Commitment as a Relationship with Past Versions of You

When to follow through and when to let go

Unblocked: Moving through creative blocks with a self-consent practice starts 5/15.

When I was 21, I fell in love with acting. I had wanted to be an actor since I was nine, and promised myself at 16 that I was going to follow through on that dream. But it wasn’t until I took my first theater acting class in New York with Sondra Lee that I really understood what acting meant. It’s a process of deep listening (what I call ‘full-body listening,’ for more than just words), or being present, tuning in, attuning to self and the other, reacting honestly, not anticipating, and so much more.

The deeper I got into it, the more I began to understand myself to be a process-oriented person, more than a finished-product person. I wasn’t so interested in performing as I was in rehearsing. My love of acting led me to directing, but no one will ask you to direct anything until you’ve directed something so I began writing my first play with the goal being to direct it so I’d have a credit. I let go of the acting dream in favor of directing and ultimately writing.

But I was torn. I felt tethered to my 16 year old self. I wanted to uphold the promise I’d made to them. I felt I was betraying that me. I wanted to go back to talk to them, to tell them that I know things now that I didn’t know then; things that, if they’d known, they would understand the choice I was making.

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