Theatre and the Internal Battle

Recently I have attended live theatre and loved it. Straight plays especially I am seeing these days contain challenging subject matter that beckons the audience to ask difficult questions. I love it when the art of live theatre serves a purpose in enriching people’s lives. However, recently I have discovered the changes in my taste for entertainment.

As many who know me are aware, I am passionate about emotional and mental health, especially my own. I have spent hours analyzing my emotions, habits, lifestyle, and childhood to determine why I think and feel certain ways, and how to improve those parts of my life that are unhealthy.

How does this affect my tastes for live theatre? I am realizing that the reason many shows are challenging is because the characters are not healthy. It is easy to see the unhealthy decisions of someone on a stage, but it is more difficult to identify those same issues in real life, which is what makes theatre so beautiful. An awareness or a call to attention of a character’s flaws creates a deeper awareness of our own flaws or the flaws of the world. This awareness in turn elicits a response from us, be it a call to action, or at least developing a unique perspective of an area in which one was previously oblivious.

The problem I have is that often I see elements of myself on stage played out in ways that do not allow for a resolution. At the conclusion of a given play, the audience is left to create their own resolution, their own determination to not turn out the way the characters might have. This can be a positive thing, especially if it motivates the audience to live healthier lives. Where I am in my own life, however, seeing dangerous life decisions played out onstage brings me pain because I am trying as hard as I can to avoid a similar fate.

In the midst of my daily anxieties, stressors, and irritants, during which I like to imagine the worst case scenario, I have thought that perhaps one day I will create short dramas to put on a stage to get them out of my head and out of my way in life. I think many people before me have already done that, as we hear stories of artists who lived tortured lives and wrote from dark places. It makes for great drama, because no one wants to watch a story in which everyone is perfectly happy the entire time. My hope is that the events I see onstage will not become a reality in my own life.

And so while I may need to take a break from live dramas to work on my own life, I hope one day I will learn to maintain a certain disconnect from people I watch in stories so as to enjoy them more.

Tricky Transitions

Some of my readers may know that I started this blog a couple years ago when I was trying to figure out what to declare as my college major. Because writing helps me to sort out my thoughts, I was hoping that blogging would help me better understand my areas of interest and therefore better understand myself. While I eventually did declare a major that I ended up graduating with, I find myself in a familiar place of not knowing what I want to do with my life.

The time right after graduation was challenging. I was starting a new job, getting ready to move, and trying to figure out what friends were in the area and available to spend time with. Meanwhile, the need for a consistent budget haunted me day and night, as I was an emerging adult who was quickly becoming fully responsible for supporting herself. I would feel lonely, but then feel guilty because my circumstances were pretty decent, and I wasn’t suffering from a huge crisis. I say these things in past tense, but really I am still working through each element as I learn how to act grown up like so many before me.

Other young people I have talked to empathize with me as they remember how difficult their time of transition out of school/into independent adulthood was. It is comforting and validating to know that I am not alone in my struggles, but I wish there was more concrete advice to be given for those who find themselves in similar situations. As frustrating as it can be, however, there is no set formula for how to survive outside of school. Yes, community, budgeting, and hobbies are all worthy goals to pursue, but what do you do when you are pursuing those things and you still feel lonely and disinterested? The most common thing that I seem to hear is to just keep on keepin’ on. I guess that’s really all I can do, regardless of how fruitless the journey seems at the moment. I will figure it out eventually, but it is frustrating how the seemingly pettiest of challenges are often the trickiest to maneuver.

How Does One Make Friends?

Recently I’ve been reading a book that talks about relationships, and one thing that stood out to me was the observation of how relationships (of any sort) are made. The person who tries to make friends for the sake of having friends will likely have trouble building those relationships. If, on the other hand, one makes friends through mutual interests, then the relationship can develop.

This is why people become friends with those they take classes with, or work with, or are in a club with. They are people uniting for a cause. The relationship between two given people develops not when they are focusing solely on each other, but rather focusing on a mutual passion or interest, something outside themselves.

This is not to say that you can’t focus at all on the other person. It can be good to just take time to talk with someone. But what do you talk about? Often conversations between friends will gravitate toward topics that interest both parties.

I am not saying that the only way to make friends is to join a club. But this was an aspect of friendship that the book I’m reading pointed out in a way I hadn’t thought about before. Perhaps one reason I’ve had trouble making friends is that I try too hard to be likable to everyone. I don’t want to have opinions so strong that I drive those of a different mindset away. But if I don’t identify with anything, then no one will want to identify with me.

However, I have also experienced a different challenge: I may become friendly with people I take a class with, but as soon as the class is over, the relationships are over. We no longer have that common purpose to bring us together, and so we go our separate ways. I suppose the marks of a deep, lasting friendship are not based on what brings people together, but rather what keeps them together.

What is it, then, that keeps people together? In my experience, what draws me to a person may be a common interest (“You like such and such? Me too!”), but what keeps me drawn to the person is a change of focus from the interest to the person behind the interest. It could be that we have a myriad of common traits, or hardly any at all. Sometimes what draws me to a person is not how we’re similar, but how we’re different.

Shared interests then grow into shared experiences, which in turn creates shared feelings, resulting in a shared connection. How deep that connection reaches may be an indicator of how long the relationship lasts. Often the more personal the experience (whether good or bad), the deeper the connection.

These are my thoughts on the development of relationships (of any kind). Perhaps with this sorting out of my thoughts I am better able to understand how to connect with people and ultimately, better understand myself.