I have a secret to tell you guys—acting schools are nuts.
Seriously, they have a very cultlike vibe. They tell you that everything you think and believe is a lie, they break you down, and they rebuild you using their logic and teachings. On top of that, they really stress the fact that you have no time for your family or friends anymore because you are following the true way—you are pursuing art. So, um . . . that’s pretty culty.
In 2008 I was fresh out of university, and instead of entering the workforce during the second coming of the Great Depression, I took the little savings I had that wasn’t lost in the stock market and moved from San Francisco to New York to go to a conservatory acting program. I was a perfect candidate for acting school. I loved theater, had no real acting technique, and had no idea who I was.
These qualities left me vulnerable and desperate for guidance. I was just a lost little girl who wanted to spend her last few dimes on a place to call my own where someone would tell me how to think. So when I found myself in New York at a slightly prestigious acting conservatory, I was totally ready to have my brain washed. Lucky for me I was about to be brainwashed with some very good advice.
The best part of acting school, and the most effective brainwashing tool, was the feedback—basically all we did was rehearse scenes, perform them for our classmates and instructors, and then get ripped apart by critiques from everyone. The feedback started simple. After my first scene I was told by my instructor, “Your posture is horrible,” and a classmate chimed in to add, “She must have really low self-esteem because she won’t root herself to the ground.”
For two years, the feedback I received was basically the same—I’m not owning my space, I’m not rooted to the earth (still don’t know what that means), I’m not harnessing my power. I roughly translated this to “You’re a rootless bitch who hates yourself, and you can’t even cry.” Crying is incredibly important in acting school. Everyone who has ever been to acting school will say it’s not about learning how to cry, but this is a lie. You are basically a failure unless you can start crying at the drop of a hat.
After a lifetime of undiagnosed ADHD, which often led to emotional outbursts, and a childhood spent with a father who has trouble with empathy, I had learned how to do what I call locking it down. Because my emotions were so big and so often misunderstood, I spent a lot of time getting in trouble for reacting emotionally. So instead of checking in with how I felt whenever anything went down, I tried to simply dismiss or ignore my feelings. I’d squelch my feelings and tell myself I was being irrational.
Locking it down is a great defense mechanism, but it leaves you tearless—and to be a full, card-carrying member of the cult that is acting school, I had to cry.
One day I was in the respite that was voice class, and all it asked of me was to do yoga poses and work on breathing. (And yes, people often cry in voice class, but it’s not required; you aren’t a failure if you don’t cry.)
In this class we were doing Fitzmaurice work, which requires you to train your body to sort of tremble while you do different yoga poses until your body is shaking and convulsing as though you are having a very intense orgasm. While your body is doing all this, your breath is supposed to fully release, or something like that.
While in this class, I was in a position known as camel doing my thing and my voice instructor came over. She’s a fabulous former dancer who has an edgy zen vibe, and she was coaching me. This simply means she asked to touch me in various places to help me “release” my voice and said things like “Breathe into your knees, breathe into your shoulder,” and so on.
When she got to my sternum and lightly touched it, something strange happened. It felt like a hot ball of molten lava had formed in my chest, exploded, and sent a wave of searing magma through my body, and I started to cry.
Once I started crying I couldn’t stop. I cried all the time. I cried when I ate, I cried when I was in the shower, I’d cry as I fell asleep.
As I cried, memories flashed through my mind. Every time I felt ashamed for being “too sensitive,” every time my heart had been broken, every loss, every time I self-destructed. I cried all the tears I had tried to lock away. It took weeks to stop crying; I had a lot to make up for, apparently.
When I was finally done, I felt like a new woman. I was lighter and brighter, I stood up taller, and I became a much better actor and human being in general. Once I got in touch with where I had been hiding my emotions, I could finally access them, check in with them, and communicate them to others!
I’m forever grateful for that day in voice class and the ridiculous, shaky yoga pose that helped me find my feelings again. Turns out feelings are superimportant; they’re like a barometer for how well a situation is meeting our needs. When our feelings barometer starts to beep (is that what barometers do?), we get to pause and figure out what we want to better have our needs met. What’s not to like about feelings!?
So many books Kristen and I have lived by paint a picture of the optimal human as someone who has the ability to choose positive feelings over those yucky ones, with the end goal being a life that appears to be free from negative emotions. That book I mentioned earlier that tells readers to admit they’re liars, The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck, is a perfect example of this. In his book, Mark Manson says the first step toward living your best life is to take responsibility for everything that occurs in your life, regardless of who is actually at fault.
The book says we should do this because even though plenty of things are beyond our control, we can always control how we react and read into them. This is a great idea in theory, but hard to actually implement considering emotions are natural and very hard-to-control human reactions that we use to communicate with others and ourselves. So overriding your feelings or negating them seems kind of counterproductive, right? It was for Kristen and me; we found it to be frustrating and in no way life enhancing to try to gaslight ourselves.
Most of the books we’ve encountered while living by the book do not touch on the fact that you have to check in with your emotions to even know if you’re happy, and learn what bums you out. Why on earth would you try to push these natural and helpful indicators away?
I don’t think it really matters how you get at your emotions as long as you find a way to listen to them and let them run their course. For me, it was that voice class and doing orgasm-mimicking Fitzmaurice work. I hope that for you it doesn’t have to be such a production, but even if it does, who will really care?
Over the past few years I’ve learned that the less energy I waste on trying to change my natural emotional responses to the things life throws at me, the more content I am. And as a bonus, I have more energy left to get myself through emotional situations using less wacky means, such as watching the birds outside my window and speed-walking through Manhattan. There are so many great ways to check in with yourself and honor your emotions, like crafting or swimming or even therapy! I’d rather try that stuff than attempt to convince myself my feelings aren’t real and end up crying for two weeks straight after an ex–modern dancer touched my sternum again.