Uprooting My Brain

Yesterday I officially got prescribed ADHD meds. This comes three and a half years after actually being diagnosed.

While journaling helps my memory (sort of), it absolutely does not help my motivation (rather, the complete lack of it). Performing slightly more regularly seems to be helping my memory get back in shape a little bit, but there seems to be no way to trick my brain into accidentally being motivated to do boring things like washing the dishes and sweeping the floor.

Though I have the container of capsules beside me as I type, I won't be starting them till Monday. I'm literally opening a show out of town tomorrow, and if I'm deathly allergic to these capsules I would rather find that out when I'm not supposed to be holding a hundred or so people in a state of suspended reality.

I am very aware that as a creative person who still manages to at least flirt with the performing arts industry, it's likely the fantastically-fast and somewhat melodramatic ADHD mind that got me this far in the first place. I'm worried that the meds will dull my bright, shining (I hope?) artistic ideas. But on the other hand, I am sick to death of the screaming matches with my husband about whether or not I'm making his life miserable on purpose by not keeping the house clean.

I'm also afraid that these meds won't work. And then the screaming matches will continue with no hope of an ending in sight.

I'm not sure what to expect, or what I even want to happen. Is it unrealistic to hope that (most of) our marital difficulties can be solved with a pill? Should I even be seeking to change who I am and how my brain operates to be palatable to the man who is supposed to love me unconditionally (whether or not the change I'm attempting is successful)?

Even if it does help, it's not a magic bullet, and I'm afraid we'll both be disappointed that it's not. This is the last thing I can think of to try, and if it doesn't work... am I just going to have to resign myself to being yelled at for the rest of my life?

I know this isn't a permanent change. If I decide I don't like it, I can always stop the meds. But I worry that what I love about myself and what my husband hates most about me are both growing from the same root and if I kill the things my husband hates, it will also kill the things I lived for.

Creative Residency Update

I'm now two months into my God-sponsored creative residency.

 

I'm over three-quarters done my next major dance work (Smaller).

 

I've managed to get into four shows so far this year, with two more pending.

 

I've read three books so far.

 

I've started drawing in earnest, especially in these past few weeks.

 

I've done a lot of cross-stitching (on both my theatre jacket and my husband's).

 

I've noticed my memory is getting stronger. I'm in my biggest post-pandemic acting role yet, and... I wasn't even the last one off-book. It feels -- at this exact moment, anyway -- that maybe I can still have a viable theatre career despite everything. And maybe I don't have to destroy myself to do it... theatre is no longer my only reason for living. It's a huge part of keeping my mental health in shape and it still brings me much joy, but I don't have to be in four shows at a time to earn the privilege of breathing oxygen.

When there are no shows, I can spend time with my husband, and I can draw, and I can read. I also discovered the Sims, and that's the first computer game besides Spider Solitaire, Ultimate Yahtzee, and Minecraft that I'm both competent in and actually enjoy.

I have been very productive (see above), but I have also managed to learn to ACTUALLY relax, for possibly the very first time in my entire life. I'm a little worried about how re-integrating into the workforce next month will go (especially with my two biggest shows of the year so far ramping up around that same time), but these months off have been a much-needed break so far. I don't think I have properly let my mind, soul, and body rest since I was 18 years old. That was... well over a decade ago. I still wake up in the morning and have to consciously remind myself that I don't have any looming deadlines or responsibilities that day and that I can relax.

I do wish I was doing more creative things sometimes, but at the same time, I'm happy with what I've accomplished so far, and am happy to carry that momentum forward.

I'm also somehow less stressed about money? I did apply for (and receive) unemployment benefits from the government and what they're paying me is comparable to what I was making, but somehow we don't seem to run out of money as quickly. I don't know if I'm just less stressed in general which is carrying over to our finances or if we're being more responsible, or what, but I'm not going to argue. I'm just hoping that peace continues even after I go back to work.

 

The only thing I haven't done yet that I still want to establish before I go back to work is a dance studio. I want to start ACTUALLY moving my body again. I can feel it locking up, and I hate that feeling. But the only way out from stiffness is to get moving.

Nachmo, Day 31+

I wrapped up the official Nachmo 2025 event by finishing choreography for At Sunset. That's not the last song of the show, but that does mean I officially choreographed twelve out of the sixteen songs during Nachmo proper; 39 minutes' worth of choreography out of the 54 total for this show.

I also managed to secure a dance space, at least for now. Tap dancing there is forbidden unless I lug in my portable tap floor (which, at my height squared, might be a misnomer), but it is a dance space where I can move around to music without breaking things (whether myself or important objects). I can at least start learning the choreography in soft shoes for the muscle memory.

I've submitted this piece to a festival that takes place in June. I don't really expect them to accept it, but I had set a goal for 2025 to submit choreography to at least two festivals. I don't need to get in, I just need to submit them. So I'm now 50% done that goal for the year. I'm at least putting my name out there, and at the moment, that is all I need to do. The rest is in God's hands, and I am genuinely at peace with that. I have done my job and I can move forward with the next thing.

This is going to be another dance year, I think. Since getting married, I seem to spend every other year focusing a lot on writing (mostly working on Kyrie), and then the opposite years focusing on choreography things. Even-numbered years are writing years, apparently, and odd-numbered years are dance years. I am perfectly okay with that. Last year there was a lot more overlap because I had actual choreography gigs, but I did a lot of work on Kyrie in the first 7-8 months of 2024, and that was really where my heart was for a lot of the year. This year I have at least four dance films I want to make, some of them larger projects like this one.

Last week, the musical theatre production I was working on opened, which got a huge commitment (and a lot of drama/emotional stress) off of my plate. It looks good (as I knew it would), and I learned a LOT about managing expectations within the production team. I do have an assistant choreographer gig lined up for a different musical theatre show in a few months, so hopefully I can apply what I've learned.

I'm still here.

 

I'm still here, and I'm still doing this.

Nachmo, Day 20 - Process Shift (The Tech I'm Using)

I've been slowly changing how I write choreography throughout the month.

 

Since 2012, I've written all my dances out on lined looseleaf first, then either transcribed them into Benesh Movement Notation (ballet/jazz) or typed them into Pages (tap dances).

This month though, I started using my Rocketbook erasable notebook. Since it's set up to scan the pages directly to my email, that way I could continue writing by hand like normal, and then immediately have no-effort digitization AND email backup in one fell swoop. And it does work well. But the Rocketbook has limited pages and I was choreographing faster than I was uploading/backing up.

 

I sort of accidentally fell into this habit of jotting down choreography notes in the Notion app on my phone whenever I didn't have the Rocketbook on me. Then I'd continue working on the notes in Notion on my laptop, with the iTunes/'Music' miniplayer in the corner.

Two days ago, I discovered that if you hover the cursor over the miniplayer and scroll, you can scrub through the song without having to click back and forth between Notion and iTunes.

That absolutely changed the game.

Now I can keep the cursor in one place (hovering over the scrub bar) and replay 8 counts to my heart's content, while simultaneously typing notes without the extra hassle (yes, I know exactly how 'first world problems' this sounds) of clicking back and forth between the two (and forgetting which one was selected before starting to type). This means I'm losing my train of thought WAY less, and the fact that I'm doing a show on my lived experience with memory loss should tell you how frustratingly easy it is to lose my train of thought... and how difficult it is to find my train of thought again once I've lost it.

This tiny change has launched me into creative hyperspeed. I'd already half-taught my devices not to autocorrect my tap dance shorthand so I'm not facing that friction much. I'm also not sweating the specific counts as much as usual (mostly for the sake of doing a lot of output during Nachmo proper), replacing specific subdivisions with timestamps because those are MUCH easier to find when you're dealing with jazz music. I just don't have the brain space or energy to try to find the 1 and hold a very fleeting idea in my head long enough to figure out which sixteenth count I'm starting the step on while following the saxophone melody. I'm NaNoWriMo-ing this thing. Get it in writing and figure out the pacing later. I've always let the music's own dynamics and rhythms inspire me, so I'm hoping with the help of the timestamps I'll be able to hear what I was thinking later.

As far as stats, so far today I've done almost three minutes' worth of choreography. I've just finished the song I was on, and that officially brings me to the 30-minute mark of the show -- or, my goal for Nachmo 2025. Obviously, we're going to keep going and see how far we get. Maybe choreographing the entire 54-minute show in a month isn't entirely out of reach after all. I hadn't planned to speedrun creation and production the way I did with Sottovoce, and I think it might be harder to do such a thing this time. The things that made Sottovoce so unconventional for me were the things that made it forgiving... I was suffering with memory loss even then, but the lack of set music meant I could hide the blank spots in editing a little bit (that's why the editing in Sottovoce is so janky. Almost every single cut in that film is covering a 2-3 minute mental blank). Here, I am working with set music, and while that may make it easier to memorise, that will mean I actually have to know the choreography, at tempo... all 54 minutes of it.

I do notice that letting my work breathe/not choreographing at the absolute cutting edge of my ability (as of 2019) means I cover more musical ground a lot faster, and hopefully it'll be easier for my broken brain to actually learn it. I'm only hoping it's not too boring for the audience.

Nachmo, Day 19 - Unreality

It's been tough.

 

Things has escalated with the other show. I've been accused of being out of touch with reality and was told I have done nothing for the show. The exact words were: 'calling you a choreographer is generous given how little you've done.' While it is true that I was quite sick for a long period of time and the assistant choreographer had to take on a lot of extra work as a result, I didn't do nothing. But here we are, I guess. Once again I've busted my butt on something I loved and wanted very badly only to be told I wasn't even trying. Why do I keep trying at all if nobody can tell anyway?

 

Of course, this bleeds into my solo choreography work. I'm reminded now why I consistently stop short at asking others to perform my pieces. I'm reminded that none of those glorious 16-dancer pieces I've choreographed in the past will ever see the light of day, because I'm too selfish and lazy and inflexible (that's another one I've heard before) and socially inept and broken to work with other people. I am apparently only capable of choreographing solos for myself.

I tried advocating for myself like my industry friends suggested, but they only doubled down. Inflexible. Lazy. Demanding. Selfish. Out of touch. You don't deserve to be called a choreographer.

I'm trying to use this feeling of rejection and inadequacy to inform the work I'm doing on Smaller, but it's hard to feel that the choreography for Smaller is any good. After all, my work isn't even good enough for community theatre. How can I make a whole show about memory loss with no studio space to bring it to life and (apparently) no business calling myself a choreographer in the first place?

Ten years ago this would have fueled my resolve. I would have sworn to prove myself.

But I've spent those ten years proving myself, and it hasn't made the smallest speck of difference.

Back to the show. I finished the last song of Act I last night. I'm now just over 26 minutes of completed choreography -- only four minutes away from my goal for the month, with 12 days to go. I think choreographing the full 54 minutes of the show in 31 days is still a tall order, but I might be able to get somewhat close.

 

As long as nobody else comes at me telling me what a failure and a fraud I am.

I really don't know how much longer I can -- or should -- keep trying.

Nachmo, Day 15 - Unwanted And Fraudulent

Today basically marks the halfway point of Nachmo. I started today with 15 minutes of choreography completed -- 50% of my January goal of 30 minutes, and 27% of the total show. So we are on pace. I was hoping to come out of January ahead, but I suppose there is still time to do that.

 

I'm not sure how I feel about how the show is shaping up. In my quest to not be too fancy, I feel like I'm being overly repetitive. I'm almost sure this show is going to bore the audiences to tears, if they don't walk out mid-show. Tap dance requires striking such a fine balance between repetition and novelty, and I don't think I'm experienced enough to know where that line is. It's something I'm having to think about a lot in this show... after all, it's about memory loss. How can you show memory loss unless you have a firm, clearly established motif? Only once it's established can I break it effectively. But the more I repeat it, the more my brain screams at me about how lazy and unoriginal I am.

It doesn't help that one of my theatre choreography projects is suffering from some serious issues with the cast -- specifically, they don't like my choreography (even though the production team loves it), and will stop at absolutely nothing to sabotage the choreography, turn the directors against me, and disrespect me and my hard work.

Part of the rift boils down to me not having access to a studio space. And I'm also really feeling the lack of a studio space in this personal Nachmo project. I am currently laid off. I absolutely cannot afford $40 an hour (plus GST) just to noodle around on some pet project of mine -- although such noodling would definitely make said pet project stronger. What kind of choreographer doesn't have a studio? It's like meeting a painter with no canvases. Of course you're not going to take them seriously. And people are not taking me seriously. This is also the second time in two years that I have had the dancer(s) dislike my work so passionately that they actively ruined it just to avoid doing the thing I choreographed. I don't mind collaboration, but collaboration MUST go both ways, and both parties MUST consent. I did not consent in either case.

This is tearing my already-fragile self-confidence to shreds. I took this gig to get experience, and the only experience I'm getting is disrespect and pain. And I have nowhere to put this pain, as my husband refuses to let me vent (because it's 'too negative'... and yes, of course I married someone whose top complaint about me is my pet peeve phrase, because why wouldn't I sabotage myself like that?), and it's 'improper' to air it publicly, especially since I'm starting out and I need to establish a good name for myself.

Sometimes it really feels as if it's a crime to expect common decency.

 

Update: It looks like I'm going to be officially wrapping up Day 15 with 18 minutes of choreography completed. Did all of Cimarron while watching the hockey game and I did the dishes to boot.

Of course, somebody will still find some excuse to call me lazy.

Nachmo, Day 10 - Breathing And Reruns

Rehearsals have officially started for my next theatre show, and we're officially choreographing this show out of order.

Also, yesterday, I hit the 10-minute mark, as in ten total minutes of music choreographed. This is on pace for my stated goal of 30 minutes of choreography during the challenge proper. (The show is actually 54 minutes long, but I'm trying to be reasonable about my expectations for a 31-day challenge.) (Obviously I am going to try to exceed thirty minutes, but I will be happy with thirty if I don't manage any more than that.)

The mouse incident did have me lagging behind a bit, but yesterday I went on a tear and choreographed over two minutes' worth of material. Today so far I've done nearly another minute, but I know where I want to go from there so I should be able to knock out a bit more tonight. I might need the buffer for this weekend, as I have a meeting for a potential choreography gig, dinner with the in-laws, and a long rehearsal with my remote choreography gig.

As for the show itself, I choreographed the first two pieces, then skipped ahead due to overwhelm and did the sixth song. I'm now on the seventh song, and that will take us into the intermission.

Things are starting to take shape a bit -- I've got a couple of motifs, and am trying not to worry too much that I'm grossly overusing them. I'm trying very hard to let the piece breathe a little bit more and not try to stuff tricks and overly complex rhythm changes into EVERY SINGLE SUBDIVISION of the music. That can be impressive, but my pre-pandemic work especially suffers from too much razzle dazzle rather than too little. I hate how slow and boring modern dance is, so I overcompensate by overstuffing the music with a volley of sounds like gunshots on a battlefield. I am trying to recognise this when it happens and pull back on the reins, just a little tiny bit. (I'm hoping this will also 1. be easier on my memory once it's time to learn it, and 2. communicate the whole 'memory loss' theme a bit more.)

I'm really proud of how the playlist turned out. Honestly, I stuck in a couple of early-'90s smooth jazz songs I had, then searched 'melancholy vapourwave' on YouTube. I got exactly two videos as a result, but both videos supplied me with enough music to populate the rest of the playlist. As I listened to those YouTube mixes, I slotted each contender into a rough song order on my Notion tab for the show. When my final paycheque came in on the 30th, I bought the songs and stuck them in the playlist. I listened to the playlist exactly once through, on the 31st. I think I made two or three swaps, but the song order is actually largely the same as originally written down on the fly. The transitions are really smooth, and the 'vibe' throughout the whole show flows and shifts really well (other than the second song, as discussed in a previous Nachmo update). That's incredible, considering I heard some of these songs exactly twice in my entire life before the first of January. (Usually my playlists are full of songs that I have known for years, if not decades, that I am intimately familiar with and could sing to you, note-for-note, in their entirety.)

 

This music takes me back to a simpler time. And one of the biggest things about memory loss that surprised me was how much my brain simply played 'reruns' of memories of simpler times -- memories I hadn't even thought about in decades. My brain played reruns of every memory I ever had at my grandparents' old house in the country (I was not quite five years old when they moved into town), long-forgotten moments in the trailer we lived in when I was a child, and many hours of 2021-2023 slipped past me as my brain kept me sitting in the sunlight in my old pink bedroom (which by then no longer existed as mine, or as pink, for that matter). I couldn't really think any new thoughts -- there were none to think, I couldn't hold onto the concepts long enough to match them together into a new thought -- so my mind just dumped me into my past, as vivid as if I was still there. I completely understand now why old people talk so much about the old days -- as far as we're concerned, we are still living there, still in 1959 or 1982 or 1997, still living in those fleeting moments before everything changed, before wi-fi, before iPhones, before the pandemic, before all the loss, before freaking hipster music.

 

It was a comfort at times to live in the golden years again, but it also stopped me from engaging with the present, from making new works and new friends. I would wake up from driving my old Pontiac Montana down the highway in 2012 and find myself in a year I didn't know in a world I didn't recognise with people I'd never met.

Anyway, that's part of the experience I'm trying to capture in the show, especially as we move into the second act -- that disconnect between physical reality and our mind's reality, and how we don't even know -- or can't control -- that it's happening.

Nachmo, Day 7 - Two Deep

I've officially finished the first two songs for the show. I'm really proud of the first one. The second... not so much. My brain was very much elsewhere (we discovered a mouse running around our apartment on day 3 and although we haven't seen or heard it since then, we have no proof that it's actually dead or gone and apparently sometime in the past four years my dislike has become a phobia so I'm still VERY jumpy).

 

I may end up cutting the second song from the show entirely. I still have plenty of music, and the song is extremely repetitive, plus I'm not proud of the choreography. It's complete, so I can always slot it back in if I do end up taking it out. I haven't actually taken it out yet, but it's definitely on the chopping block.

 

The next song intimidates me, primarily because of its sheer length. It's just less than five minutes, which I have absolutely done before, but it just feels different somehow. Maybe because it's been so long since I choreographed anything? Maybe because there are no lyrics, and till now 98% of my choreography has been to music with lyrics? Maybe because my self-confidence is still shot from college (read: the prof with no emotional integrity who had absolutely zero business being a performing arts professor)? Maybe because last time I tap danced was when I filmed Inside Of You in October 2023 and am TERRIFIED that I have forgotten all the knowledge I had managed to scrape together about tap dance? All of the above?

 

This is also the song I have known the longest out of all the songs on this list. This shouldn't be this hard. Should I embrace the difficulty? I'm willing to do that but I don't know how. The story of my life. All those times I would go into that gutless professor's office and ask how. How do I 'be more vulnerable' (his main demand of me... me, who was losing friends by the dozen because I was 'too personal')? How do I sing better? How do I improve as a performer? How do I get a role, any role -- especially when he has done nothing but tell me I'm such a talented performer?

 

Despite years of trying to break free from his tyranny, I'm here nearly six years later, still trying to break out from under his thumb. I haven't spoken to the man since 2019. I know, on some distant intellectual level, that he had to be at least somewhat inaccurate in how he viewed me. But I still can't get out from under his shadow.

 

On one hand, it's because my in-laws replaced him within a year of me breaking free. But I've seen this before now, and I know not to buy any of their crap. It's a lot easier somehow to brush off my in-laws' opinions than the opinions of the man who told me in no uncertain terms that he held my future in his hands and never quite artistically mentored me in the way that I still wish I could be. I learned from that professor, and I alienated my in-laws before they could get close to me. But that doesn't help that 20-year-old kid who went to college with a heart full of joy and a head full of dreams and handed them over to the powers-that-be and watched those powers repeatedly dash her contributions against the rocks.

This is exactly the emotional place I probably should be at later in the piece -- once the world starts caving in around the protagonist. Maybe what I really need to do is skip to the end and work backwards. I've been listening to the show playlist as I've been writing this and the darker songs are standing out to me.

Worth a try, I suppose.

Nachmo, Day 2 - Joy

Yesterday I choreographed some 44 measures (in 4/4 time, so like 146 counts?). Didn't finish the song, but got just past halfway. And you what? I am absolutely happy with a minute and a half done on the first day, especially in tap dance (it's a lot easier to make ballet take up a lot of time than tap).

 

I can't even explain HOW FREAKING EXCITED I am for this year's choreography. I don't think I have ever been excited for Nachmo proper (M and I used to do a National Choreography Month -- which we dubbed NaChoreoMo -- in May every year, and I usually got way more hyped for that, as I was usually not dying of pneumonia at that time of year).

I'm excited about the show itself, for sure, but I'm also just really excited to be taking part in a creative challenge again. I haven't done one since NaNoWriMo 2023, and that one was really difficult/generally not-fun for a number of reasons.

I guess I forgot how much I love creative challenges, especially in a medium I'm currently 'feeling.' I was so high on life yesterday as I started this project that I wondered if that was what mania feels like. (No doubt my college professor would still have said I was being 'too sad.' But *beep* him. He has no emotional integrity, and you can't be a good artist without emotional integrity.)

 

Tonight I finished the first song of the show, and for the first time since 31 December 2022, I was able to actually add a song to my 'Completed Choreography' playlist (Sottovoce didn't use music, and I don't have the music for the two theatre shows I did in my iTunes library because both companies sent the music through ROCS ShowReady).

For trivia purposes... the playlist alone is now 130 songs, 8 hours and 10 minutes long. That's a lot of choreography, and that doesn't even include Sottovoce (24 minutes) and the theatre musicals. I could start the playlist when I arrive for my day job in the morning, and I still wouldn't reach the end of the playlist before it's time to clock out. That's so much music. That's so much choreography. I've accomplished so much, and I honestly feel like I'm just getting started.

I remember in February 2012 when I swore I would finish choreographing a dance to prove my mother wrong (about how I didn't want to choreograph 'bad enough'), and the elation I felt when I finally finished that piece (Sing Your Freedom) on 10 April. Look how far I've come. I just choreographed a tap dance in two days. At the time I choreographed Sing Your Freedom, I didn't even know how to tap dance.

I'm just so excited that I still get to do this. I'm so happy this is still a part of my life.

Nachmo, Day 1 - Motif

National Choreography Month, Day 1, early afternoon.

 

We're off to a great start. Already 64 counts down, and I believe this is going to be the motif that repeats throughout the show, so in reality this is a HUGE investment as it will eat up chunks of 64 counts throughout the show. It's a fun, swingy motif with lots of alteration potential, and it's not like something I would 'usually' do (and there are few things I hate more than repeating my choreographic self without a very good reason).

My soft goal for today is to finish the first song. That initial 64 counts was nearly 40 seconds, and the song is only 2:48. It'll be a stretch, but it is definitely possible. The motif gives me a good energy to work with and is giving me a lot of momentum. This is the most excited for Nachmo I think I've ever been (I also think this is the first year EVER that I have not had bronchitis at the start of the event, so that is definitely also helping morale).

 

If I have enough free time (and motivation) this year, I would also like to create my own list of Nachmo prompts, as the ones they typically do on their social media/website lean HEAVILY toward random, improv-based modern dance, and that is basically the antithesis of everything I stand for in my own choreography. But we'll see. The actual choreography comes first.

Onward and upward!