"Don't Bother, They're Here..."

 Tonight after opening, and a week of tech plus 2 show days, I was doing the show feeling as “lost” and “at sea” and “clueless” as I ever have been (perhaps, save, Kiss me Kate for the BBC where I was just operating on adrenaline and... cortisol and... panic? Unclear. I still can't watch it...) 

 

Bluntly: I have been waiting around for the Désirée “aha” moment to arrive much like the (totally fake) Handbook for Adults whose delivery I am still anticipating. But tonight, during the crushingly iconic “Send in the Clowns” I began to have a catharsis so huge I was rendered inarticulate. I felt like I was bombasted with a shattering realization: that silly ol' Désirée is meant to teach me/show me/force me to:

confront my life choices

confront the health and traumatic history realities that had nothing to do with my “choices” 

including the loss of the full spectrum and potential of my singing voice

and above all my unavoidable relationship with self loathing and my compulsive search to find attunement and safety in the gaze of others. 

 

Whoa boy. It was overwhelming. And excruciating. 

 

The mistake? I was waiting for the intellectual breakthrough—for the moment when I'd finally understand Désirée.  Instead, my body understood her first.

 

It strokes me that most people regard "Send in the Clowns"  as a love song, or a ballad of regret. But psychologically, I think it is something much more terrifying: 
It is the moment when a woman realizes that she has spent a lifetime arranging herself around other people's desires. In my experience thus far, it is filled with almost every emotion there is— including if not especially rage and shame. 

Désirée has always known how to be admired.
She knows how to be wanted.
She knows how to enter a room and make everyone turn.

She even knows how to piss of her own mother. 

But the week we meet her, what she discovers, far too late, is that admiration and attunement are not at all the same thing.

And something about that distinction feels uncannily close to a pattern I have come to recognize in my own life.
From childhood onward, I learned to scan faces.
Dad's long illness.
 An emotionally unsafe extended family.
Years of illness. 
Multiple surgeries.
Throughout those experiences, my silly ol' nervous system seemed to have created a painful equation:

If I can just become the right person... the exceptional person... the indispensable person... perhaps then I will finally be safe.

Not consciously, of course (nervous systems don't speak in sentences—at least I don't think they do...) They speak in actionable strategies.

I have always wondered why, with so much external "evidence" of worth, and with a great loving support system, partner in Alec, and such loyal friends, I have such a ravenous need to feel "deeply seen." 

I now realize that every time I moved to a new environment (which, as a freelancing artist happens every couple of months or sometimes weeks!) a new relationship or singular artistic environment would end up carrying the weight of my need to feel deeply seen. 

 

That's too much pressure for a scene partner. Or a group of strangers. All of whom have their own lives and boundaries and needs and neuroses. 

 

Tonight I think I experienced a revelation: I haven't actually been seeking any kind of admiration or even platonic intimacy.

I have been chasing safety. 

The experience of finally relaxing.
Of no longer having to earn belonging.

Those are different things.
One requires performance.
The other requires surrender.

Then there is another irony.
I've spent much of your career trying to convince audiences that I am "worthy."
But what if the mature roles ask something entirely different?
What if they ask:

Can you stand in front of people without asking them to heal your self-loathing?

 

Not because I no longer have self-loathing (I'm a woman on earth, after all...)

But because it no longer gets the starring role.
That is Désirée to me.
She isn't trying to be adored anymore.
She is trying, perhaps for the first time, to tell the truth.

 

I've been... surviving.
And the agony is that the strategies I constructed for that survival kept operating long after the danger had passed. 

I dunno. Perhaps that is why "Send in the Clowns" undid me. It is exposing the exhausting performance you've been giving for decades.

And somewhere beneath that performance is the woman I've been thinking about all year: the one with the surgical scars, the cellulite, the altered voice, the intelligence and strange humor, the immense capacity to love, and the courage to stand in the center of a theatre without pretending to be immaculate.