Sorrow/Grateful

On the first day of tech [for The Music Man,] I crumbled inside myself, gripped to the core by a wave of echoing grief and awakening emotion. 

 

Historically, I have always been someone who gets reamed by emotional tidal waves tardily: days, weeks, months, years after the event. Like a shipwreck survivor who only experiences the intensity of what they went through once they are standing on the shore. Except for me? I've been standing on the shore for a few weeks...or years, completely unaware that I haven't processed the shipwreck. Like at all. And I wonder why I'm having this panic response in the middle of a grocery store, on the subway, as someone is telling me a perfectly innocuous story... or, ya know: on stage.

 

Apparently this "shipwrecking" response is not uncommon. At the height of adversity I am razor-sharp, hyper-lucid, totally focused on nothing but getting through the storm.  I think my hyper-vigilance just never quite turns off... and then I get caught unaware. 

Or have a panic attack. 

Or, I give myself an auto-immune disease. 

Or D: ALL OF THE ABOVE!  

Fun. 

On this particular evening I was filled to the brim with memories of my voice not showing up for me. Bursting with recollections of my many counted inadequacies over the last decade of struggle. Once upon a time, I loved to sing. Singing was my great outlet, my greatest joy; a place of total honesty and freedom. Oh, how I had become just yet another loss. Another grief to grieve.

 

That night, I felt so small and diminished beside KJ [Hippensteel]’s panache and glitter. But I mostly felt like such a fool. My inner critic was in full force:

"Who are you to be here?"

"Who are you to try again?"

"Who are you to think you could do this anymore?"

"You are too old, too ugly and your singing voice is a disaster."

"You are so unworthy"

"Everyone is laughing at you." 

"You are such a foolish old woman, doing this role."

 



It was a deep deep thing…

I think I am having a lot of echoes of post-colitis awakenings during this because it is showing me quite deliberately how much time I really "lost”

 

I think yes. it’s the time, it’s the stories, it’s the experiences… it’s lost time. Un-reclaim-able.

 

I am holding two conflicting thoughts about colitis: 

 

1. I am so grateful to be here, and to have found a solution to colitis that appears to be really working for me! My life has been restored and I feel good and healthy and I’m so glad to have a new lease on life.
 

but also… 


2. I feel sorrowful about all the time that I missed. About a kind of 'loss' around my 30s, my "prime," my years to "be in full bloom," and a kind of female and adult expansion being “taken” from me by so much illness and (literal) unutterable pain. 

But an almost constant sensation that I was literally “disgusting” 

by the depths of loneliness and isolation and the certainty that no one would ever love me or find me attractive or be willing to deal with my illness and the “disgust.”

 

After the run I panicked horribly. I wept-- not for the "job" I had just done on stage, but for all of it. For all the loss and all the fear and all the pain and all the horrors. I released all the uncried tears. And then I did something out of character: I called friends. I let loved ones in to this experience of humiliation and loss and pain. I called friends whom I knew would understand, who loved me fiercely, who I know would hold me in this base and demoralizing moment; and uplift, validate and support wherever I "was." 

 

It worked. We are not meant to bear it all alone. I am humbled. 

 

So.

 

Onward. Onward, still. Just like this photograph of me in song-- however clumsy or imperfect: in a position of surrender and of flight, simultaneously. Eye closed in a kind of faith, heart open to the possibilities of all that life holds, arms outstretched ready to welcome it. Welcome it all.

 

Onwards with courage and integrity.  

Resilience is distinct from mere survival, and more than mere endurance. Resilience is often endurance with direction. Share this Quote Eric Greitens
Read more at https://www.brainyquote.com/topics/endurance-quotes

Resilience is distinct from mere survival, and more than mere endurance. Resilience is often endurance with direction. Share this Quote Eric Greitens
Read more at https://www.brainyquote.com/topics/endurance-quotes

Resilience is distinct from mere survival, and more than mere endurance. Resilience is often endurance with direction. Share this Quote Eric Greitens
Read more at https://www.brainyquote.com/topics/endurance-quotes

 

 

 

"Resilience is distinct from mere survival, and more than mere endurance. 

Resilience is often endurance with direction." 

- Eric Greitens