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January 24, 2005
Hello, My Name Is Sally, and I Am a Procrastinator
I so don't want to work. And I so have LOTS to do. Which is why I am posting here.
But I'm all ready for my classes tomorrow (both the one I teach and the one I'll be attending).
Actually, the whole topic of class tomorrow and being prepared brings up an interesting point. I had a class in clown work last spring that kicked my ass. There is no other way to put it. It kicked. My. Ass. Every single class period was agony, and though I never missed a class, except when I had pneumonia, it took all the strength of character I had to make myself go. Because for me, that class was nothing but an exercise in frustration and humiliation.
And the thing is, I loved the instructor. He's a great guy. I just didn't get it, and every time it was my turn to go in front of my classmates and work, I started to cry and spent the entire rest of the class period sobbing uncontrollably. The worst part of the whole thing, however, was my not understanding why I had a problem with this work when everyone else in the class was getting it and having a wonderful time. I tried and tried and tried and got nowhere. I was unbelievably relieved when the semester finally ended.
Well. That instructor is back for two weeks beginning today (he lives in Chicago), to work with us as we prepare for Macbeth. And knowing he was coming back, I figured I'd better get to the bottom of my problems with the work. If I didn't figure out why I was having trouble, I was never going to get anywhere. (With all of the italics, I'm beginning to feel like Miss Climpson in Strong Poison by Dorothy Sayers.)
Fortunately, I've also been doing alot of self-discovery and analysis working with the book Sacred Contracts, so I was sort of already in the right spot for this stuff. And last week, I had a brainwave. From the beginning of an acting project (interestingly, this is not a problem for me in any other creative area), I have a sense of how I want it to turn out. And I have this desperate need to make sure it turns out right, to make the right choice. So when we were doing this emotional work trying to get as big as we could with whatever emotion we picked, I was skipping the steps where you build up the emotion starting from barely a hint of it and just going for big.
Of course, the problem with that is that when you get to the edge of your comfort zone (and mine is larger than most people's), if you haven't done the little steps, there's nothing supporting you and you fall off the edge, so to speak.
I chatted with him about that this afternoon. I wanted to be sure he understood that what I needed from the work (so that when we did individual stuff we could both focus on that) was to spend more time on steps one through six, so that when I got to step seven, I had somewhere to leap from. And to my relief, rather than acting as though I was trying to get out of the work, he said, "That's a huge thing, to recognize that. That's a really big step. Congratulations. I do that myself and always have to work on it. But now you know. And you can work to get where you want to with that knowledge."
Bless his heart. I wish I'd figured this out last spring, so I could have got more out of the class.
Posted by sally at January 24, 2005 08:04 PM
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