

Discover more from The Remarkable Fools Letter
Whether an arts educator or wedding dj, I’ve been astounded by the brilliance of the humans I’ve had the pleasure to engage with. I love the porous people, the ones who are just spongy enough to let some of you in while letting some of themselves out. Not so much people with bad boundaries - those are clearly there - but those who are comfortable enough in their own skin to be present, engaged and ‘eating life in big bites’.
I love to see just how uniquely present and individually brilliant humans are. We’re great. We adapt and readapt in so many creative ways. Essentially everything we can do well - that’s a creative adaptation. Everything we do that’s neurotic? Thats a creative adaptation. The stories we have in our head about how we got here, why we are here and what’s next? Those stories are all part of this great growing creatively adapting uncontrollable force called human culture.
So. The most remarkably foolish things I’ve witnessed, I didn’t see coming:
Being yourself is really difficult
Full stop. It’s that simple. Be yourself? Ha!
I remember when I started working with high school students. We were working on commedia dell arte - physical comedy. They were all naturals. I’d watch them joking around in the hallways and they were free. They were flowing. They were funny as hell. Once they had to ‘perform’ though, things changed.
On stage, they couldn’t ‘be themselves’. They got stiff and lost all sense of play. They were full of ideas and rules, not freedom and pleasure. I don’t know who they were or what they were doing. They were like confused young horses, wild eyed and bound while exploding with power screaming to be let run.
This was really surprising. I believed that these students so free to play and be loud and physically outrageous in the halls of their high school would bring the same bravado to the stage.
Accepting reality as it is is essential to being yourself. Much of my work therapeutically has been spent bringing people back in touch with the pain that comes from acknowledging what is actually going on in their lives - despite their pleas that life ‘should not’ be that way or that they ‘wish things were different’.
Being yourself is about living life as it is without spending too much time where it ‘ought’ to be. Being yourself is about living life with how they are and dealing with reality, rather than escaping through the fantasy of ‘wishing things were different’.
Personally?
Settling into ‘being myself’ has been a treat.
For a remarkable fool. Life’s absurdities are everywhere, they inhabit every action, speach, discourse and relationship. It’s our job to expose them, play with them, and laugh at them at every opportunity.
When we’re ‘being ourselves’, we try less and ‘are’ more. This makes life more fun.
The less we listen to the wrong critics and the more we lean into what’s working, the better the quality of our work.
Being yourself requires knowing yourself and having the guts to accept within yourself what you find unacceptable.
Tomorrow?
I’ll tell you about the other ridiculous thing that I did not foresee when I began my career.
When I met Calle at theatre school he told me that he was a fork man. This is funny for two reasons: His last name is forkeman and he pulled out a fork as he said it. He continued to say “I eat life in big bites”. He mimed stabbing the fork into some invisible food then raised it to his mouth. Once at his mouth the put the fork in his nose and hung it from that little place in between nostrils where you would put a ring on a bull to control the beast. (if you have one such ring, my apologies, I do make fun of these more frequently than I should. Ditto if you are a man with a man bun or know a man with a man bun. I even have some friends who have ‘man buns’. And despite their incredible muscles created through gym addiction, I have not hesitated to mock said man buns in their presence. Anyway. That’s the story of the forkman.
a surprise from the profession
We talk about people being and acting. Surely being is easier than acting? I have noticed that people who are being themselves are at ease. Those acting confident when not feeling it, or acting sincere while lying; they are not, at their core, at ease. They are exerting effort. Give enough effort, and they give off vibes you can feel. They are expending energy by acting like something they aren't.
Great actors become the character they are portraying. They aren't acting in the sense of surface level pretending. They are answering the question, if I were this person, what would I be like? And they answer the question with conviction. They don the skin of that person. People who are obviously pretending to be confident or sincere? It's clearly someone else's skin they are wearing. Not theirs. They are trying, not being. And its not pretty to watch.
After reading this, and reflecting, I, someone who is confident in my work, and honest in nature, someone generally at ease, realize that my thorough exhaustion that was also felt almost universally by front line workers, is from acting okay. During the March 2020 til now stage, front line workers have needed to be strong, capable, confident and caring. This is most true for the caring professions: doctors, nurses, teachers, therapists etc. We haven't been. For the first time in my life, I have been acting, not being, for an extended period. I haven't been okay. Acting okay for everyone else has taken its toll. The goal this summer is to heal. It sounds dramatic, yet it's the most sincere thing I have said to others in a long time.
"What are you doing this summer?"
"I am healing".
I am doing less for others. I am resting when I am tired and well, that's alot of the time. Household, business and personal goals? I am giving about 20% effort there. I am slow and not so steady. I am tender in all ways. Was it Rocky who beat up the sides of beef? Yeah, feeling more like hanging beef than Rocky. But, I am noticeably physically stronger today than I was two weeks ago. That is very satisfying. I am watching sappy TV dramas on Netflix when I rest. It is acceptable to cry while watching them. I need to cry. I need to release the trapped energy, the tension, from acting okay. I realize that alot of people feel like this from acting okay all the time. I have neurodivergent friends who are always wound up or need extended times to get ready for work or to wind down afterwards. Is that from acting okay when you aren't feeling okay? I think this is likely. My heart hurts for them and this acting that society forces on them.
I have learned alot over the last three years. Not the least of which is that this badass has limits and I have exceeded them, repeatedly. I also know that anything is possible through love. I haven't loved myself. It's been self-abuse, this long term acting okay. It's time to heal. To not be okay, but to be becoming okay and to be okay with the process. I'll be over here...just being. You do you. See you next year.