scottish fold named Wallace The Cat.