Saying Less

My resolution is to Say Less. It's been a resolution for the past two years, but this time I need to make it my singular focus. It can't be this simple, but lately it feels like every unpleasant experience I ever have is due to Saying Too Much. Then again, maybe I've had more good than bad come from Saying Too Much.

I'm reminded of teaching an improv class in 2013. One student was such a dork--but such a funny dork! For mid-terms I gave each student a challenge for their scene. The boy with the slow charm had to rush, the girl with all the questions had to make all the choices, and the dork had to play someone confident. He really couldn't do it, but that was funny too! After the exercise he slumped to his seat. "I get it! I have to stop being a dork!" No, no, no I clarified. You'll never not be you, but you can push the boundaries of what you is.

Being authentic and trying to say what I mean has been really important to me since I don't know when. Honesty is sacred, emoting is power, I MUST BE ME! My enneagram four wing never more ruthless than Sunday when I spent at least an hour fretting about what my phone lockscreen would be for the new year.

But a new take on authenticity has finally occurred to me. Maybe my full-throated beliefs are a privilege. The worst briar of the recent past, a person in my life trying to make me feel small. I spent dozens if not hundreds of hours considering how to express the deep and inappropriate discomfort this person has inflicted on me. But no draft was ever right because I don't think there is a draft that this person would fully accept. In the meantime, I wasted so much of my authentic energy on that stupid venture! I could have been writing play that ends capitalism or something!

I used to think saying something, even if no one agrees, at least let the fledgling truth exist somewhere, somehow. And I still think that. But alternatively, I could look for safer nests.

Last winter, I battled a conglomerate who wouldn't pay me on time. I hated how they made me beg for what was mine. My friend Mur suggested I stop explaining myself. You don't have to bare your soul because they're wrong.

Debris

Cobra has this magnetic, wonderful energy. Everything is BIG, which I imagine could be tiring, but we have coffee like once a month so everything's glitter canons and gossip. She came to the Saturday evening performance of my play last month. She bustled up to me at intermission, bright-eyed, "You went for the jugular!" She said and talked my mom's ear off about how much she wants a boyfriend and how no one goes for the jugular in writing anymore. In the talkback, she set the discussion ablaze piping in several times. People felt comfortable adding their findings. It was the best night of feedback for certain.

When I met with her a couple weeks ago I wanted to thank her for it. She had made fire. But when I brought up the talkback she sort of flushed and apologized for being so open and explosive that night. She had left embarrassed. "Why did I say so much? That wasn't my place." But from my perspective of the big picture, she was invaluable. You bring honesty, and you bring the party! I told her this and she was absolutely deflated by relief.

When I was a junior in high school my calculus teacher began a lesson and suddenly crumpled into sobs. Her son had been deployed to Iraq that morning. We all knew she didn't want to be there. She would have paid a lot of money to erase that image from our minds, but some of us needed to see it. This grown good smart woman wrecked by fear and war.

Office Hours

Playwright professor today: "Well, you're a bubbling young optimist."
After I said, "Well, obviously there are multiple sides to every issue. If there were one clear right side, we would all just do it."
And he laughed, but not sincerely.
And he shook his head.
And I felt huge in his office chair, in his office. Not like my BUTT was too big, not like that. Like, "Oh. All my pieces are chipping off of me at a rate of a million chips per second? And this tiny angular boxy space is going to be, like, wrecked with chips? Like, soon? Like, I need to get out?"

I filled up my water bottle in the hallway. A long highway with all white doors. All closed. All belonging to professers. Not really. Belonging to a university. The one behind me had flyers for theatre business workshops, and there was this picture. A little drawing of a glass of water. It was labeled "water" and "air" and the text said, "It's technically always half full."

String

"It hasn't hit me yet"--This sentiment always feel jagged to me, rough cutting. I know what it means, but I don't like it. I know what it's like to terminate a relationship and then check my e-mail and weigh the pros and cons of an e-coupon. I know what it's like for my grandfather to pass away, cry for five minutes, and then dress up as a talking piglet or dance to "Girls Just Wanna Have Fun" during a "Best Of" sketch comedy show. I know because that happened yesterday. And then I know how to write my final paper on the racial themes of Show Boat throughout it's five Broadway productions while I miss that man, and suddenly Chelle shows up with a cake frosted in red and green.

It hasn't hit me, but why must it? I don't like the "yet" because who says when "big" things happen they must be big? Why is it natural to come to a point of absolute devastation, horror, drunken elation about new chapters? We live day by day, and it all strings together like Cheerios on yarn weaving between the fir tree branches.

There shouldn't be a moment when everything in your world closes up. Ever. No clam shells, no ring boxes, no tight-fitting Tupperware. Even if it's all meant to be reopened! Even if that's the intent! Even if you're meant to transform! No, no, just string along. Just string along--one spool, one life.


May 2009.

Here's to a sincerely great man.

He don't plant 'taters.
He don't plant cotton,
and them that plant 'em
is soon forgotten.
But ol' man river,
he jus' keeps rollin' along.