As performance artist’s our body is our instrument.  We need to be in touch with both the physical and non-physical elements of our being. We need to be able to have meaningful connections with people we’ve never met within a matter of minutes and show them the most vulnerable sides of ourselves while simultaneously hitting a high C, doing a triple pirouette, or balling our eyes out while a camera zooms in on our face with twenty others in the room. My question was if I am so “in touch” with myself then why was I having so much difficulty being in touch with what I wanted in real life and going after it?

The woman in the photo above is me. It was taken roughly four years ago. I think that is important to note because what I am portraying in that photo is how I desperately wanted to feel in my life at that time. I am not saying that I wanted to walk around playing air guitar… well, maybe I kinda do. I wanted to feel I was fully expressing myself while not giving two hoots about what anyone else thought but the reality was, I felt paralyzed. I don’t want to make it seem like I was a wallflower who kept to themselves. Far from it. I am outgoing, love to laugh and value directness and honesty above anything else but I felt completely stuck. Have you ever felt completely unsure of everything in your life? Questioned every decision you have ever made?

I don’t have all of the answers but I have been on an active pursuit over the past five years to figure out what exactly was holding me back from being my most authentic and creative self. What I discovered was simply this: I was ignoring my voice. Actually, it was like I was telling it to SHUT UP!  The person who felt so “in touch” with their instincts while performing was ignoring their voice! Trust me, the irony was not lost on me. It probably took me three years into my journey to figure this out!  When I made this discovery I was actually angered by the simplicity of it all. I had gone down so many paths, slew so many dragons, made an ass out of myself, at times, in the process and the answer to my struggle was the very skill I prided myself on?! I felt like someone was going to come up to me and say,  “You had the power all along, my dear”. I have always wondered why Dorothy didn’t slap somebody at the end of Wizard Of Oz when they told her that!

Here is what I realized I was doing. I was tapping into my past experiences to help embody the choices I was making while working on my craft but I was also allowing my past experiences to inform and guide the decisions I was making in my day to day life. This proved to be an effective tool when needing to find my way into a character but proved to keep me paralyzed and living in fear that my past would repeat itself. I had blurred the lines between make-believe and reality. I definitely did not trust myself anymore.

I would like to say once I realized how much weight and significance I was giving to my past that I had the know-how and strength to leave my past behind and trust my instincts again but it took me time to decipher my voice. To recognize it.  To hear its faint squeaking from the corner of my heart. It was challenging at first to trust something so quiet. The hardest part about trusting it again was knowing that my voice was out of practice and that it was going to make some mistakes. I vowed this time would be different. I promised to be gentler with myself and to be an ally not an enemy of my voice and to be forgiving while my voice learned how to speak again.

So, how do you find your voice, what’s the importance of finding our voice, and once you do, what do you do with it? in this episode, I am sharing just that! Have a listen! 

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