Summer break is upon me and I'm not sure how well I'm taking it.
I got a j-o-b for the Summer. I'll have to wait until my first pay check comes in to really see how happy I am with it, but for the time being I like it just fine. Nice people. Good food. Tips. Under 40 hours a week. Decent hourly. It's a little ridiculous, actually.
Having now been in Philadelphia for over 8 months I feel like I finally moved here. I'm not longer around the same small group of 13 people every day (all of whom I love, I just didn't feel like I moved anywhere particular other than in with my class). I have resources to see more shows. Go out to eat occasionally. Buy more groceries than what's absolutely necessary. Hell, I just bough razors for the first time in months.
I had a killer second semester in grad school, guys. I went to circus school and had an absolute blast, doing everything short of running away to join the circus. We did multi-character pieces, which if you're familiar with any of the tours I used to do back in Boise you'll understand that I felt very at home. I took saxophone lessons and piano lessons, both of which reminded me what it's like to learn something that you're not a professional about (aka: suck really hard at something that you feel like you should be good at because at this age you should really be good at everything, right?), which I think made me take bigger risks as a performer.
My year-end evaluation culminated in notes about things I was cracking open and fierceness I was bringing into the room. I'm unsure I understand exactly what that means, but I feel things. You know, like a human.
I've been considering a lot lately the how I've changed over the last few years. This was brought on by my typical, boarder-line-debilitating scroll through social media. Specifically the "people you might know" field. Which I noticed was speckled with several people that I not only knew, but was sure that I had been Facebook friends with in the past.
So of course, as an insecure human being that is under the impression I am generally like-able, I spent an unfortunate amount of time in the throws of grief as to what I had done to so offend or accost these people that they would want to shut me out of their precious, wonderful, sought-after social media circle.
And then I realized that it's really none of my fucking business and my life got instantaneously better. It was remarkable.
Don't get me wrong, I'm still a little hurt by it, but over the past few years of my life I have concerned myself much less with being well-liked and become much more concerned with what I want to actually do (which has been a nothing-short-of-terrifying endeavor). I've come to the conclusion that while being well-liked is a perfectly worthy goal in life, I'd much rather it be a side effect to what it is I want To Do (TBD).
The years I spent with the main goal of being well-like by people, or a group of people, or a company, or some sort of community, ended with a great deal of emotional and mental stress that ultimately ended in a lack of productivity on my part. That's the business side of it. The personal side of it is sadder and more hurtful to those close to me and taught me even more valuable lessons. As it turns out, being well-liked meant I kept my mouth shut when people may have preferred I speak.
It doesn't even begin to end there. There were people and groups of people that I deemed "shouldn't" like me anymore because of some social stigma/standard about which I became obsessively paranoid and so I decided the "polite" (what the fuck? Where do I come up with this shit?) thing to do was to remove myself from their lives as much as possible. If anyone's ever lived in a community of any sort before, whether a big city or a small town, you know how impossible this is to do. It's also just so massively awkward I can't believe we didn't all end up laughing until we were in stitches. It wasn't funny though.
A big draw to my current grad program for me was a sort of nerdy/boredom research stumble. I google/news searched the name of my program and came across pages and pages of reviews for shows currently or recently running in Philadelphia that were either involving if not completely and independently produced by recent grads of the program (the program has only been going since 2013, so there's not really any option other than a recent grad). Upon my skype interview with the program director one of the things he said to me that graduates from the program know what kind of work they want to make. As someone who has always joyfully hopped on board with the latest project (arguably, I've elbowed my way into my fair few projects...) this was immensely appealing to me.
A year in and I'm still not sure what kind of work I want to make, but I'm more certain every day of what work I don't want to make. I gain new tools every day. I am confident in a mode of physical story telling that I simply didn't know existed until a few months ago and I'm slowly steeping into a community that is thrilled I'm here.
I composed my first song. My first three songs, actually. I held a handstand. I broke my record for running a mile. Three times. I yogaed the shit out of lots of yogas. My classmates are puppeteers and modern dancers and clowns and directors and playwrights and twenty-three and fifty-four and acrobats and teachers and musicians.
I work at a coffee shop. I walk a lot. I'm looking into continuing circus school lessons over the summer. I'm going to buy a piano. I'm reading. I bought a bicycle I have a big old crush on.
So to those who have unfriended me, I hope you're not reading this. Not because I don't want you to know my thoughts - actually I hope I have so little to do with your life that you'd never even consider checking in. I hope I was part of some Spring cleaning of your social media accounts. And to those who I've "politely backed away from", I got nothing. Only speculation.
I still have none of the answers. I just feel a whole lot more comfortable not knowing. I'm thrilled to do things and not be sure if it's right. Like transposing songs. Or improvising a song as a character. Or get lost in Center City. I've finally put into practice my love of failure. Sometimes.
My first post-semester evaluation I was criticized for "being such a good student". My desire to "do well" or "do it right" was crippling in that first semester. I feel like I wanted to do everything in my life so well, or so right, that I never contemplated whether it was something I wanted to do. Like my entire life goal was just for everyone I knew to say, "Good job!"
New things are afoot. Or abreast... Heh.
I will update you as infrequently and unexpectedly as you have come to know me.
