Preparing My Easel

Personal revelation (v.): the act of acknowledging and then coming to terms with an aspect of your personal being that you were unaware of or unwilling to admit

Stage One: Excitement - Characterized by a titillating desire to share the new news. This desire stems from a personal pride in resolving a portion of your identity and then wanting to share that with those who matter to you the most.

Stage Two: Anxiety - This stage occurs when one realizes that they have admitted the existence of this new facet of their live to themselves and/or to others. The anxiety derives from being unable to repress again the conclusion that has been enlightened. Even if it ends up being a false realization, it still has existed in some form in the realm of the personal.

Stage Three: Self-Loathing - The language of this stage focuses on attacking the self for acknowledging and the labeling the revelation that is causing the anxiety. The hatred comes mostly from the realization that there is no way to go back to a place of unknowing. This state is also where, if the personal realization is true, the person will start beating themself up for their shift in identity.

Stage Four: Exile - A shift from the self-loathing stage occurs when the person begins to try and analyze the issue or development on his or her own. The person decides that the only way to get answers on what is true about their identity is to look at themselves aside from everyone else. Coupled with the self-loathing stage, exile tends to have its roots in depression.

Stage Five: Love - Sitting with one’s self long enough and realizing that the world hasn’t collapsed, no one has died and that this revelation will not go away even if you ask it to politely finally leads to an acceptance. This acceptance of a new portion of one’s identity can only lead to a further understanding of one’s personhood and eventually love for that personhood.

E-A-S-E-L - The processs of discovering a more complete picture of one’s identity is laying the foundation and creating the scaffolding for the beautiful masterpiece that is each individual person.

Don't Count the Miles, Count the I Love You's

I’ve decided to not indent my paragraphs

for this entry in honor of Lucy. Why she doesn’t indent her paragraphs, I will never know but I thank God she doesn't because she helped inspire me to write tonight and that is something I haven't done, for sheer enjoyment, in a long time. So thank you, Luce, for your awesome entry and a reminder that it's not about what you write but why you write it. Another lesson I think I am learning is that people leave and it sucks but that doesn’t mean that they are gone forever.

When you leave or when people leave you, you can’t just give up on them and forget everything that ever happened between you. You can’t forget all of the fun times you had and you can’t erase the memories from your encoding. You

can’t repress your feelings of wishing you could be with them again—in the name of love, shenanigans or a never

ending life chat.

You have to be okay with the fact that in this modern world we have the joy of meeting people from everywhere in the world and the burden of being separated from them by landmasses and oceans.

You need to realize that communication is all

together good because it keeps us all intertwined through video messaging, text mess

aging, email, Facebook and all of the technological advances that are making good-byes turn into let’s stay in touch.

Loss, to me, always seemed like some sort of dead end. Once someone was gone, they simply could not remain a part of your heart or mind because it hurt too much to remember their absence. The only way to go from loss was back to where you started—before you met them and before they had a place in you as a person. So throw caution to the wind and allow the loss to come and change you.

Accept the loss—especially if you know its coming—as a challenge, as a testament to your friendship, to your bond, to your memories, to your love. Let the loss deepen your relations and open your heart. Take the pain from the loss and remembering that losing something doesn’t always mean forever and be glad that you even got the chance to have it for a brief moment in time.

Cuntented.

To me, The Vagina Monologues represent everything I love about theater. Originally produced as a one-woman show by the writer, Even Ensler, at the Wow Cafe on the lower East Side in New York City, the show has taken a significant role in bringing female issues into the mainstream. The first rehearsal I had in New York for the production I stage managed there two summers ago was in the Wow Cafe. Being 18 at the time and wide-eyed about being in the Big City, everywhere I went felt like Holy ground. Only after my time in the lower East Side concluded did I learn that the Wow Cafe, La Mama (the burlesque theater across E 4th street) and The Kraine Theater (where was show was) were indeed part of the mecca of theatrical activism.

At theaters like the one's listed and dozens of others in New York, Chicago and Boston, shows that have nearly no budget, not much rehearsal time to speak of and a message are unveiling themselves to small, dedicated, adventurous audiences. The show isn't about the expensive lighting equipment or the ornate scenery, it's about using performance to inspire, to explain and to enlighten. When I first started getting involved with The Vagina Monologues, I wanted to show CCM that they didn't own theater on campus. I wanted to pull off a production wherein reality, we were striving for a staged reading. This relentless drive for theatricality was only abandoned once I had to act in the show.

I've never been one of those stage managers who secretly wanted to be a star on stage but wasn't good enough and receded into the dark wings of the theater. So when I was cast in The Vagina Monologues as Woman #2 I didn't know what to do with myself. The process of rehearsal allowed me to accept my role and appreciate the words I was presenting. I wasn't acting to make a fool of myself (which I inevitably do anyways), I was acting to tell the audience about vaginas and why I love the word cunt. I suddenly felt like a Biblical prophetess, telling my collegiate people to chant cunt and worship the vagina.

If I could write a proverb about my experience, it would be: Cunt you see? Theater is supposed to have a soul. That's how it's meant to be. So whether it be the first staged reading of what is soon to be a revolutionary, international phenomenon in NYC or a college production of The Vagina Monologues in the Engineering building, it's the conviction one has in their words and their dedication to the project on stage that matters.

My Audition Mantra.

I'm jealous of people who have a place to fit in. Lately, I feel like I've been auditioning for a place in the world. I have been walking into all of these different gatherings, with different roles in society, full of a variety of different people and each time I wait to feel the click--the metaphorical click of puzzle pieces into place. Each time, I am playing to a new audience, wearing a carefully thought out and planned out costume to align myself with the show I hope to find myself a part of.

And, yes, I have lived and worked with a slew and a half of actors but I've never understood how much it sucks to audition. You are putting yourself out there in a very vulnerable state after you've worked your ass off and you get rejected. There could be a million reasons why but all you can do is blame yourself and feel like you just aren't good enough.

I've been to the Undergraduate English Society meeting, to Triota (Women's Studies Honors Society), to The Vagina Monologues, to anything and everything and all I want to do is find my people. And maybe that's asking too much so all I want to do is find a place where I click, where I am happy, where I feel like I have purpose.

This state of being lost, in limbo, in pergatory begs too many questions. It leaves me questioning my ability to make real human connection, wondering whether my past has left me utterly defunct to humanity. And as I worry, I recede into myself and my word documents, into my bed and my television, into my own living death. I've been trying to fight it because the tears I've cried have done nothing for me but made me more aware of my underlying sadness. If you've only recently been reading this, you may not believe that once upon a time, I was a happy person.

And thusly, I will continue to audition for my role in life because apparently, no matter what act you come in during, you need to show up and be present. Even if the show is The Vagina Monologues...

Well, I've Been Afraid of Changing...

Sometimes I get scared that in these past few months I've lost my identity. There's something in the combination of losing what was such an integral aspect of who I was before college and the fact that I am so lost in these surroundings that has left me struggling.

It's the puzzle of combining the micro, meso and macro levels of an identity that is leaving me with a 1,500 piece jigsaw of Van Gogh's Starry Night. Who am I according to me? Who am I according to those who are in my life on a personal level? Who am I according to the jock who sits next to me in Bible class wondering which iTouch game I am playing? And with all of these questions come the assumptions you make about what others are think about you based upon your own internal belief system. Your identity is a combination of the different things you believe people feel about you.

Since I stopped stage managing after CLOC this summer, I lost something that was such a structure for who I was. I know it's not gone for long but right now, its absence leaves this awkward unstable aspect of me that invites conjecture about who I am beyond the theater. Suddenly, I am defining myself by my brain and my love for literature and English (which is whittling away as the academic spark in me is fading due to UC classes). And here at UC, those are very hard things to define yourself by because no one gives a flying Fig Newton about any of that.

So what do you do when your identity runs counter to the environment you are in? How do you become comfortable in an identity you are still so insecure about in a place that makes you feel lost? I guess if I knew the answers to these questions, I wouldn't be struggling to pass the few months I have left in Cincinnati. Maybe I would be trying to save myself from drowning rather than waiting out the storm in my bed with my crime dramas and kitten. Maybe I would feel comfortable enough in who I am in this moment to try harder to find my niche.

[A quick shout-out to a friend who loved me enough to remind me that I used to love writing here and for giving me a little incentive to try again.]

That's What She Couldn't Say.

Sometimes, I think I need to just sit down at my computer, stick a pencil up my nose and start banging away at the keys in order to make myself write. I remember a time when the pencil up my nose wasn't necessary and when I would be the utmost relieved to finally have a moment to express myself in words. It was easy back then. The thoughts, the emotions and the stories just seemed to flow from me as I processed them. They never told the truth I was expecting to find when I was done but something that needed to be said was and I could walk away knowing that.

I haven't really sat down to write since I got back to school. I can't really make myself write anymore. This is terrible and even though it sounds like complete and utter discombobulation, I cannot bring myself to close this entry and let it delete itself. I need to have some product for my forced writing exercise.

There doesn't really seem to be anything I have to say anymore. I don't think I really have a belief system strong enough to make claims about anymore. I think that that needs to be reinvented and reinvigorated before I can start believing in the power of words again. I think that the more I embrace being a woman and the feminist perspective I am now just starting to flaunt, the more I will be able to say.

That perhaps the further I recede into myself, the further I will be from the heart of writing: human experience. But that's an entirely different issue for another time. The whole point being that I can't write anymore to save my ever-loving soul. All I want to do is watching television and not move from the peaceful land in which nothing happens and I don't allow anyone around me enough to hurt me.

And that's all she wrote, folks.

La Sotto Voce

This is going to be my forum to make a public apology. So bear with me. This probably applies to you so keep reading.

I am a terrible friend. More accurately, I am terrible at keeping friends. I push everyone away because of one thing or another and then I just run, without giving anyone any word on what my plan will be. Something in me snaps and I am off out of their lives just as quickly as I've managed to remove them from mine. I hate it when other people do that to me, obviously because the things you hate in others are actually the things you do. I mean, I am obsessively checking my phone for a text that will never come because the person I am waiting to make contact has made that decision to remove me without telling me any reason why.

It's a twisted world to live in: constantly seeking love from those who don't want you and leaving the one's who love you because that seems just too good to be true. I constantly feel like I am losing friends because either I am alienating them or they are alienating me.

Here is where an apology is due: I'm sorry if I've managed to do this. I'm sorry if I played God and decided that I didn't need you in my life. And if you felt some pain losing our friendship, then I was absolutely wrong in every way shape and form. Today in Burnham's class, we talked about how my generation is afraid to trust genuineness. I am a horrible offender of this. I only feel compelled to trust you if I am the one making the effort and being honest. However, if you want to reciprocate that then I run like a dog with his tail between his legs.

I don't want to be this person anymore. With transferring on the horizon, I am already severing ties that I don't think will make the cross-state bond. What I should be doing is fostering these connections so they do just that...make the cross. So I am saying to all of you and to myself that this is the first quiet voice speaking out against my own failings as a friend. La sotto voce is screaming to save me from myself.