Tag: writing

Crooked Fool: Embracing the 10

Cydney Marie Leave a comment

“I’m sorry there was some…emotion there.”

Sentences like this one have been said to me in a variety of situations in recent years, usually in the context of some minor moment of tension. And in many cases, this response almost rubbed me the wrong way moreso than the original conflict.

Why are you apologizing for emotions? We can apologize for our behavior or the way we respond to things, but that’s not the same thing. Plus, why is expressing big emotions somehow offensive, or even more troublingly, some universal sign of mental instability? Why does feeling and showing the urgency, immediacy, and importance of something warrant our friends diagnosing us with various ailments and commenting on how “dysregulated” we are? While therapy and emotional intelligence can be beneficial and healing under the right circumstances, they aren’t meant to be weapons pointed at anything that’s mildly uncomfortable.

Emotional intelligence isn’t the same as emotional absence. We have them for a reason, and using them smartly and compassionately doesn’t necessarily mean using them less.

I was an Angry Kid, or at least that’s what I was constantly told. My emotions were simply too big and implied that, at best, there was something a bit wrong with me mentally or, at worst, I was just a bad, angry person. As an AFAB, femme-presenting person, you could argue that this was mostly just misogyny. Since I’ve spent most of my life with a visible deformity, and since deformity is often equated with villainy in media and the arts, you could argue it was ableism. But whatever the underlying reason, it was a form of hatred. It was exclusion, meant to reinforce the notion that my emotions made me bad and that I needed to be punished into controlling them, cutting off their sharp edges, in order to be worthy of love. I needed to fit in the box and follow the rules, and if I couldn’t do that, I was Bad.

I’ve struggled for years to articulate what drew me to theatre in those early days, but one thing I remember vividly is how freeing it felt to be able to fly up to a 10 on the emotional scale and be praised for it. Onstage, the 10 is encouraged, a necessary use of energy to draw the audience into energetic proximity. Though they know we’re just telling a story, heightened emotion shows immediacy, need, scale, stakes – it shows that the events taking place, real or imagined, are worth drawing up our vital force and setting it loose, pushing it beyond us. And if it’s worth it to us, maybe it should be worth it to them.

This is why live performance has so much power. It’s a sharing of life force in proximity and a declaration that there is something out there worth physically putting ourselves out there for.

Theatre has its problems, at least as it exists in a late-stage capitalist, colonized society. But it makes space for big personalities and big emotions. More than that, it cultivates them, training them into us because of the power that they have to move a room, to cause someone’s breath to catch, to break skin out in goose bumps, focus soul power through glaring eyes, and zing urgent, world altering energy into fingertips, twitching them into action.

And sometimes we need the 10 even in life. Big emotions are there for a reason. Sometimes that reason is change.

What is worth your 10? Where will you lend your vital life force? Which story will you let breathe fully into your living body in the years to come? When is it worth exhausting yourself and getting angry if it leads to change?

We can’t live every moment of our lives at a 10, but sometimes we are called to it, and we have to be ready to draw upon ourselves in fullness when that call comes. Villainizing our heightened, most powerful selves will only serve to keep us quiet when it counts the most.

Crooked Fool: Artists, PLEASE REST.

Cydney Marie Leave a comment

My favorite memory of physical theatre school is when, during tech week, amid regular 13-hour days, one of the profs wanted us to work through lunch. I rebelled, and of course I was viewed as the difficult one. Guess who probably wouldn’t hire me out in the wild?

In case it wasn’t clear, I’m being sarcastic. This isn’t my favorite memory.

But it is common. The reality of trying to make art in a late-stage capitalist, colonized society is that a lot of artists, even professional ones, are forced to work a fulltime day job while making art on the side. We burn the candle at both ends, and our teachers and directors perpetuate the status quo. This is, in large part, because poor funding and misplaced social values prevent artists from being paid fairly for their work, and while it’s worth advocating to fix that, it’s not going to happen overnight.

Grind culture is deeply embedded in the arts. In contrast to the narrative that doing what we love will ensure we never really work a day in our lives, we often find our passions reduced to nothing BUT work. Joy comes second if it shows up at all.

Many of the arts have ritualistic, spiritual roots. Creative community practices are meant to be owned by everybody and to have innate value outside of their money-making potential. But in 21st century America, that’s not how it works.

When was the last time you turned on some music and moved aimlessly all alone? When did you write something no one would ever see? When did you let yourself create, even if it wasn’t perfect, whatever the hell you wanted, just for yourself?

Sometimes, rest is resistance and stillness is power.

How can we reconnect with our work as a source of personal power? How can we find the ways it can recharge us, rather than just how much work it will take to “make it?” Can we play, explore, and create just for us, without needing someone else to buy it?

Capacity is a real issue here. When we’re constantly grinding to make a living, whether in the arts or otherwise, it can be hard to find time for practices like this.

But here, in the dead of winter while everything sleeps, with potentially some really dark times on the horizon where our creative work may be needed more than ever, can we resist by reclaiming our time?

Crooked Fool: Living by Lamplight

Cydney Marie Leave a comment

As the light grows ever more dim, tendrils of gray among warm yellowish rays snake across the floor. The warm light of the lamp bulb grows brighter, drawing attention, declaring its presence, becoming the focus of the room. The titles of the books on the shelf become hazy in the half darkness, the gray, the not quite night, the semi-pitch black. My black cat becomes harder to spot in the shadows. The light is almost uncomfortable in the darkness, lighting the old quilt on the wall from below, highlighting the folds, wrinkles, seams, and age-worn fabric as though it’s telling ghost stories by firelight.

It is in this light that I feel most at home. Present, just a little activated, warm, full of possibility. When I can’t see in the darkness, I lean into the trust I have in my body. I let go of the need to see everything clearly. A familiar room becomes a bit unknown, memory filling in what it can, imagination tearing at the seams of reality for the rest. But I don’t mind it. As my eyes slowly grow tired and less focused in the dim light, my mind stays alive, my skin taking over, constantly, chronically sizzling with little vibrations of energy.  Breath becomes a little freer and also more vibrant, more vital.

This time, between obligation and sleep, is the seeking. This is when the unknown knocks and we make friends with the dark, accepting it into ourselves. Shadow comes out to play, welcomed by light that allows it to show itself freely. The slow creep of the shadows, the tiny burning of light in the bulb, and the slight somatic disequilibrium of the dark and empty but full invite play in a much heavier way than the broad daylight, quietly brimming with vital force.

Sometimes, when I’m leaning into the creative movement of my body, or the give and take of an improvised scene, I crave this. The playful, primal life magick of light, dark, and gray. Sometimes I close my eyes or let my vision go out of focus, leaning into the flying sensation of the unknown in my body, trusting my limbs to catch me, rolling out of every misstep, if not gracefully, at least still alive. And when I cannot see them in the shadows, the darker ones light little fires in my limbs, screaming stories into my the nerves all throughout my body, insisting on shining light where it has been snatched away.

This is where I crave to live and spend my vital energy – in the cracked shadows of warm, stubborn, attention grabbing light that exist in my bones, breath, soul, and story. The unknown soul also shines brightly, and light is seen best in the dark.

Play, dance, and sing with beings of light and dark without caring whether they came from the pitch black of night. Let the unknown give them a chance.

Find life in the half light, the flickering candle, the dim incandescent, breathing into the dark beauty in these spaces even if it feels like flying, like half dying, like losing yourself or letting your soul fly to pieces. Walk in darkness always.