A couple of months ago, I had the honor of studying for a week, albeit over Zoom, with someone regarded as one of the greatest acting teachers alive today. The weeklong workshop consisted of my acting partner—let’s call her Maureen—and I putting on a scene from John Patrick Shanley’s Four Dogs and a Bone.
I was in awe of how this teacher was able to see people so fully. The compassion he had for humanity and profound care for his students’ growth demanded excellence from all twenty-some of us online participants, and we wanted to give it to him. Logging in from scattered parts of the country, he guided us with kindness into dangerous emotional territory. Tears flowed and voices echoed from the deepest, most raw parts of our psyches. I had never been so in love with acting.
Maureen and I were struggling through Shanley’s brilliant, dense text.
“You’re going away from yourself,” my teacher said to Maureen. “Feel the floor. Breathe. Allow yourself to feel everything that’s happening right now.” She nodded her head and narrowed her eyes, but I could sense that she didn’t fully buy it. We flung and bounced our impulses off each other as best we could, but we finished our scene that day feeling as if something was still missing.
As we all turned on our video cameras again the next morning, a red-eyed Maureen admitted to an epiphany since our last session. “I realized,” she started to break, “that for the past year, I have been making an intentional choice in my life to go away from myself.” I didn’t quite understand what she meant.
“You tell me to feel everything. And I know. I know that as artists, it’s in our job description to feel everything. But how is it possible? How is it possible to feel everything with the world and how fucked up life is right now? The killings. The shootings. The unrest, the war, the pandemic, the climate…it’s so much. It’s. So. Much,” she confessed, wiping at her wet cheeks.
I stared at this woman, two decades my senior and an intimidatingly accomplished mother of two, as she ripped her heart open and spoke the truth of what all of us—separated by virtual little squares in this strange time we live—had been feeling to some degree. Maureen was right. She held up a mirror to a feeling I hadn’t quite put the words to, but rang through my bones.
How do we feel it all and keep going?
At 1:15 AM on this evening in Stockholm, typing away and peering at the midnight sun outside my hotel window, I don’t know the answer. I’m reminded of an interview between actors Ethan Hawke and Keira Knightley from 2014. They discuss how to take film reviews in stride while maintaining the emotional sensibility required of an artist.
“I think you have to have a thick skin,” Knightley starts.
“Well,” Hawke replies with his head slightly cocked, voice lilting in that you’re-wrong-but-I-will-be-gentle kind of way, “I think you have to have a thin skin. And a lot of perseverance.”
It has been just shy of two weeks since I shaved my head, packed my life into two bags, and set off on this insane journey. Strangely, I still don’t believe it has fully hit me, the magnitude of a year alone on the road and this experience that will ripple across the rest of my lifetime.
Perhaps I am working through my own the-world-is-too-much moment. Perhaps my dull emotional senses are not an indication of feeling nothing, but rather, feeling everything. And too much of it.
And yet, I am painfully aware that the nature of my research topic—a reexamination of my ideas regarding love based on what I saw modeled by my parents (I mean, come on…that’s some heavy shit)—requires me to feel it all. Maybe not at once, but day by day, interview by interview. If I want real transformation, I’m going to need to inch towards that place within me that I most don’t want to go.
As much as I can gather the knowledge and the theory and the statistics, how could I possibly explore something as elusive as love from a purely cerebral, intellectual place? No—it needs to be something that sinks down into the core of my being.
With the world in what feels like ever-increasing chaos, the immense privilege of my situation has become all the more apparent. Is it appropriate or fair that I’m embarking on this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity when society seems like it’s hanging by a thread?
I don’t know. And for better or for worse, continuing to show up fully and honestly à la Ethan Hawke feels like the only thing I can do.
Perhaps it’s the only thing any of us can do: that in taking excellent care of ourselves, we can better show up for the world and the others in our lives. We can gather the courage and energy necessary to go to those dark places within each of us that need attention. We can dare to feel everything instead of opting for a numbness to get through the day.
I’m not quite there yet, but I can feel a change happening. And so I will write and write and write this year as it continues to change me, and I hope, dear reader, that in receiving my words, you might change, too.