There’s a feeling in my chest – in that space between my breasts – that’s started to pulsate over the last several days. An unforgiving sinister pain that no doctor would notice as existing anywhere but in my mind. But it’s there. A second heart, a demon thought, an imposter of an imposter waking up inside of an egg. I can feel it cracking.
Where does the real you live? In the breath. In the body. That’s what I’ve learned at least. But it’s scary to go there. Inside these caverns live all the emotions I don’t want to feel, and all the unattractive thoughts I don’t want to express. This feeling makes me nauseous.
Perfection does not live in the body. Perfection lives in the throat, and exists inside shallow breaths and fluttery vowels.
My acting coach Ben Ratner once told a story about his mother. He encouraged her to breathe past the place where she usually stopped. Past her throat and into her body. She took a deep breath and stopped – “when you breathe, do you start to remember things?” she asked. I hope it’s okay that I shared that story, but it resonated with me on a very deep level.
I came across a picture today that I wasn’t intended to see.
Rooted in jealousy, replacement and fear of change, I’ve felt this pain before. But it’s more pronounced now. The pain growing with the realization that I am moving on just as others are moving on. Life keeps moving. Things change. As comfortable as it would be to freeze time during those perfect moments, that’s not possible.
People leave us in so many ways. They cease to be apart of our stories, and even if we were the ones who wrote in their ending – in the story that is our life – that doesn’t mean that it wasn’t painful, confusing, or scary to do so.
I’ve often wondered at the ability of some of my favourite authors to terminate a character they have spent so long developing. Is it worse because they created that character from scratch?
But then they didn’t create them completely from scratch did they? They borrowed aspects from uncles, friends, and that person they met at a crossroads one night on their way home from the pub. Their characters are borrowed from real life. Just like in life… do we turn each other into characters? Forming ideas of what we want the people in our lives to be. A character we can predict… until they do something unpredictable. Like leave.
We go to the movies to escape from our lives… but how often do we actually fully experience our own life? I’m not sure. I once told a friend that what I loved about acting was that it was the only place I felt I had permission to be fully human. No judgement. I could experience all the ‘bad’ and ‘good’ emotions without apology, because I was only repeating words from a page.
How would it feel to give myself permission to do the same in life?
Just a question I’ve been pondering as I breathe through the pain. I hoped writing this would help to ease the discomfort, but it’s still there. Only now it’s heightened by the fear of pressing publish.