Loose
My second month on the road has been an extraordinary and overwhelming moose-marathon: with the warm up course, summer school, mask intensive, weekly shows and classes as well as the ongoing explorations, inquiries, discussions and experiments that happen while living with fellow improvisers! I've met so many amazing buddies and I feel super grateful and humbled! Also, I feel worse at impro than ever before - which is sometimes exhiliarating and hilarious and sometimes embarrassing and awful! This month the real doubts have crept in which means I am uncomfortable which means I am learning which is a Very Good Thing.
Toward the end of summer school, I acquired a cloud of anxiety that followed me into every game and scene I played - I had been mostly avoiding bringing my wheelchair onstage and there were only a few days left of this course and I was putting more and more pressure on myself to DO IT and DO IT RIGHT and be perfect and solve all the problems: If I truly believed we need more disability reresentation onstage I had better get up there and start representing. This backfired though - I was a wreck during the show because I kept almost bringing Stella into the scene and then deciding not to at the last second and then feeling guilty and being all up in my head about it. This went on for quite some time and I had a really hard time enjoying myself, let alone learning or taking risks. And then finally something clicked and I realized hey, there isn't a deadline! This isn't a test! And then the revolutionary idea: hey, I GET TO DECIDE! Nobody is forcing me to do this in a certain way or by a certain time and there isn't a correct answer. I'm sure the 'push through the pain' attitude works for some, but if I'm honest with myself, it was hurting me a lot more than it was helping. I was having a lot of difficulty feeling like I deserved to be on stage at all, let alone trying to navigate this huge emotional circumstance in front of an audience. The intersections of being a relatively new performer and a new (and to further the complexity, part-time) wheelchair user are tricky and tangled and I'm going to cut myself a little more slack in sorting through them. If I'm an honest improviser, Stella will find her way on stage in time because I'm trying to find my way on stage, and she's important to me.
Since acknowledging that I feel a lot calmer - still full of insecurities and imperfections, but more willing to be playful with them. I keep coming back to my favorite lessons from summer school: be honest, be vulnerable, be willing to change.
