Posts tagged: Perspective
Sometimes I don’t make the best choices. When asked if I want the red pill or the blue pill…. I’ll ask for both.
I’ve found myself rather listless recently. This always leads to bad decisions.
Friday night was a blurry mist of some family, some friends, some strangers, well vodka, and four different bars. It was shameful in many ways, even if there were a few good moments. Saturday was not a good day.
I had drinks with a guy I met recently tonight. It wasn’t a “date”. We just wanted to get to know each other a little better over a few drinks. He is certainly a nice enough guy. He’s cute, sweet, and very funny. I found myself imagining how I would fit into his life as we talked. Then other things started popping out a little more clearly as he spoke…. he’s a drug addict, he was a former (possibly current) go-go boy, he was a former and somewhat current believer in demons and numerology… etc, etc, etc.
This gave me pause.
As one could imagine.
But what really gave me pause was my willingness to see where I could fit into HIS life. I think I look at everyone that way when I meet a potential mate. Instead of wondering how another person could fit into my life and if we could fit in each others lives. This may seem elementary to most people, but this was a big discovery for me.
“How am I not myself?”, a great question I often ask myself. These actions over the last few weeks are the actions of a person who is missing something in his life. I am clearly missing something. I’ve been feeling that for a while now. This situation is not something I need to fix right now, even though that’s precisely what I’ve been trying to do. It’s not a position that needs to be filled by another person, or an emotion that needs to be studied at length and understood. It’s just a hole, maybe a little larger than I initially thought, that is going to take some time to heal.
I can’t fuck anyone to make this feeling go away.
A new person is not going to change it.
A new situation won’t enlighten it.
Any outward search for something tangible is an exercise in futility.
This is an inner path that I need to take on my own.
This is the first Valentine’s Day I have been on my own in 8 years. It’s an arbitrary day that has not had a lot of meaning in my life. There are only two ACTUAL Valentine’s Days that have any meaning to me: 1993, my first with a girlfriend, and 2007, my first with a boyfriend. Interesting, I just put that together as I was writing.
So…
This Valentines Day is for me. As difficult as that may be.
Today I celebrate my new awareness, my limitless possibilities, my recognition of bad choices, and my ability to forgive myself for them.
Happy Valentine’s Day Tumblr.
I have had many lives.
I’m not referring to reincarnation. Although, whose to say about that, really?
I’m writing about the number of parts we play in our lives.
Shakespeare wrote about the “Seven Ages” of man in AS YOU LIKE IT. If Shakespeare had written in a more complex time, would there have been more than seven?
I have lived in over 10 different cities, not including the years on the road in touring productions of Shakespeare in the West and South and A Christmas Carol in the Midwest and the East. This transient lifestyle has given me a reputation with my friends, prompting one of my oldest friends to buy a new address book altogether due the number of post-it notes that had overtaken his old one in a valiant effort to keep track of me. (I think he has since given up.)
In some ways living this way has made me a better actor. I’m forced to evolve into any situation I’m in, or else go crazy. I listen and I take a situation in, at which point I react. The essence of acting.
My adaptive nature has also had it’s negative side. Some lives that I have lived are very different from the others. I was seemingly a different person altogether when you compare certain periods of my life to others.
The most interesting and memorable parts of my life, though, have always been the transitions from one life to the next. I truly think the most alive a person can be is when they are letting go of something old and embracing something new. When doing both at the same time, I find that everything in life sparkles and is more heightened. I see more.
Each of these transitions have been scary and many have been risky. However, looking back, each one has been a gift that has lead me to a new and exciting part of my life.
I’m in the midst of a transition now. This one is different. I hadn’t been able to put my finger on why until recently. For the first time, I’m transitioning out of something without anything new to transition in to. It’s easy to feel lost without a new heading.
Last week I was in Florida. My 87 year old grandfather underwent triple bypass surgery. He came out very well, considering. In fact, he’s already up and walking around at intervals. While I was there, he ordered my mother, my aunt, and I to spend a day on the beach. We were not allowed to come and visit him. He wanted us to relax a bit, and truth be told, I think he wanted some time for himself. We all need that.
I walked down to the shoreline so that I could feel the cool water on my feet. As I looked out on the open horizon I thought about the past few months of my life. I thought about how fortunate I have been to have experienced life to such a rich degree. I thought about the number of beautiful people I had met. I admitted to myself that I am in love with someone who is not in love with me and I thought about how beautiful and depressing that thought was, all at once. I thought about how getting older happens when you aren’t even looking and how TIME strikes us all when we least expect it in the most surprising, slutty, shocking, shattering, and life-saving of ways. I thought about how life MOVES and how all we can do is stay present enough to keep up with it.
There is something very liberating when you stand on the edge of the shore and look out to a sea of endless possibilities. It’s a terrifying task, to be true. But, It’s also an exhilarating one.
…. with someone you can’t be with…
…is very painful.
Is it worth fighting for or should I let it all go?
Yesterday was truly the worst day I have had since coming to New York City. It’s a strange twist that the day after I write about faith in my career, and find some perspective about the whole thing, I’m bitch-slapped with a day like yesterday.
Most of it was my fault. I was thrown. I should have nailed that audition. I am disappointed in myself.
Today, this happened.
I got a call from one of my best friends. He’s doing quite well for himself out in LA. I picked up the phone and he started reading an old news article from when we were in high school and doing shows. The article was about a trip that we took to the International Thespian Festival, in which we were going to perform the opening night of the entire week in front of over 2,000 fellow high school Thespians. This was quite a big deal and we were all very excited about it.
Performing that week changed our lives forever. My friend and I were courted by different schools after our performance. Think “sports scouting” for college, but with theatre. He and I are where we are today as a direct effect of performing in this festival. Without this experience we would be in very different situations, without a doubt.
He began reading the first paragraph of the article which described the beginning of our journey. We had loaded our charter bus and taken off for our 8-10 hour trip to Nebraska when all of the sudden, not ten minutes away from our point of departure, our bus broke down. The paragraph ended with a quote.
“If this is any indication of what’s to come, we’re in trouble”.
The quote was mine.
Now, I don’t know. You see, my friend is a very busy guy. It’s rare that we actually get to talk on the phone. When he called today I happened to be free and the timing worked out so well that we talked for over an hour, It was great. What’s amazing to me is how he started the conversation. He started with this random quote from an old article that he happened to be paging through. It just “happened”. Was it fortuitous after the day I had yesterday or was it just coincidence? In the grand scheme of things I don’t suppose it matters what the answer to that question is.
What seemed like a “bad omen” at the time, the bus breaking down, actually had little to no effect on us. It was just a random event. As random as my friend calling to remind me of it and as random as crashing a burning an audition. All of these things are random and none of them really effect major consequences in my life. In fact, the bus breaking down is as random as me running into a theater contact and friend, who I had lost touch with, as I was walking out of the building and walking away from that terrible audition. Who knows what may, or may not come of that brief encounter, personally or professionally. Maybe nothing, maybe something.
Hearing this story again reminded me that it really doesn’t matter that the audition didn’t go well. Sometimes the moments that feel like crash and burn moments are nothing more than that, a moment.
That afternoon, when the bus broke down, it was less than fifteen minutes later when another bus arrived and carried us all the way to Nebraska. It carried us all the way to where we are now, really. All we had to do was wait fifteen minutes.
So, for now, I’m waiting.
