“Hope smiles from the threshold of the year to come, whispering, ‘It will be happier.’”
A year ago, I did a show that coincided with one of the most confusing + traumatizing events of my life. A before-and-after event, if you will.
Before-and-after events are not always bad. Weddings. Births. Life + work achievements. These all qualify. So do deaths + breakups + losses—the kinds of moments or days that cleave your life in two. The show itself was a beautiful, career-making B&A, happening alongside a personally devastating B&A. It was confusing times.
As the days to begin the rehearsal process approached, I didn’t sleep or eat much. The body keeps the score. I was anxious and messy and irritable, a palpable fear taking over my days. How could I maintain a sense of professionalism while everything unraveled? Should I tell people? I don’t want special treatment. But… do I need special treatment?
I didn’t tell anyone until tech week, objectively the most difficult week in the process. But these people, many of whom have become human life rafts for me, knew on some level that I was struggling before I ever explained myself. The show ended in tears, as was written, and some nights my onstage partner would have to rush backstage and hold me until I could catch my breath. The crying just kept coming.
What was interesting, though, was how much better I felt afterward. I am not a person who does feelings by nature—not my own, anyway—but the material and the context forced me to face them, these feelings. So messy + uncomfortable. I don’t believe in coincidences.
2019 has been a long, long year. One of the longest of my life. And as the days grow darker and the nights grow longer, I feel a pull toward that grief, the kind that swallows without chewing. It would be so easy to focus only on that, the grief + the suffering + the loneliness. It will always be there, to some degree.
But where there is grief, there is also a softening. The chance for rest. For assistance, if it’s allowed. There are long walks + dogs to pet + words, both to read and to write. There is art. There are long-distance phone calls. Collect calls.
I am endlessly grateful for what my artistic life has given my personal life. It has broken my heart a thousand ways, but the healing it has done has more than made up for it. Should old acquaintance be forgot, as they say.
Here’s to grief + healing + happiness in the new year, wherever it may find you.