Too Short for a Blog Post, Too Long for a Tweet 416

 

Here are a few excerpts from a book I recently read, "In the Form of a Question: The Joys and Rewards of a Curious Life," by Amy Schneider.

 

 

One of the key points I want to make in this book is that I am open to being wrong, to reconsidering my beliefs. It is my hope that, in the future, I will come to disagree with, and perhaps even disavow, some of the statements I’ve made in these pages, because it is my hope that I will never stop learning. I look forward to your feedback. The next book will be better.

 

 

Jeopardy!, like sports, is an attempt to measure a natural talent via an unnatural competition. So you don’t just need to “know stuff,” you need to know the right kind of stuff. During my run, Jeopardy! aired a tournament for college professors, who are essentially professional knowers of stuff, yet their collective Jeopardy! performance was not particularly elite. Jeopardy! rewards breadth of knowledge, not depth, and as such rewards the combination of knowledge and laziness that’s been my hallmark from childhood.

A few months later, I got home from work and, in a routine that had become automatic, went to my bedroom to pick out which feminine clothes I would change into for the evening. As I was debating the merits of each outfit, something occurred to me: if I were to die suddenly, right then and there, I wouldn’t get to wear any of those outfits. I would be buried in a suit and tie. That’s how I would be seen at the wake, that’s how I would be remembered. And that last bit of eggshell dropped off. 

If I could only wear one outfit for all eternity, I needed it to be pretty. And the only way I could be certain of that would be to not have any outfits that weren’t pretty, never to dress in those hideous god-awful boy clothes that I’d hated my entire life. And if I did that, people would need an explanation. And the only explanation that would make sense would be: I am trans. I am a woman. I wear the clothes that were meant for me all along. I was going to have to come out of the closet.

Onstage, you can get away with anything. You can do the very things that frighten you the most, and not only can you survive them, but you can enjoy them. You can feel proud, even about the things you’re most ashamed of. It’s no coincidence that the LGBT demographic is wildly overrepresented among theater kids. Being queer so often means being ashamed of your queerness. It means feeling driven to express a part of yourself that is prohibited, a part you’re ashamed even to have. Theater gives you a chance to express that prohibited self, right out in the open, but in a deniable way—That wasn’t me violating my prescribed gender norms! I was just playing a character! *wink* 

Not only is acting a refuge from societal judgment, it can also be a refuge from yourself. I have not been a big fan of myself for most of my life. I kept a mental list of all my shortcomings, all my failures, everything I had to feel ashamed of, and I tended that list with great care, always on the lookout for opportunities to add to it. Which made it a relief simply not to be me for a while every night, not to have any responsibility for myself or my actions. Left to my own devices, it seemed like I always did the wrong thing, or said the wrong thing, and I always would, because I was fundamentally flawed somehow. But in a play, it’s not up to you. The script tells you what to say, the director tells you what to do, and for a brief period you don’t have to berate yourself for always making the wrong decision, because you’re not making any decisions at all. 

That’s a lot of what theater meant to me. But when you think of actors, you probably don’t think of shy, retiring, introvert types like I was back then. You probably picture big, brash personalities, always putting themselves at the center of attention. And for good reason, because those people are also drawn to the stage, and for reasons that are almost the opposite of the ones I’ve just described. The way I put it is that two types of people are attracted to theater: people who always want to be seen, and people who always want to be hidden. In theater, you can do both at once. Theater is a place where you can stand alone on a stage, with hundreds of people focusing their full attention on you, and yet still be invisible. It’s a place where you can say, Hey! Everybody! Drop what you’re doing and look at me! Notice what I’m doing! Stop thinking about your own life and focus on what I am feeling right now!, and yet somehow say it selflessly, humbly, as part of a communal project. 

Theater brings together people who, offstage, would find each other intolerable, and offers them each what they need. For the shy, it offers escape, concealment, safety; for the confident, it offers attention, freedom, validation. In theater, not only can you do the very things you fear the most, but you can do them with the very people who make you fear it. Putting on a play is like a massive simultaneous trust fall, with everyone involved in the production constantly falling, even as they constantly catch each other. If you do the thing you’re afraid of, and do it in collaboration with the people who make you afraid of it, then eventually you’ll start to realize that you no longer have anything to fear.