…So: You’re still pursuing the “acting thing”?
If I could have one wish, it would be the ability to deeply get to know every person on this earth, and experience their beautiful singular life.
When people around me have outbursts, strangers and loved ones alike, I always find myself trying to figure out why. On a micro level: what happened to them earlier today? On a macro level: how did they grow up? How have they been conditioned to react based on past experiences?
On the one hand, I want to study their mind coldly and scientifically in order to find the answer. On the other hand, I want to warmly embrace them and to experience the beauty in being one of the special few let into their most secret worlds. The world only a spouse, best friend, or their child sees. The one they try not to let anyone else see. The one that’s only confronted alone in their room while trying to fall asleep. The one where the grumpy old man is secretly a scared little boy whose joy has been snuffed out by his father or his experience in the war and the rude old woman lashing out at the store is actually just a person at her breaking point who has been belittled and disrespected every day of her life.
The closest I get to my wish is when I act. If I had not found acting and decided definitely that I was going to pursue it with everything in me at age 12, I think that I would have been devastated daily by Sylvia Plath’s fig tree metaphor (link). But instead, with acting, the possibilities…the branches… feel like juicy, exciting, motivating abundance instead of crushing, overwhelming, impossible choice. When I act I get to crawl inside the minds of people who aren’t me and shake hands with a playwright or screenwriter who sometimes isn’t even aware of our deep relationship via their words. I get to go to different places, have different family members and friends, and live through the best and worst moments of some person that a writer knows, or is, or read about, or made up. Over time, the more and more times I throw myself into doing this person justice in the telling of their story the more I feel like I’m meeting and appreciating and putting my arms around and squeezing and knowing all the people in our world.
all actors are a bit crazy in the best way.