When the Walls are Too Thick To Break Down, Try Climbing Over Instead

"You want to experience the anticipation for what's around the next bend, but there's just too much stuff for you to do right now before you can allow yourself to feel the excitement. You have big decisions to make as the Sun moves through your 12th House of Destiny for the next month. Choose carefully, for your current choices will likely have a lasting impact."

-my Google horoscope for Sunday, December 21st

It's almost four o'clock in the morning and I've been torturing myself for hours, days weeks...

I have become completely and totally nocturnal in the past few days. If my insomnia was bad before, it may now have reached irreversible. The problem is, I'm too anxious and too excited about my life to sleep. Sleep seems so irrelevent, so expendable right now...there is just too much to do, to much to think about, to ruminate on... possibilities overflowing all around me. I am sometimes hit by these amazing periods of inspiration, of total openness and awareness of all that I am capable of receiving from the universe, and how much I am capable of giving back in return.

I know I sound totally esoteric and a little insane. I've been sleeping about 4 hours a night for the past couple weeks. And consuming far too much coffee and alcohol.

Tonight I got home and was determined to finish my grad school applications. I've nearly done just that. I've put my documents to bed for the night and will reopen them tomorrow to be printed out. I may edit again tomorrow night, but I've decided: they go out on Monday. No exception. I must lift this weight from my sloping little shoulders. I must cease the self-torment. I could edit until I'm dead. I'm choosing life instead. Que sera sera, as they say. C'est la vie. Soon it will be out of my hands and into the universe. And the hands of Kristin Linklater, head of acting at Columbia, my dream school.

Yes, that's right. She has her own technique. I can't handle my affection for this ivy-league institution. It's reached an obsessive, all-consuming level. I'm completely infatuated.

My friends are amazingly supportive. I feel like I should come with a disclaimer: Difficult, Exhausting, but Unendingly Loyal and Eternally Grateful! Will Challenge and Enhance Your Life With Her Presence!

It never ceases to amaze me how little we change over the years. Yes, we grow and learn and devise ways of coping with our neuroses, but they remain embedded inside our psyches, nonetheless. The childhood baggage, the insecurities...these things are irremoveable parts of who we are. Yes, we can turn down the volume, shut them away in drawers and cabinets, yet they always remain. Our vulnerabilities are part of what makes each of us special, and understanding and embracing them gives us immeasurable strength. However, every so often when they peek out from behind closed doors and cause us momentary lapses in sanity and coherence, we have no choice but to collapse under the weight. For a moment. To release it. My insecurities are like poltergeists: they just need to be acknowledged and released. They have unfinished business, and when it's completed, they retreat. Except they're never fully evicerated. They just lie dormant for a while, until roused the next time.

I may have a tired emotional cycle. But it's much shorter now than it used to be.

And now I think I have a personal statement.

Here goes nothing:

Though it's been a year and a half since I finished my BFA, I never really stopped feeling like a student. All that's changed is that the walls of the classroom have faded away, or rather have receded out of sight so that now I look out at the world and can see no walls, no boundaries. I am a student of experience, not only of the theatre, but of the streets, the subway, the restaurants I work in, the city of New York and beyond.

For more than half of my undergraduate career, I was still a teenager, vigorously working toward discovering and defining who I was as a person. The search for myself was prevalent throughout my technique training, and after four years of work I found that while my fragile adolescent whimsy had transformed into a poised and confident adult perspective, I was still unsure of my place in the theatre industry. Certain of my artistic inspirations and beginning to explore my own creative strengths, I moved to New York hoping to fall into a niche. The professional tools I had were steering me down a specific path that was leading my performance career into the mainstream musical theatre, hopefully capitalizing on my special skill as a violinist along the way. Though I had some success in that area, sparking interest in casting directors and working a little along the way, I quickly discovered how important it was to me to constantly redefine my ideas of art and its relationship with its audience. I longed to continually seek out more effective and meaningful means of collaborative communication. I wanted a chance to experiment, to collaborate more actively on progressive new work, to develop a wider variety of skills, and to deepen and diversify my artistic sensibilities.

As the gradual decline of our economy has coincided with my generation's transition into adulthood, I find myself emerging as an artist in an age of extreme social despair. We have felt the odds of achieving our personal goals rising higher and higher against us; and yet, as artists we continue to believe fundamentally in our responsibility to care for each other and the world we live in. I've always felt compelled to act in the interest of the greater good, and to me, the theatre is the place where that responsibility can blend harmoniously with my own pursuit of self-fulfillment. As I grow and learn from my adult experiences, a certain truth has moved to the forefront of my awareness: as Anne Bogart wrote, "you cannot create results; you can only create conditions in which something can happen." I can no longer sit back and wait patiently for my career to happen. I must pursue my goals more actively, more vigorously, taking control of my circumstances, placing myself at the forefront of the theatre of the new millenium. I believe that I can stand on that precipice at Columbia University, prepared to leap at every opportunity.

The limit was 500 words (approximately.) I clocked in at a miraculous 496.

I hope it's good. I hope it accomplishes what I was intending. I hope you like it, but please don't tell me what you think. What I think and how I feel about it is more important. I can't revise it any longer. I have to stop beating myself up. I always secretly wanted to be a writer, but honestly, I don't think I could handle it. Acting is so much more cathartic. Good acting absolutely depends on being able to silence the voices in your head and be present in the moment. Writing is all about utilizing the voices in your head. I think I have too many angry, scared voices to be harnessed. They resist being translated. They resist being edited. I hate editing myself. And I hate being edited by others. Putting the voices into someone else's head is fantastic.

Okay, so it's a little like therapy. But I swear to you, communication of ideas is of utmost importance to me as an actor, and I prefer to communicate other people's ideas that move me. My own ideas are so confused, so frustrated. But people who have talent for saying things that matter... those people are my heros.

All I can do is cry and scream and sing and laugh through your words onstage.

"Courage doesn't always roar. Sometimes courage is the little voice at the end of the day that says 'I'll try again tomorrow."

- Mary Anne Radmacher

"...a subject for a short story..."

I never really stopped feeling like a student. All that's really changed is that the walls of the classroom have faded away, or rather they've receded out of sight, so that now I look out at the world and can see no walls, no boundaries. This feeling both exhilirates and terrifies me.

It's intermission at the Walter Kerr Theater. I've just finished watching Act I of The Seagull, a play that has fascinated me since I first discovered it in my high school drama class. A girl in my class once said "Chekhov is about how boring people are." I don't think she was entirely right, nor was she entirely wrong. The curiosity of Chekhov is that he is always examining how seriously people take their lives, because our lives are all we have; and this seriousness is absurd, because all we're left with in the end is death--nothing to show for our lives.

Yes, I'm writing in my journal at intermission of a Broadway play. In front of me, an 18-year old boy is asking his two teenage fag-hags what their favorite musicals are. Beside me, a middle-aged woman is yawning and remarking to her husband how she likes The Cherry Orchard better. And I am sitting alone with tears in my eyes feeling finally that my creative channels have been opened.

My grad school applications are due in 3 weeks. I realized this yesterday and suddenly all my old neuroses, kept at bay for so long, kicked into gear. It isn't a thought of not being worthy of acceptance--I've outgrown that, thank goodness--but the awareness that I'm finally down to the wire. It's a reality now, even though I've completed 75 percent of the applications, recommendations have already been submitted for me, and my transcripts have already been sent. I've always had every single intention of completing this task, yet for some reason, the awareness that it is possible for me to fail to complete it is there. It's so silly: I know it's just a matter of doing the work. There's just one task that's holding me up...the personal statement.

I went through the same battle when I was applying for undergraduate school. My sense of self-awareness is so debilitating and unfortunately does not have an on/off switch but rather a slow and stubborn dimmer. I can dim it...but it takes soooooo long. I know what I must do but I've been putting it off, knowing how much time and effort it requires. In situations like this, I must write and write and write and write and write until finally I realize I've hit the zone, the place where my neuroses are drowned by the soothing buzz of my ideas, flowing like water, directly from the source, straight from my gut and my soul, simple, succinct and essential. But first I must wade through draft after draft of terrible, eager-to-please, validation-obsessed, self-conscious drivel, draining each pathetic, calculating, self-loathing waste of thought and word from my stubborn psyche. As the writer Trigorin says to Nina in The Seagull:

"Oh, when I'm writing it's not bad, and doing the final editing, that's enjoyable. But once it's published I can't stand to read it, I can see how wrong it is, I realize I should never have written it, and I'm depressed and miserable."

Yeah. That pretty much sums it up.

Everyone is so desperately lonely and crying out for someone to appreciate them and thus validate their miserable existence and thus everyone is so wrapped up in their own suffering that they're completely incapable of giving or received real love. And without love, what happiness is there? The artists in The Seagull are searching for truth and beauty, yet their self-obsessions prevent them from ever finding it. And how true to life is that? Perhaps cynical, but heartbreaking nonetheless. Human isolation and loneliness is devastatingly tragic. Like Tennessee Williams wrote in the preface to the published version of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof:

"As a character in a play once said, 'We're all of us sentanced to solitary confinement inside our own skins.' Personal lyricism is the outcry of prisoner to prisoner from the cell in solitary where each is confined for the duration of his life."

The drafts of this stupid personal statement I've written so far have all been focused on figuring out the right thing to say, cracking the verbal code for being accepted to an Ivy-league MFA program. As if there was a secret Ivy-league language that only wealthy trust-fund kids were entrusted with. Fuck, they're just people. And artists, no less! We speak the same language! Before the play, I took myself out to dinner at an over-priced French bistro down the block from the theater and as I watched the staff ease their way through the pre-theater rush, I felt like I was part of a secret society. Actually, I feel like I'm part of two secret societies: Restaurants and Theater. There is a language, a rhythm to each world, which I've mastered through years of experience. It's a very satisfying feeling, to feel united to others in this way. I feel most comfortable, most at home when in a theater or a restaurant. And strangely, this realization didn't make me feel small or limited in any way; it made me feel accomplished. There are other little worlds out there that I will grow to understand in time...how exciting! I have the rest of my life to make discoveries!

I don't know what it is about December...maybe it's because the stars are aligned under my sign, Sagittarius, but I always feel most like myself at this time of year. Even when relatively little is happening.

Subway. Headed home.


Chekhov is an actor's Everest. So rich. So much to be mined. So unsteady. So layered. Nina's last speech...I know it by heart: "I know now...that what is important in our work...is not fame, not glory...but the ability to endure. To be able to bear one's cross and have faith. I have faith, and when I think of my vocation, I'm not afraid of life."

Would it be cliche to quote Chekhov in my personal statement? Would it seem trite? It reminds me of that Artaud quote, about how trying to put words to that which moves us most diminishes its meaning, but to use a symbol is to capture its essence in an undefineable and infinitely more accurate way. Only he said it more eloquently.

My creative channels feel open thanks to the stimulation of good theater. Thank goodness! Reality TV and the internet must be killing my artistic soul. Not to mention fashion magazines.

Though I still have no idea what to write.

Motherfucker.

All day I've been determined to return home after the play and write until I had a finished draft, even if it took me until the wee hours of the morning.

Of course, the moment I sat down and turned on my computer, I felt at a loss. Not for words themselves, of course--I'm rarely at a loss for words--but for the right words. The words that would best convey the truth of myself as an artist, my voice and what I want to use it to say, and the order to put them in to give them the most precise, effective meaning.

Konstantin: The more I write, the more I think it's not a matter of old forms and new forms: what's important is to write without thinking about forms at all. Just write and pour out whatever's in your heart.

But what to do when you only have 500 words at your disposal? How to filter the outpour of my heart into it's purest, most concentrated and most potent form?

Jesus Christ. I belong in a fucking Chekhov play. All talk and no action.

I'm never getting to Moscow at this rate.