avidya killed the radio star
in which I make irreverent puns and apologize for my silence and announce the 60th!! Chrysalis livestream (Sunday March 27)
We tell ourselves stories in order to live. -Joan Didion
Hey Hartlist,
Two weeks from today, I’ll do the SIXTIETH episode of The Chrysalis livestream show. Click the below to subscribe to my YouTube and/or set a reminder!
Episode 33 (KidsNotJustForKids) was one of my favorite Chrysalis shows and I thought it’d be fun to revisit both the theme and the squirrel puppet.
Maybe this is because my niece & nephew are obsessed with ‘Encanto’? I finally watched it with them yesterday (my first time, their 8th) and I loved it so much, partly because it’s great (YES Real Interesting Girl Characters!) but maybe more because it was so great to watch them watch it. They were mouthing all the words and offering helpful explanations (“This part is in her head, not real life”) and singing along and offering to hold their grandma’s hand during the ‘scary’ (ie, tense) parts. At one point they paused the film to point out exactly which characters they identified with the most. And I remembered how when I was that age NOTHING was more real than the stories I loved and believed in, and how powerful they were/are, and how awesome that is.
Except, I reflected later, when it’s not.
“You’re very talented, but do you want to do this professionally? Cause you know, honey, you’re not commercial.”
-random mother of a classmate my freshman year of high school, who randomly watched a rehearsal of our school play and randomly felt the need to crush the dreams of a 14-year old girl
I remember exactly where I was when this happened and how it felt. I remember the face she made, a kind of sorry kid sympathy shrug. I remember that my heart sank to my shoes, but also that I accepted it as 100% fact and said nothing. It didn’t occur to me to ask Stage Mom1 what she meant by “commercial”. I think I just assumed it probably had something to do with having brown hair or not smiling enough.
And that’s important, because while the comment was … whatever it was… the Story I told myself about the comment (“I will never succeed professionally”) was the real trouble.
Because even though I went on to act professionally, the Story was like an app always downloading in the background, sucking up battery power and underwriting the way I saw everything. I don’t want to overstate things (and there were certainly other influences at work), but to a degree: the Story rendered my every success a fluke, my every failure ‘proof’ of its truth, my every unfulfilling industry partnership a well you can’t really expect better. I also turned down big opportunities, didn’t prepare for big auditions, didn’t leave bad partnerships, did only low-paying jobs, and never even tried to audition for television because what’s the point.
Cut to a few (cough) years later: I’m in rehearsal for an exciting new play at Sundance Theatre Lab and I’m chatting with one of the other actors on break. He’s the only male cast member and I remember him from a long-running TV comedy in my youth. We’re talking about work and life and he tells me that his girlfriend used to be a professional actress. “She was doing really well for a while”, he said, and named some of her credits, “but then she turned 40.”
And he made THE EXACT SAME face and sad that’s life shrug as Stage Mom. And I’m not going to tell you how old I was/am, because I’m (still, somehow) a professional actor, but I will tell you that I sure was below 40 and I guess it hadn’t occurred to him how this comment might land. Because I suddenly had a new Story running: my days are numbered. And I kept on running it for a long time, even - and this is important - in the face of what some people might consider concrete evidence to the contrary.
I want to stress that I don’t (anymore) think either of the people I’m talking about were trying to crap on my parade, at least consciously. I think they were telling me the Stories they were told, and that they believed.
(Oh another big one that drained my battery for a long time: You have to choose one; you can’t be, like, a musician AND an actor. To say nothing of writing musicals…!)
In case anyone thinks I’m going in the scary “all your negative experiences are your fault for thinking negatively” direction, I am not.
The title of this week’s novella newsletter is a joke that I kept to myself in yoga class last Saturday. I choose to see the fact that I didn’t actually blurt it out as evidence of personal growth. (Because it was very hard not to.) The concept of avidya - often translated as “blindness” or “ignorance”- is on the Yogic List of Stuff To Watch Out For. I just looked it up again and found “delusion, or ignorance of the self”; I like that a lot too. It is the opposite of vidya, or wisdom.
We need our Stories in order to live. But I think that getting too attached to the wrong - or, less helpful - story is one form of avidya and it’s worth doing a spring clean now and then. Go through the hard drive and see if anything needs deleting or updating. Or - to switch metaphors - check and see if you’re still subscribing to stuff you don’t want, and cancel that s*t.
Sorry, need to keep the language kid-friendly for the next show -!
Why am I talking about all this? It’s basically a reeaaaalllly long-winded apology for letting almost a month go by between newsletters! Yikes. This can also be blamed on a couple of Stories - I haven’t been able to find a spring gig for the band yet (‘I have nothing going on and it’s embarrassing’) and, as a few people have mentioned, this newsletter has gotten ‘more personal’ (‘I’m being weird and I shouldn’t talk about my life so much’).
For one thing, one of my favorite bloggers writes with joyous abandon about her irritable bowel syndrome, and for another… “nothing going on” = I’ve been redecorating my apartment for the first time in years, I’m upleveling my Tarot readings into an actual business with the help of a great coach, and I’m starting to work with my first new acting representation in many years.
Yep.
There was a moment during quarantine where I said to myself Ok, either I’m letting go of acting completely and accepting that it’s over, or I’m taking this probably embarrassing seminar that helps actors find agents. Long story short it took several months, it was the first big proactive search for representation of my life, and I have now used the phrase “taking meetings” without irony.
And in those meetings, I heard the sentence “Of course you should be working” more than once, I heard a lot of enthusiasm about us “multi-hyphenate” artist types, and no one -NO ONE -asked me how old I was. I think even ‘range’ came up ONCE.
If you’re still reading :), I will end with this. I don’t remember where I read it and I’m going to butcher it, but there was a study done about “optimists” and “pessimists” and it revealed that the optimists, over a period of time, experienced better outcomes than the pessimists. Duh, kind of. But this happened even when they weren’t exactly factually correct about their circumstances in the first place, or were without hard evidence as to why things would go well.
We’re all telling stories all the time anyway. So may we all tell Stories that put gas in our tank, rather than siphon it away. (Welcome to Hart’s House of Metaphors, Final Clearance Sale.)
See you at the gig,
Rebecca
her kid had been in movies and was way more experienced than I was at the time