Lately I've been listening to probably too much music, and I'm at that annoying point where every time I hear a song, I think, "Oh, my God, that is so my life." I am fourteen again. Woo. The Head and the Heart's "Lost in My Mind" flipped onto Pandora at that moment. So, you know what I mean despite the lameness, yeah? In other news, it turns out Katy Perry and I could be best friends because we both have personal whoas. Shoot me if I ever sound this stupid again. I actually hate that I'm writing all this forward intro crap.
ANYWAY. It's been kind of a whirlwind of a week since my last post, which is mostly good. The kind of stress that goes into being honest is unexpected, but it's freeing. I'm sort of done talking about what it means to be real, though. Not that I will cut someone off if I find myself in conversation about it again. I could talk about it forever. It's just, it takes a lot to stop pretending. I am so used to wearing a shield that I sort of don't know what to do with myself right now. Sorry if that sounds real asshole-y, "I'm sort of done," ugh, it's just, what I mean is I want to start actually living more real — not just writing real.
Like, I need to talk things out so that I can know if I'm on the right page with the people in my life. I sort of feel like if I'm not talking to someone regularly it's as if they don't want to know me. No one is a mindreader unless they're a mindreader. That's something I wrote in my last post, not the mindreader part, but the feeling of thinking people don't want to know me. I'm at this point where I can't tell if I should take another step out and tell people I want them in my life, or if it is better to just move on. Who knows if they feel the same way? Oh, the sheer amounts of opportunities missed due to personal gridlock. It's weird. It's so weird.
Actually, something weird happened the other day. I don't normally do stand-up a ton, but it's something that I'm weaving into my life intermittently. It turns out I like to stand up in front of people and open my worldview to them. (We're all shocked.) It's a special kind of rush...knowing you might just blow, and you don't have anyone to blame it on, except maybe high ceilings that swallow laughter. I like to say doing stand-up is like having a conversation where you can't be interrupted, and if you are, you get to go off on that audience member, and everyone is like, "Yeah, lady, you tell them!" That hasn't happened to me much, which I appreciate, though I would sort of love to yell uninhibited sometimes.
Normally I just talk about how much I love my family and maybe tell a story about us all being insane together...things I'm comfortable talking about. A lot of stand-ups find things to gripe about and because it's a shared experience, audiences laugh. They laugh from recognition. That's a very cool kind of laughter, but I love laughs from surprise. What I mean by surprise laughter, is they didn't expect to hear what they heard, but they recognize it still, the laughter of admittance that they understand. I love to surprise myself most of all, probably because I'm a narcissist. (I'm not really a narcissist, and I don't think I actually know any true narcissists in the way that Narcissus, that Greek god, was.)
Anyway, I did a whole set based on honesty, relationships and being real. The first line of the set I got dead silence (which is what I was seriously hoping for, chill out), and then it got laughter because it stopped people in their own brains. It's very uncommon for a comedian, let alone a female comedienne to open with, "Hi, I want to be married." Cats out of the bag! Surprise! I want a lot of things, and this is one of them.
It was so amazing, guys. The fear, anxiety and silence that took over the audience (mostly single male stand-ups) opened the door to the rest of the set: being honest about our hopes for ourselves and the people in our lives — people want to talk about it, apparently, as many of the other comics ended up referencing my set in theirs. It's not as if I want to get married to just anyone anywhere anytime, and not today by any means. But it's real. It's a part of who I am, and I explained why.
There's an unwritten rule in Hollywood that you can't say you want to be an actor on a sitcom, or you want your own HBO stand-up special, or you want to write the next big Blockbuster, what have you. But, clearly if you've made it as far as Los Angeles, those are things that you likely want, and saying you want them makes them more real. It opens you up to others. How are they supposed to know who you are and what you want, if you don't tell anyone?
So, I said it. And I kept up this new trend in my life of being truthful, and it felt fucking good. There's that old ditty, "Truth in comedy," to which I say, "There is comedy in the truth." It has less of a ring, but I think it's clearer. What I think the first means is make your comedy truthful, whereas the latter means, tell the truth, and it will be funny. The difference is slight. It has to do with where you start.
All those things I said before, those are my dreams. And we don't tell what our dreams are because if we tell other people then they know if we didn't get what our dream was. As for wanting to be married, especially as a new-to-LA actress, that's just something you don't say. You don't say a lot of things, life is all about the things that you do not say to one another. There's embarrassment that comes from voicing this particular desire. I would say that the number one thing you don't say as a woman in your twenties or thirties is, "I want to be married." Not everyone wants to be, but I would say most people at least want the comfort of a serious relationship. I'm not going to qualify this much anymore, because I don't think it should have to be, other than to say, marriage is a really great thing if it's between two people who really want to be married. It's being with the person who has your back, is excited to see you, and who you have the freedom to totally be yourself with all of the time — and vice versa, that's important.
Of course, we aren't going to always be 100 percent ourselves with someone else until we're ok with ourselves alone, but that's the goal. You can't be yourself with someone else until you're yourself by yourself. Did you get all that? I had to read it aloud a few times. And that's why relationships should be treasured, given time to grow and fostered with connection.
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