111709
In what feels like another lifetime, I was an actress. I don’t really remember what it was like, playing other people. Even now that I’m involved in my first performance in ten years, I can’t really remember what to do, or how to think about it. How do you take something that is not real or spontaneous and make it seem real and spontaneous? I used to have an idea, but I don’t anymore. It used to be very important to me.
I think, now, that what I liked about acting was the opportunity to focus on feeling things in a safe, relatively organized way. Emotions have never been my strong suit; they are so unpredictable and uncomfortable, and in real life, especially my college-age real life, it made so much more sense for me to put my real feelings away somewhere and sublimate them instead, in class. It made so much more sense, but then everything began to break apart. Emotions are like water—they exist, and though you can hold water in clay and plastic and glass, eventually the water will make its way to where it wants to go. I hope that I understand that a little bit better now.
Anyway, I found this short student film on YouTube today, just out of the blue. I remember that I traveled to Chicago to make it, and that I was excited to make it, and that we did it very quickly, in less than 36 hours. I’d never actually seen it until today—the director was my boyfriend at the time, and then we broke up, and not much longer after that I started to think that maybe acting was just a bandage on a larger wound. I’m not quite sure what to think of it besides the fact that—though I know it’s me—in my heart, I can’t really recognize myself at all.
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