Today (March 2), a memory popped up on my Facebook feed: my boyfriend and I exploring the Seaport District of NYC before seeing The McKittrick’s immersive production of The Woman in Black. It was from a year ago.
One. Entire. Year ago.
That feels simultaneously like a blink in time and the slow inching of an eon. It was shortly before the pandemic slammed the USA, mere weeks before the Western hemisphere was plunged into this epoch of upheaval with the remainder of the world. It’s so very surreal to think about. To be frank, I don’t know if I’ve fully grasped, fathomed, and dealt with my feelings about it all: after all, we’re still in its midst. Some of it (the social justice issues), deservedly so.
That odd duality has colored the past two months. I keep using the word “frenetic” to describe it all. And it was. In the simple time management sense, figuring out how to navigate online courses that don’t really translate all that well to Zoom (looking at you, movement classes), having to film multiple self-tape style assignments within a few days, the rigor of conservatory academia itself, late-night rehearsals, and, eventually, learning how to film an entire musical on green screens in one week (Nunsense comin’ atcha mid-April!) was exhaustive. The long hours made me feel like I never had interaction with the people in my home whatsoever. I volleyed between productivity, contentment, anxiety, loneliness, struggle, and triumph. Whenever those middle two took hold, it was the worst. Thank you, oh wintry months, for providing me with that.
More than crazy hours, though, you, January and February, brought a duality of fear and excitement, an alchemy that anyone who has been on the cusp has felt. I’ll be graduating in a little over two months, having received my BFA, and I have no damn clue what I’m going to do. I have ideas; applications have been made; contacts have been connected with. But, at this moment in time, I don’t even know where I’ll be geographically in a few months, much less what my livelihood will entail. Being a planner and a perfectionist, that brings me moments of immense fear, the kind that infiltrates your brain and presses alarms that you didn’t even know existed.
There’s a whole slew of mental calisthenics that goes into that fear, much of which I’ll keep to myself (that ish doesn’t need to be blasted into the interwebs). Put simply: I have more questions than answers, and, as someone who’s always been the perfect student, that lack of sends panicked shivers down my spine. My brain has revolved in hypotheticals for the past two months. What if? What about? Why would? Is this? It’s the mentally harmful gymnastics we all do. Perhaps it makes me sound juvenile to voice it, but hey. I got slammed with this wonderment of negativity. Some weeks, it annihilated my mental state. That’s the truth.
What I’ve been trying to remind myself (and what has been proven to me again and again, if my thick panic disorder skull could osmosis it through) is that there’s also so much excitement and possibility in the unknown. That’s the beautiful reverse side of the coin. I mean, god, that’s happened several times within just the past 50ish days. I heard of/located some wonderful new apprenticeship opportunities. I figured out the new LMDA President teaches not an hour away from my hometown. The Artistic Director of one of my dream theatres to work at reached out to me after finding my site online. I am bombarded with new ideas to be written, performed, sung, dreamed up every day, and there’s something so beautiful and simple in that. Who knows where that will take me?
In short, January and February, you confused me. You overwhelmed me. You uplifted me. You slammed me to the ground. You healed wounds, closed doors, opened windows. You were a wacky duality of blizzard and spring day. It’s been a time, as my generation would say.
Onward and upward from here, I do hope.
And peace out, winter. Welcome, spring.
Rhiannon
Postscript: Since I haven’t done this in a while, how about some things I’ve enjoyed recently!
Book: Spinster by Kate Bolick
Play: The Revolutionists by Lauren Gunderson
Music: these oddly-specific-but-wonderfully-sensical playlists by olivia on Spotify
Podcast: Spark & Fire: Epic Creative Stories on Spotify
YouTube: Morgan Long and Ciara Foster
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