Before the director calls action, cast and crew await a measurement of the room tone or ambient sound. I remember my first time on set and the hushes that silenced us all and then the swell of inhaled space lingering in my lungs and throat before action. I’d taken a giant exhale as I’d been holding my breath.
Because we were filming in New York City, despite being on a sound-proofed stage, we’d sometimes stop for a passing ambulance or train whistle. Light was muted with paper taped over windows to prevent shadows and the movement of the sun as it crossed the morning into afternoon and faded into night, from changing the time and space held captive in the room to be filmed.
Often, I would close my eyes and then open them before beginning the line reading or taking my first step across the room, choreographed and marked with tape on the floor. If it was voiceover, I’d take a sip of water, throw guttural sounds from the back of my throat and down my chest across the room, and eat a green apple to rid the words of that nyyaa nyyaa sound sometimes caught when standing too close to the microphone. And then we were ‘go.’
The calculations of expression, the monitoring, taking temperature in order to create consistency and continuity make for good filmmaking and digital storytelling. In my real life, I’ve been less able to manipulate all the parts that create my story. There are always outside sounds, shadows, raspy tones and scratches picked up, elements beyond my control. Sometimes from other people, places, and things. Sometimes from myself.
We have made the mistake of believing that our hero is always the good guy, that he or she, mostly he, always means well, understands his motivations and emotions, has some modicum of control over himself and the effects of his actions. As hero we are frighteningly unforgiving when other players fuck up our narrative and change the pacing, derail the storyline threatening to make us bit players.
I returned to therapy when I moved to the city, something that many of my people are hesitant or downright resistant to, collectively or culturally, and within my own family. I am the only person in my family to have sought regular mental health assistance or guidance which has at times been humiliating and isolating. In one early session with a therapist, she asked me to consider the possibility that I could not be the director of all of the characters in my story, that I could only play, most authentically, myself.
All too often we consider everyone else in our lives to be characters in our play. They are supporting cast or unfeatured players who cross on and off the stage but never under spotlight. They are important only in how they relate to us, in how they influence or challenge or threaten the main character. Ourselves. What an extraordinary change to consider each of us fully dimensional and important in our own rights.
At that moment, I began to really sit with, often uncomfortably, how it was that the people in my life came to be who they were. I began to see my own patterns, my blind spots, and to acknowledge the trauma and quiet abuse that had informed my life. I discovered my attachment style and my porous boundaries, the energetic pull I had on satelliting bodies and how it terrified me once I’d lured anyone into my orbit. And I started to excavate the lost parts of me that hid deep in my subconscious, having escaped there while I lived in survival.
When I can, I spend a bit of time to myself in quiet in the morning to take stock of myself, to recall my dreams and journal them, and to settle myself back into my body. I listen to the hum of the room, try to settle my heart which is always racing, try to settle my spirit which is always ready to flee. I meditate visualizing bands of protection, boundaries that for much of my life were not well established.
Around the same time I began therapy again, I started studying acting at an acting studio downtown after work. Returning to my body, paying attention and taking command, and considering how our internal monologue, peppered with all the messaging we’ve had throughout our lives affects our gait, the timbre of our voices, our posture, stance, and embodying characters different from myself, I noticed that each of us arrives in a moment either armed or open.
I was armed. Invisible gear weighing me down, backpack, night-vision goggles, headset, scopes to survey the periphery, identification scanners. I could always hear my heartbeat in my ears. Though I appeared open because of my fear of asserting my power.
In one acting class with a teacher called Ed Morehouse, a phenomenal terror from theater’s heyday, smart and direct, who suffered no fools, joked that ‘there was no twisting of the mustache scoundrel rubbing his hands together so that you’d recognize him as the villain.’ The villain, he’d said, sees himself as the victim. And the air sucked out of the room. Were one to take the tone then, there would be the hollowed inhale of no-gravity outer space.
I have carried that wisdom with me for over twenty years but didn’t quite know what to do with it exactly. I tried not to consider myself a victim of circumstance yet couldn’t stop repeating patterns and finding myself in situations so similar, only with different players. I was not radically honest with myself, often talked myself out of what I intuitively felt or realized, so ingrained was my distrust of my own belief system. It is only recently that I am aware of the sabotage created when I am afraid to speak the uncomfortable, the inconvenience, the contradictory. I catch myself appeasing, drawing feather-light lines in hightide sand, watching them disappear before the end of the line is reached. I am afraid of the hum of the room when the sound of the truth still rings long after it is spoken.
It certainly makes more sense to go along to keep the peace, not to make waves in the ambience. Not everyone, I realize, recognizes the change in vibration when something wicked enters the chat, when the heaviness of someone else’s energy shifts the mood, when they find themselves in physical or emotional or psychic danger. Not many of us recognize or explore when that shift may have been because of us.
Before the director calls action and everyone is in place, collectively we listen and sync, preparing to enact the scene, each of us with our own role or responsibility. We are, all of us, the hero on our journey across the room. Soft padding is affixed to the bottom of our shoes, so the sound does not overpower the dialogue. We arrive at our marks where we are to interact. The camera zooms in. The room begins to vibrate with movement and sound, building to the sacred geometry of our action. Anyone could be the villain. Everyone could be the hero. It all depends on your intention.
"I am afraid of the hum of the room when the sound of the truth still rings long after it is spoken." this made me cry. This whole piece is exactly what I needed to read right this moment. Thank you infinitely.
The sensory imagery and emotional essence is beautifully expressed, Stephanie. I read through one then read the last sentence of each paragraph next. I could feel the flow. I’m celebrating it all these days. I defunkify the trauma stuff. I carry it all with a grain of salt. I’m less concerned at 55 with villains and heroes. Humans being humans in all the messy clay and miracle of breath. I’m even less concerned with “good” energy “bad” energy. Too often wellness teachings are categorized in ways that separate and harm. So much is on a marvel of a spectrum to limit myself and my beloveds so. Anyway, and so it is…. Ever learning and expanding! Thank you for being-ing you and for sharing your voice! 💛