WARNING: This blog displays potential VPL (Visible Phenomenological Life)
I'm a big fan of metaphors in the main: handy, visual maps for slippery thoughts and stark concepts. But what if your whole life were a metaphor for what you really want? What if every decision you ever made was made 'as if' you were making it, and was actually just a map for the 'real' neural pathways being stumbled upon by your 'true self'? yes, I have recently started a course in psychotherapy, what of it?
I'd written the first draft of a script and got interested in the story I wanted to tell and the way I wanted to tell it.
Act One, Scene One, Draft One:
A storage unit, piled high with boxes and bits of furniture.
A woman walks into the space, she knows this place, it is hers.
Two boxes explode behind her. Confetti flutters to the floor.
The woman watches the confetti fall, raises her face to the audience and begins to speak.
Heroine: Ignore them. A couple of titans I locked up year's ago. And now they're pissed.
It doesn't take a head doctor to guess what might be going on here, but as I grapple with being as readable (and predictable) as a dog-eared paperback, an exciting new chapter begins... Chapter 30, 'Changing the script'.
Scripts aren't just satisfying thud-makers on an actor's doormat. Turns out 'scripts' are also what psychotherapists term 'an unconscious life plan made in early childhood and based on decisions made in response to external influence and internal vulnerability.' (Christine Lister-Ford). Like, I don't know, becoming an actor to legitimise being a precocious little show off, perhaps. Ergo, my career choice was effectively determined by a three-year old. Which is to say, I'm 30 going on 3. Send help! And a snuggle blanket!
This stuff is the best kind of wisdom: new knowledge you have a familiar fuzzy feeling that you already knew.
Of course, I might choose to continue being managed by my infant agent (it has it's benefits) but once you draw back the curtain and acknowledge there's a tiny wizard crouching behind your big head- pulling levers and ruling Oz, it's only polite to strike up a conversation:
Me: Err hello. What are you doing here?
Little Wizard: Pressing the buttons for making the show.
Me: What show?
Little Wizard: My show. Silly.
Me: Have you always been here?
Little Wizard: Yeees. DON'T TOUCH THE BUTTONS!
Me: Umm-
Little Wizard: Go and get your own buttons, these are my buttons.
Me: Can we share the buttons?
Little Wizard: [frowns, firmly strokes the top of a shiny red button with her right index finger]
Me: ...
Little Wizard: You can press... that one. [points to a tiny round topped button, worn silver with over use].
Me: What's this one do?
Little Wizard: Makes the big head laugh. [giggles]
Me: [laughs] Can I press it now?
Little Wizard: No dafty, this is serious.
Self exposure in my world is supposedly par for the course. Being a performer I am used to the idea of exposing myself- physically, emotionally, intellectually. And yet. We kid ourselves that being an actor, for the most part, means being in control of what people see, in order to make them think or feel something we intend. Now re-read that sentence but substitute the word actor, with the word 'adult', and welcome to my present world.
And many of us are used to the idea that no matter what we intend, our performances will be perceived according to whoever's doing the perceiving. Beauty in the eye of the beholder and all that. Or grief, or fury. And sometimes we play one feeling and mean another, because we want to be perceived but also create unease, or allure, or... But other times no matter what we intend people see what they want to see or what they're ready to see or what they expect to see, forever and ever Amen.
So what of the stuff that is perceived but not intended? The buttons pressed by little wizards or knarly old witches for that matter, that we don't know are being pressed. Maybe it is because I'm a performer that I find this idea terrifyingly exposing. 'You mean I've been out there with my pants down this whole time? And nobody told me?!' The only thing for it is to unpack some of those exploding boxes, calmly, methodically and gently. Unpack them, catalogue the contents, archive what's no longer relevant, and leave everything else within easy reach. Especially pants.
I'm up to the fourth draft of my script (performance script that is, there's no draft for the life script, just one very long performance).
[Kathryn enters with a backpack and a bottle of water]
Hello. [say something about expectations of this audience before coming onstage, and what she feels now she can see them].
Can I start?
Is everything ready?
Ok.
The thing about life scripts is they have predictable endings: according to the games people play in order to fulfil them. I'm hoping the same won't be said of my final draft for the show (whatever number that will be). Mind you, a wise man told me recently 'you haven't written a script, you've written material for development.' Perhaps that's a concept I can apply to my psychotherapy course too - it's not a life script, it's the 30th year of material in development.
I hope I didn't just give away the ending.
I hope I didn't just give away the ending.
