I don’t even know how to describe my feelings right now. I’m like, so torn up that it just burns and burns and hurts and I want to scream and cry but I can’t because there is nothing to say. Logically, rationally, I know what will happen and I know what choice I have to make and there isn’t any way around it, really. But emotionally, even spiritually, it feels like, I just want to howl my rage and frustration and collapse to the ground, clawing at those sons of bitches gods above for the games they play with mortal man.
I am a firm believer that everything happens for a reason – fate has dealt her hand and even when I can’t see the cards it’s always turned out for the better. I’ve always believed that. So for what fucked up reason would this happen? What does the universe need to prove? How can logic and emotion be so pitted against one another?
I was offered a part in a Greek Chorus of Iphegenia this evening, a production that is touring for a month or so across the US before returning to an Off-Broadway stage.
I signed my apartment lease this morning, for 12 months, legally binding me to the building.
We can only afford the apartment through my financial aid, since I am still enrolled in school and it counts as school housing.
If I take Iphegenia, I will have to take academic leave or withdraw for a semester, which means my financial aid will fall through, and we can’t pay rent without the aid. I have to be a student to afford housing right now.
School, or show.
My plan, or my dream.
One mind-blowing opportunity, or another.
I want this so bad. These sort of things don’t just fall into the laps of unsuspecting, naïve, young actresses every day. I don’t want to have to make a choice, and then regret my decision a year from now. I don’t want there to have to be a choice. I wish he’d never asked me. It wouldn’t hurt so bad.
I’m not a greedy, selfish, spoiled little girl trying to bleed her family dry to follow her dreams. It sounds that way. I feel like a parasite. But this – this is the thing my soul burns to do, perform, professionally, share that art with others, to do this FOR REAL. It’s what I’m here at school to do, and yet, school is here first. Financially, it comes first. I’m going to get information, see what loopholes I can duck through, but I know, in my heart, that this cannot happen, and the logic is strangling the emotion while my emotion smothers my logic.
Why do I have to choose? Why was I presented with this… this thing? This incredibly fortunate and beautiful and flattering opportunity, this dream (Greek theatre on the road? WTF!!!), this glimmer of my future, but knowing full well I cannot, in good conscience, even consider accepting when there is no way?
And the people involved… I know they are talented. I’ve worked with a few of them. I would kill to stay close with them. I’m getting all worked up again just thinking about it. I’m so young, and I feel trapped by this. And NYU is a dream too! Don’t get me wrong, I wouldn’t trade this place or the experiences there for anything – without it, I wouldn’t be having this meltdown of emotion and rational thought. NYU was the first big dream that came true, and opportunities are bubbling up around me that I can’t snag because I belong to the violet dream first. I am a baby leech, attached to my family and being transformed from an ugly leech into a vampire finch (look it up, bloodsuckers are damn cute). I’m everything and nothing. I’m free and living a dream but standing on the sidelines, watching them float in front of my nose.
I don’t know. I do know – that’s the problem. I do know, but my heart is thrashing and refusing to accept defeat, refusing to accept no as an answer.
After Josette Bushell-Mingo’s workshop on Greek theatre, this is too perfect and poignant and painful. We went so deep into the Greeks, and I stood and reached for the sky and roared my grief and rage to the gods who watched silently as we suffered. Here I am, a chance to be that very thing on stage, and yet I am reduced to being that thing in my dorm room, my heart howling while my brain tries to cut off the flow of emotion before it kills me. I look to the sky and feel my teeth press against each other, my jaw stiffening and my lips thinning, my fingers clawing compulsively into my sheets and my skin as I battle myself over what is and isn’t. I am two beings, with these two choices, and these two controlling forces, my head and my heart. I feel schizophrenic and sick, I’m so torn in half.
But there isn’t anything to be torn about. I hate being a rational and an emotional being. It makes things so hard to understand.
Josette would have us walk the streets of Thebes, the timpani moving our blood more than our own heartbeat. And in her grounded, deep, beautiful voice, she would command us to “Stop. Make your contract with the gods.” And we would. I looked through that black ceiling into the face of whatever was there, and I was hurting, and I am hurting now. Those faces never met our eyes, though. Those gods, all powerful though they were, left mortal man to find their own way. I’m not going to get answers. No one will tell me how this should be, so I have to do my best, as I always do. Accept what happens. Fight. But not be stupid.
Being logical just fucking hurts! Dammit, I can’t be over emotional and just let it out because then my brain is like, knock it off, you’re being absurd. So I’m like, oh yes, that’s right, but when I try to rationalize away the hurting, it rears up and says but look at what could be, look what is here and why you are hurting!
So I’ll leave it at that. I’m looking for my contract with the gods and I’m getting no answers. I had a piece of cake. It didn’t make me feel much better.
I hate feelings.
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