Los Angeles is a car culture. If you’re going two doors down to Chipotle, you hop in your car. (Calm down. Everyone here drives a Prius!) Regardless of where you live, though, most of us get around using a vehicle. Let’s say you want to go to the beach. Every day of the week, you think about Saturday, when you’re going to sit in the sun and listen to the waves and flirt with cute strangers. How insane would it be if, when Saturday rolled around you drove your car to Santa Monica, and instead of getting out and walking on the sand, you barrel over the bike path and start doing donuts around startled bathers? Personally, I don’t think my Jetta could handle driving on sand. But that’s the point – your car, the vehicle that brought you all the way across town and fulfilled your weeklong dreams of sun and sand, is no longer useful. It brought you there, but now that you’ve arrived, you have to leave it behind to do what you came to do. It’s the same with acting. And all creative processes.
We often get stuck on the thing that helps us get somewhere as the thing. But that’s the whole point about a vehicle. It’s a tool that allows us to get from Point A to Point B. It’s a device that allows us to experience something else. It’s an instrument that helps us navigate a moment. But we can’t get stuck in the vehicle.
Whether a beginner or seasoned professional, everyone comes to the work with their own abilities, habits, fears, flaws, healthy practices and coping mechanisms. And almost every single actor I’ve worked with has needed this lesson.
What got you here is not necessarily what will get you there. Which is where you want to go.
Maybe someone prefers to project an image of how they want to be perceived, so they build up a fictionalized life on social media that leaves out all their mess. Someone else might come from a history of unhealthy anger and abuse, so they control their temper so they won’t be like people who yell and scream. Someone else’s religious practices might teach abstaining from sex until marriage. Each of these examples can be positive and serve as a form of protection that allows them to walk through the world. Whatever the issue, though, there comes a point where the thing they’ve relied on often stops them from moving toward the things they want. They become stuck.
The good news is there’s a simple fix. The bad news is that while simple, it isn’t easy. Ready? Just. Be. Honest. Simple right? But in practice, it’s downright terrifying.
When I say be honest, I mean be honest about how you feel, not just what you think or believe. I believe that violence is wrong, but in moments of anger, I might feel like knocking someone’s block off. If I pretend that feeling didn’t happen, because I believe it’s unacceptable, then I’m denying the truth of what is actually happening in the moment. I’m denying a part of myself. And ultimately, that energetic non-expression of denial is going somewhere ”“ so there’s no actual denial we can get away with ever, anyway.
When we are honest about how we feel, when we commit to the full expression of that feeling, the judgment we fear from others does not materialize. Instead, when we bare ourselves, stripping away our sense of control, our limiting beliefs, our self-doubt, and get down to what is really going on, right here and right now, maybe in the darkest, most hidden part of our hearts, we will hear from the audience a simultaneous gasp as they think – “Me, too. How could they know that about me? I feel that way too sometimes.”
They may love you for it. They may hate you for it. They may blame you. But everyone watching has been gifted the opportunity to recognize it. In you. In themselves. In others.
So it becomes universal because certainly nothing is limited to just our own experience. And you will have made it to the beach. And the vehicle that helped get you there can be traded in for a new upgrade as you’re ready to have a whole different experience from a different vantage point. Won’t that sand feel good between your toes? Better than just staying in the car that got you there, for sure.