Sometimes, during my scene debriefs in acting class, I feel like I’m in therapy. The difference is that the entire class is privy to my session and I am on stage bathed in the beady yellow eyeball seeping from the back of the room.

In my scene “I” have a four-year-old boy who dies when he’s hit by a car in front of my house. In preparation for the scene I thought I had done a pretty good job creating memories of him and our life together but they were still detached, as though I were observing a movie about someone else’s life.

After my scene the teacher says, “You’re son died.” I respond without blinking, “Okay,” because I think that there is a comma after the statement instead of a period, because I think that we are talking about the facts of “my” life.

The teacher takes me through a few minutes of connecting to my self and to others in the room by taking breaths, trying to feel what others are feeling.

He tells me, “Do you realize that every time I asked you if you were able to do that you said yes and then follow it with a statement that disregards any progress as if it’s not enough.

 

I fall back in time to a hypnotherapy session years ago. I am lying on a couch with my eyes closed. I’m in a cave with a jewelry box sitting on a table. In the box there is a piece of paper with a message for me.

When I unfold it there are three words written there. My voice quivers and breaks as I say them aloud. “You are enough.”

My thoughts return to the acting studio as I think. UUUUGGHH. FRICK, all the damn work I’ve done on myself and I still have the same issues coming to the surface:

1) Judging myself as not enough

2) Comparing myself to this alternate/better picture I have of myself

3) Following compliments with sentences that negate them

4) Catastrophizing. (Catastrophizing is an irrational thought where we believe that something is far worse than it actually is)

You need to get your son first, the teacher says. He says, as long as you have your son you don’t need anything else. How did your son say mama? You’re a mama, he says.

I recoil internally and squint my face. That’s where the resistance lies, he says. He says, what if it was your dog that died? You probably have an easier time relating to animals. True, I think. What if I gave you a gun and you had to shoot one of them? I hear someone in the audience inhale sharp and sad. I know the answer is to shoot the dog.

Instead my mind spins. Well what’s the situation? It depends. If we are in a life or death situation it might be better to shoot the kid because the kid needs more food and is probably going to slow us down, and if we get captured could be hurt more. Perhaps it’s more compassionate to shoot the kid? I guess that’s the thinking that can happen when I spent my childhood playing outdoor survival games.

I also feel an anxious panic/revulsion when he says you’re a mama, because I don’t want kids.

Therapy saved my sanity but I realize it also left me with a very logical way to process the world. I became an observer first and maybe a participant second. Things go through my mind before they locate my heart. I know there must be a better balance but it’s difficult when this way has kept me “safe” in the world, when this way of reshaping my thoughts has been my life preserver.

My therapist had an analogy of a log in the middle of a river. That in order to reach the other side I had to actually let go of the log, which required trust that I will be able to swim to the other side when I let go.

Therapy taught me to rapidly ask myself questions such as, “Is this true?” when a thought entered my mind. Now, those questions fling through my head in a millisecond, without conscious thought.

The weird thing is that in life, this method serves me well, but in acting, it hinders me because it closes me off from authentic heart exploration.

I also realize that I still spin catastrophizing thoughts. “I couldn’t create my son awesome the first time (equals) my scene sucked (equals) I suck (equals) I failed and I’m a suckey actress.

Basically: Not being amazing = I feel like a failure.

Hmmm. Is this true? Well no, of course not. Life is a process. Funny how my brain hurls this thought at me though.

It reminds me of the scene from Wedding Singers when Adam Sandler meets Drew Barrymore outside the wedding party. Adam Sandler is helping a kid throw up in the dumpster so that his parents don’t have to see it. He tells the kid, “Alright, remember: Alcohol (equals) puke (equals) smelly mess (equals) nobody likes you.”

An hour later where on a break and I’m still feeling slightly like a failure. A classmate stops me to say that I did a good job in my scene and not to think that I failed. My mouth falls open. “That is literally exactly what I was just thinking.” She smiles. We proceed to have a conversation about how it’s difficult for me think about being a mom because I don’t want kids. “It’s not about thinking about it,” she puts simply, “You are a mom.”

She pauses as the realization unravels in my brain. Maybe you didn’t want kids? Maybe when you got pregnant you were freaked out and still didn’t want them?

I laugh. I had been thinking that I had to completely give up my belief system for another one. Instead what I can do is start from my perspective now and move towards my child.

I can start from my not wanting to have a kid and build towards loving them and then eventually watching them leave this world too early.

I love everything about my class because I know that it is pushing along my personal core issues, causing friction, causing me to expand, not only with my acting, but also in my personal life.

A good friend once told me, “Life is a spiral.”

It’s a nice reminder for me that life is a process, that each of us has our own personal “issues,” and that even as they swing around time and again, they are not exactly the same, and we are not exactly the same.

Each time
around the spiral
we are growing
closer to
the best versions
of ourselves.

With Love,

Z :)