(no subject)

Brief news:

Hurt all over thanks to this PA stuff. As you might imagine I have more significant observations as regards this entire adventure as well, but I will save them for another time.

Brain fried.

Am playing the pissy slacker kid cast as Napoleon and Frederick in Miss Miligran's. Yes, I get to strut around on stage in a pig snout and wearing medals while pretending to be drunk -- all through the lens of a smart slacker third grader's perception of these things.

emotions and acting

Thanks to that little freak out I had at my voice lesson last week, as well as the sorts of things and performances that tend to get me going these days, I'm in this really weird headspace about emotion from the past.

Part of this is that a couple of friends are doing this therapy stuff that seems all about dredging up these old emotions, and I get that recognizing and defining these things to get through them is really important, but because I'm innately a bit of an asshole skeptic about therapy (to clarify, I don't look down on anyone and I don't think I'm too good for it, I just see it as one more process that is a bit too easy for me to manipulate, and a bit too easy for a lot of people to be manipulated by), part of me can't help but question whether this is good (and it seems to be, in that I'm watching these people pinpoint things about the sources of their emotional reactions that seems like news to them), or whether this just encourages a certain level of not coping.

Which is really weird -- I mean, I am a little appalled at myself -- in that I'd never say, "well, some shit you just have to repress", but maybe it turns out that I do think that. I mean, as much as I'm very in tune with a lot of really raw and odd hurt from my childhood and adult life, it's a very intellectualized thing, which of course allows me to place it over there and away from me.

Which is all well and good. I function in the world pretty much the way I want to. I wish I self-censored better on certain really odd issues in social settings, and felt more comfortable in medium sized gatherings, and didn't have an eye-phobia. But all in all, I do what I need to do, when I need to do it, and am pretty happy. The things that keep me awake in the middle of the night and staring at the ceiling are entirely desire and ambition and want, and I get more comfortable with that all the time -- it's fine.

A lot of people I've known, have very much felt that we must make peace with everything that has ever happened to us, which isn't really something I believe. Not everything can be resolved, or gotten over -- you just learn how to navigate around and with, and I feel that's what I've done and I'm not terribly interested in forgiving my mother or not for using a hairdryer that was too hot on me when I was three. It's just there.

That said, there are definitely certain emotional memories that when I get near them, I'm immediately like "oh let's not ruin the day by thinking about that!" Most of them are related to shame reactions to my skills at taking care of my possessions as a child and/or shame reactions to my thought processes about subjects that interested me also as a child (I have those reactions now at times, but they are so clearly just echos of past things, that they don't count, and I don't indulge my personal negativity on them).

Anyway, it occurs to me, that the "iew, not going there!" reaction is not necessarily helpful to my acting and performance ambitions, and to a certain degree being able to get through certain problems I feel I have as a performer means being a less together person for a bit (which is one of the key things that makes doing this at thirty weird). Perhaps most frustrating to me though, is that the bulk of the emotional stuff I do have access to, is so in the same vein, as there's a wide range of emotional experience I lack (mostly to do with grief, as sorrow is something I'm very comfortable with and I've never had particularly raw or strong reactions to loss and death). Also, once I dredge something up, for whatever reason (performance or not), I have no idea how to put it away again.

Anyway, this doesn't really have a question, an answer or a point. It's just one of those things where my whole life, since I was very small, my motto as been "cope or die", and now suddenly it occurs to me, I might do well to figure out its obverse or cousin or something, and while I have in my mind and intellectually -- I'm never really pleased until I've a pithy slogan on a matter.

Need pithy slogan!