I told you about it last month,
remember?
I expressed interest to the facilitator a couple of months ago in a fit of excitement which was triggered by the fun I had
writing and performing my own monologue. It's also a part of my "apply for everything" initiative that I'm trying (with varying degrees of success) to implement. So last week, when I got the email from the instructor asking for confirmation, I froze. I just started to imagine all the movement exercises and vocal warm-ups and improvs we used to do in theater in college and thought to myself, "okay, it was fun when I was 19, but do I really feel like doing that kind of thing again?"
I got to the workshop and met the instructor and sat in a circle with all these strangers -- a majority of whom were college students and/or experienced performers -- and all the introductions and review of the details of the course sounded interesting enough. Eventually, though, the "exploration" began.
As we walked around the room vocalizing, I thought to myself, "I used to do this stuff rather well. I used to jump and wiggle and shake and shout and pass imaginary balls with the best of them. Why do I feel so tense and weird now? It must just be the sitting at-a-desk-all-day thing. Or maybe this was just a terrible idea. That's it. I'm over this kind of thing. I'm a writer; I'm not an actor. That whole actor thing...it's sweet; I admire it, but it's not for me."
Then I looked at the clock and wondered how the hell I was going to make it through 2.5 more hours of this. This was right around the time we were standing in a circle with our eyes closed recalling the last shower we had and naming the puddle of water at our feet. I was about half-involved with this exercise; the other half of me was thinking, "I should just go home and email the instructor and tell her I'd like to resign. I'm sure she's got some kind of waiting-list. I just don't feel the need to really do this like I used to, you know? Yeah, I think I'll just do that. Better now than later, right? Yeah, that's what I'll do."
Then the shower part of the exercise was completed and I was just involved enough to be able to respond to instruction and continue. I looked at the clock. 2.25 hours left? God.
There was some downtime and a little discussion time during the workshop -- the focus of it is on Queer culture -- and it gave me time to think of the way I've traveled through life in the past decade since I was doing all that performance in college.... I was pretty deeply closeted at the time, but I really did do a lot of this stuff with so much more ease; perhaps I just welcomed all that performance as some kind of outlet; I don't know. Of course, since then I've endured about three really destructive work environments. And then there's the struggling with the whole coming-out thing, which for me was such a gradual, occasionally agonizing process; the deciding to date guys and tell my friends and write about it happened in a bizarre rush of a spring and summer epiphany; it was head-spinning, but mainly felt good. All the rest of it was a little trickier -- there's the family, and then the dealing with it at work -- it can all be rather exhausting.
I felt so stiff, so bound up for so much of last night, and I started to wonder how much of that is just built-up residue from all of the stuff of these past ten years. All the living. Of course it is, but I start to think of all of it and it becomes kind of staggering. The awfulness of Teach For America, the difficulties of the graduate program (and they were legion), the exciting but treacherous journey that coming out has been, the challenge of compartmentalizing my education and true vocation to nights and weekends so that I can get executives' phones and make their travel arrangements. Day-to-day it just seems like living, but once I start doing an inventory, it starts to feel like LIFE. And this shit is hard, yo!
So gradually over the course of the evening, as I was trying to deal with all this anxiety I was feeling, I allowed myself to acknowledge how willful I was being about all of these exercises. I knew what I was doing; it was just flat-out resistance. I remembered my acting and directing professor in college talking about her years of dealing with students who resisted her instruction by either lack of commitment, lack of participation, making a mockery of the whole ordeal, or insisting on having things their own way. I knew that I was doing that, and I knew I had the ability to stop. I finally decided, "you are going to be miserable for the rest of the evening unless you just try to commit and participate. So stop with the distant-and-superior thing you're doing to mask your self-consciousness, stop dwelling on all of the backstory and just Be Here Now."
And of course I did better. And I enjoyed myself. And I came pretty close to 100% commitment by the end of the evening. I won't say I was completely there, and I don't know if I'll get there. Heck, I don't know for sure if I'll stick it out for the whole thing, but I'll check it out again next week.
And incidentally, you can all blame this post on all the
diary-style blogs I've been reading lately. And an avoidance of a writing assignment on my lunch break. Thanks.
