Then one night I started watching TV, something I rarely did these days, and saw a special on spirituality and prayer and healing. I didn’t normally put much stock in spirituality, but I was bored, and nothing else was on, so I kept watching. It was interesting, I had to admit. I started wondering if maybe I should look into some spirituality classes, like yoga or that mystical Judaism that Madonna was into. I was getting to the point where I’d try anything to get rid of the shadow that seemed to follow me everywhere. Unfortunately, I found that my tendency to be the king of flaw-finding wasn’t limited to women.

Yoga was my first try, since it was so ubiquitous. I went to one of the yoga centers that catered to celebrities and sat in the back trying not to laugh at the names of the positions and the little chime the instructor used to signal the end of class. And they insisted on this whole “empty your mind” idea, but I couldn’t—my thoughts were too persistent.

I tried t’ai chi next; a few former costars attended a class in Beverly Hills and loved it. It seemed like the next natural step from yoga and was actually kind of fun, but you had to string together all these movements, and my physical memory just wasn’t good enough.

I gave up the body stuff and went into more mind-driven activities. Kabbalah came first; Madonna had popularized it to the point where it was simple to find a place to go learn. This I found fascinating for a while. But it was a lot of academia, and I had never been very good at school, so that was the end of that.

From there I moved on to studying crystals, but it didn’t last long because I couldn’t get past the idea that rocks had power. There was one very embarrassing moment when the instructor held up a green crystal and began cataloguing its strengths, but it reminded me too much of Superman’s kryptonite, and I burst out laughing. I wasn’t welcomed back.

Buddhism, Hinduism, Taoism … tried them, dumped them, moved on. I felt defeated. Nothing was working. What kind of a loser couldn’t even get spirituality right? Of all the areas in life that one has to work with, spirituality ought to be the easiest—it’s so enigmatic and nebulous, anything goes! But I couldn’t get any of it to go anywhere, and it was only convincing me more and more that I was so inept at living that I shouldn’t be allowed to.

GRACE