Written 2 July 2021, 12.26am.
This past month, I took Andrew Nemr's online course, 'The Encounter,' and while some of it went over my head (as I suspected it might; this was a course marketed to professional dancers and I'm at best an intermediate-level tap dancer), the last two lessons opened up a window into my own soul that I never knew existed.
He talked about establishing trust with the audience -- how one must start with the common knowledge that the audience has (in terms of music, rhythm, body language... anything) and said that from here, you lead them across the bridge to the meaning that you want to convey. He went on to explain that you know you've succeeded if the comments you get afterwards are less along the lines of 'wow, I could never do that,' 'how many years have you been dancing?' 'I used to dance when I was younger,' and more along the lines of 'what were you thinking about while you were dancing that? it was so intense.' He gave several examples of the former and I related to every single one of them -- so intimately that I heard them in the voices of the people closest to me as he spoke them. Those are the exact phrases that annoy me so, so much and make me angry that they're clearly just trying to make conversation and weren't impressed at all with me or my work. They're just stock phrases, and if there is one thing on this planet that I hate (besides Hillsong music), it's stock sympathy/caring phrases. It would be almost better if they would just come out and say they hated my performance.
And in a flash, I understood what I had really been after.
It wasn't love -- as I thought it had been in Part I -- or at least not exclusively. It was understanding.
That's what I've been chasing after all these years. All I wanted was to be understood. Not just brushed aside or given a flippant 'yeah, I hear ya' -- understood.
That's what I've been missing this whole time.
That's why I always feel so unfulfilled whenever I leave the theatre after a show with the stock phrases of my friends and family ringing in my ears. This is why I've been suicidal for most of my life. This is why, when Brittney and my cousin died, I repeated the story and rehashed how I was feeling over and over and over, probably literally millions of times, like a stuck record, for YEARS until I was mentally abused into silence and a deeper self-hatred for 'not getting over it' immediately. This is why I wasted my entire life bending over backwards, allowing myself to be manipulated by directors and churches in hopes that if I could just be subservient enough then they would love me and I would finally have what I wanted... except I wouldn't have.
I had love, at least in an imperfect and patchy way. I look back on my life and I can see moments where my parents and maybe even a couple of friends really did care about me. But I cannot think of even one single moment where I felt understood. Not by my parents. Not by my friends. Not by my husband. Not. Anybody.
This would have been a crushing blow -- maybe nobody will ever understand me -- except that Nemr had already paved the way by saying that you start with the common knowledge that everybody has before you lead them across the bridge to what you actually want to say. It's the exact opposite of what I usually do -- I usually just jump right into the deep end because I honestly prefer other people to do that as well. I hate small talk and pre-amble (big words for somebody who's spent a full eleven years posting rambly drivel on this very blog). But Nemr not only showed me what was wrong, he gave me a solution to try. It may be very much against my entire personality, but clearly the personality I have wasn't working anyway. I can handle being something I'm not if it's only temporary. If I have to fake something for ten minutes onstage before becoming my true self in order to make people understand, that's something I'm willing to try. At least there's hope of being understood. That's something that I've never had before.
(TW: suicide.)
I always had this daydream that if I killed myself, those who truly loved me would sift through every one of my documents and papers -- a huge undertaking to say the least -- and finally, finally know and understand me and what I needed. That daydream has actually fueled some suicidal episodes -- being understood only after death was better than never being understood at all. Hastening my death would hasten understanding. I was literally willing to kill for it.
I kept saying I don't feel love; I must be broken because I literally can't feel it. Maybe that's at least partly true. Maybe it's not true at all. Maybe I just mistook love for understanding and it was almost a fatal misunderstanding. Maybe there is a way out and maybe I can learn it. I don't really know where to start, but at least there is an option.
Thank you, Andrew Nemr. Maybe this isn't what you intended for your course to do, but I'm glad this is what it did.
Sources: Nemr, Andrew. 'Lesson 16 - Communicating Meaning.' In The Encounter (online video course). 2021. https://andrewnemr.teachable.com/p/the-encounter
