Hi! You’ve reached my (beloved) former blog. Come find me & my current work at JessieRosen.com

You want to know what I think about Valentine’s Day?

February 16, 2010

On whether or not you can always attract the same kind of person.

February 16, 2010

A “sermon” on mirrors, two-way dialogues, and losing control

February 16, 2010

Bear with me through this one. I’m about to go a tad Mom slash aunt/professor/mentor figure. In general I try to keep the blog void of preachy, kumbaya sap, but I have the distinct feeling I’ve learned an important lesson, so I’m very teaching-moment today. I’ll try to keep it as void of guidance counselor cliches as possible.

As over-advertised, The Hook-up Conversations – my collection of 12 dating-themed monologues – were performed on Valentine’s Day eve. The night turned out to be a huge success – bigger audience that we ever imagined and the type of crowd energy that can make an actor absolutely nail a performance. All of them did.

It goes without saying that a lot of work went into producing the event on the part of everyone involved. Any art is an investment and theater is one of the group-effort variety – time, money, energy – and that’s all before the weird-to-define investment of self. Performing before an audience of your peers about a topic specific to your peers takes balls. You have to love and believe in it more than you care about being judged for it, and you have to be prepared to be judged for it even if it’s 100% believable. You have to let go of controlling what people think of you, and that’s not a gut instinct – it’s barely even a learnable instinct.

Same goes for writing and presenting the pieces. Even as people were responding with laughs and silences in all the right places – an awkward live picking up of what I’d put down – I was stuck in shit-what-if-they-think-it’s-dumb mode. What if it’s not relatable? What if it isn’t funny? What if all they’re thinking is, “did this all really happen to this girl?!” or “who does this girl think she is?” or, “this is all so over-the-top.”

All those fears are rooted in the fact that this kind of art – like all kinds – is you inviting that potential reaction – you putting yourself out there to be judged and evaluated. You saying to a group of who-knows-how-many – here’s a sampling of the most personal stuff that goes on inside my brain; go ahead and tell me what you think of it while I stand here in the corner. Yes, the hope is for it to be enjoyed – for people to learn something, gain something, be in some way affected by what your work is saying, but you can’t control that. You have to believe in what you hope to accomplish more than you care about maybe not accomplishing it.

(cue Danny-teaches-one-of-the-Tanner-girls-an-important-lesson music).

My Mom message is that it’s worth it.

You cannot know what will come back at you when you stand up and say, “look, this is something I think/believe/see/wonder about and want you to see too.”

You may change someone’s entire life with one line of a five minute monologue. You may inspire someone to start writing their own work. You may help someone realize a thing about themselves they just couldn’t get at until they saw it portrayed by someone else. Maybe they’ll tell you that you helped them, and that will in turn change you. But that’s just the stuff of Morgan Freeman movies.
Someone may hate something you did, tell you, and help you see it through a difference lens. Maybe overcoming the insane nerves of it all – or as one friend put it, “I was nervous in my gums, like, I could feel the nervousness in my gums that’s how nervous I was” – will totally re-set what nervous means to you, so you’ll feel differently about all those less nerve-wracking things that used to bother you before. It’s possible that people will see you in a completely different light and that they’ll then come to you or look to you or ask different things of you because you became a different person to them.

My point is that the “it’s worth it” isn’t about it succeeding. It isn’t worth it because of the potential win. It isn’t about how good it feels when people clap for you and tell you they loved it. All of that is fantastic and plays its own role in why people go through all this crazy risk.

But the thesis of this motivational “speech” is that sharing yourself – however openly – with an audience – of whatever nature – through whatever form you work in – changes you because it changes the way you situate yourself in the world.

We’re social beings but we keep ourselves in our own controlled universes only inviting comment and influence from people we let in. We build personal privacy policies and stick to them for safety and security. But put some art on display – through blog, stage, canvas, song… – and your wall instantly goes down. With that comes risk and fear and the potential to want to crawl back and directly under a rock, but it also comes with the potential to touch and be touched by things you didn’t know existed let alone existed to change your life.
The thing you forget about putting something out there – especially if that something is yourself – is that a performances is two-day dialog. Something – likely many things – are going to come back at you. And that back-and-forth takes things to a whole different level.
It’s the difference between staring at yourself in a full-length mirror trying to memorize every line of your body and stepping in to a room full of mirrors with a group of friends, enemies, and strangers all around you. You can only see so much when you’re looking alone.

6 comments

  1. Thank you for this post. It took me a long time to start blogging because I always kind of viewed it as just a tad narcissistic. I suppose that view stems partly from my unwillingness to let my guard down with anyone but my closest friends (and sometimes not even with them). You put wonderfully how it can be rewarding for both you and others to put yourself out there, not just in a blog or through art but in life too.

    So thanks – the mom lesson WAS worth it!

  2. Jessie-

    Oh how I wish I lived in NY so that I could have come to 1)support you and 2)enjoy experiencing your dating anecdotes performed live. I’m so glad to hear that it went better than you anticipated. Is there any chance someone recorded the performance? If so, I’d love to be able to view it.

    Kristin R

  3. That was very well said, and I rather enjoyed the preachy mom lesson 🙂

    I have loved to write since I was little— and it would seem to some that blogging would come naturally to me. I want to do it, but I struggle with what I should write– what’s too personal, if I’m being personal enough, etc., I guess it’s just like you said, putting -yourself- out there, not a tailored version of yourself.

    Thank you!

  5. “But the thesis of this motivational “speech” is that sharing yourself changes you because it changes the way you situate yourself in the world.”

    “Something – likely many things – are going to come back at you. And that back-and-forth takes things to a whole different level.”

    Yes! That’s an excellent account of what creativity is. It’s a daunting thought when you’ve been trained to analyze and perfect yourself, as many of us have. But once you get over that hurdle, the fact that people can relate to you in ways you won’t predict is super liberating.

Comments are closed.