Method Acting My Way Through Life

The World Is A Stage And How Did I End Up Here?

“I hold the world but as the world, readers,
A stage where every man must play a part,
And mine a confusing one.”

One would think that running away to a new place multiple times would have taught me how to reinvent myself without burning myself out. Or at least I wouldn’t fall back into the same patterns. But when have I made things easy for myself?

Every new life I have lived, have the same worries creeping in. The worst of all, “how am I getting this wrong again?”

Because life is a performance, isn't it? Everyone else seems to know their lines, hitting their marks with confidence while I'm still squinting at the script trying to figure out if I'm supposed to be the comic relief or the philosophical hero (been there and killed that). I keep changing my stage- two boarding schools, one lockdown, a sleepless city, a mountain far away and occasionally the other topographical wonders of the country- but the script has always been the same and yet a mystery.

The beginning is fun because the stakes are low. New city, new me and new people who do not know any better. But as the story curve progresses; the climax nears, the text changes. I have forgotten my words. I have forgotten the point. I have forgotten where I am supposed to stand and what the cue is. I have interpreted people to be more than they are or mistaken them for something else or not given them more than a cursory glance or lingered on them for far too long. I have said things that would probably be better in my head than out in the open, in the script, forever etched into the mortification of the new role I have adorned.

Here's the thing about stage fright: it makes you louder. If I'm doing something—anything—and being someone with enough conviction, maybe the paralysis of trying to make the "right" decision won't completely swallow me whole. Motion feels safer than stillness, even when that motion is hyperventilating, cracking innuendoes, always being available and always always always hoping that everything I want is not just in my head.

Sometimes I wonder if there's a version of me in some alternate reality who actually figured it out. Who knows when to laugh at the right jokes and doesn't over-explain every casual comment. Who doesn't treat every social interaction like a poorly rehearsed audition and then worries that someone else got the part because they did my role better? Because there has to be some version of me who did get it right. This story can’t only be in my head.

But I am jealous.

I am jealous of my alternate self. The one who knew exactly what to do. Whose role was not to be a “chaotic, inappropriate, opinionated but also confused” person but of someone who is present. Not one with a whirring sound in her head that is either playing a movie in her mind to equate with her situation or is replaying mortifying interactions on loop. I am jealous of my alternate role and her world because I imagine she isn’t in a limbo. I imagine that she isn't scared of being excited; she doesn't jinx herself.

But.

I wouldn’t trade it. The role that I have taken seems to put me in lovely situations that become great stories for my next plays. They make people laugh and even when I think I am being performative, maybe I am doing a decent job. Maybe I am lingering because I need to slow down.

The world is a stage and at the end one man in his time plays many parts… and so there will be flowers in the end.