Sometimes life is hard. Sometimes there are just too many things to think about throughout the day and people just don’t understand that your life is so much more hectic and harder than theirs… then you realize that’s not true. You realize everyone has hard days and then you get over it. Or, in my case, you at least try to.
Everybody’s life is crazy. Everybody has their burden to bear. But even though I have the knowledge that everyone’s life is hectic and hard, it still does not mean that mine is any less uncontrollable. These past few weeks have felt completely out of my control! Mentally, emotionally, and physically: I am producing a student film, even though I barely have any practice being a producer, I got a new job, my family is nuts, and I have to write a feature-length screenplay for one of my classes. My schedule is booked.
OH. And boys. Who can forget how emotionally taxing and stressful boys/relationships/friendships-you-want-to-be-relationships can get! Although all of this craziness surrounds me, I know that there will be a light at the end of the tunnel. Someday. Hopefully. I think. And right as I had this thought, I realized that the exact same happens in improv.
Anytime I am in a scene and/or improving up (I tried to use that phrase as a cool way of saying “making up” and I think it worked pretty well so I’m going to keep it) lyrics to a song and I have no idea where I’m going within the scene, or I realize “Well great…I’m already two minutes into this scene and I have not even established where I am, what my relationship is to the other people in the scene or what my objective is,” I start to have an anxiety attack in my brain. This, especially, came into play when we were learning about lyrics in class. I could tell that I, along with other classmates, got too bogged down with singing the best lyrics or singing lyrics that rhymed and it made the scene suffer. We would try to sing a song with a small group, and then it would be my turn to sing a verse, and then nothing that rhymed came to me, and then the musical improviser was still playing the music, and then the whole class was looking at me (with smiles of course), and then I felt the weight of the whole song on my shoulders and then I just wanted to cry. Maybe it was just me….but I bet that others have felt the same way.
The best piece of advice I received was to just keep going. You will eventually find your way. For instance, when it is our turn to sing a verse and we don’t have any words that rhyme, just singing literally anything is better than not singing anything at all. Eventually, you will learn how to better yourself in the art form of rhyming. It might take a few weeks or a few years, but thinking you know what to do will eventually lead into you actually knowing what to do. You just have to trust yourself. So that is what I am going to start doing. I am going to start trusting myself.
