It’s a theatrical transition
I was talking with my friend recently about how I’ve been thinking about my upcoming show (shameless plug, shameless plug) with a friend, and they made an interesting comparison. I said that I’ve been focusing a lot on the overarching theme, whether or not it had a message, if there was a consistent narrative link between the beginning and the end. They said I shouldn’t worry about all that; in theatre – and especially theatre revolving around personal narrative – audiences will make their own conclusions, come up with their own arcs. We joked about a saying from college, “It’s not a mistake, it’s a performance choice.” That is, audiences will expect that you know what the hell you’re doing, and are often forgiving to the point of making narrative links and symbolic assumptions that were never intended in the first place.
I was mentioning this to my therapist earlier tonight, who said, “Huh. That’s a lot like transitioning.
I don’t think it’s the best analogy I’ve heard, but it’s growing on me. It’s really easy, while transitioning, to get focused on huge ideas of gender and presentation and identity. But that can be counterproductive – being happy with my gender or presentation today doesn’t always require focusing on whether or not I have all the questions figure out, forever. And finding things that I do like about my body, especially in comparison to a few years ago, shouldn’t alwas be overshadowed by things I still wish were different. Likewise, (many) people are more forgiving than you expect. I know I’m my own harshest critic, and almost certainly present more successful feminine than I think I do.
This shouldn’t be used as an excuse to ignore questions about the future, about identity, about where you want to go. But it’s a reminder that they’re not the only thing that’s important, either.
Themocracy