So, uh... the fear didn't go away after one week. In fact, we are minutes away from closing out Week Two and I'm still just as afraid -- if not more so -- than I was before.
The fear has shifted, though. I am no longer afraid that I will not be able to finish choreographing. I am now afraid that I won't be able to learn the choreography.
On one hand, this is silly. I used to be in (read: memorise) three shows simultaneously. As soon as one would end, I'd roll in another. I have memorised entire pieces in a single afternoon multiple times. My entire Instagram page used to be basically me performing stuff I'd only memorised ten minutes earlier. There's no reason for me not to be able to do this.
But on the other hand, it's been nearly three years since I was in the middle of three simultaneous shows. I have been diagnosed with ADHD since then. I went through one of the worst periods of my personal life and am missing literally two years of memories from that time -- and because I'm only just coming out of it, a lot of conversations I have now still include the other person saying, 'don't you remember...?' Which, of course, I don't. Hearing, 'don't you remember?' multiple times every day does not exactly instill confidence in one's abilities to remember any new information.
This is silly, I tell myself. This is film. You can cut and piece together as much as you need to.
But, whispers the fear, you having to re-memorise everything right before you shoot it will waste time -- and dollars -- on set. You need to get in, shoot everything in one, maybe two takes, and get out. Your sound, light, and camera people are not going to sit around forever for free while you dilly dally about memorising stuff that you should have had memorised weeks before.
And I don't have an answer for that.
This is exactly where I'm stuck with my other dance film. Choreographing the thing is zero problem. Actually filming it with any amount of confidence is a much different story.
Your stupid sparse sound design is going to strangle you, the fear says. You're taking away the one thing that could possibly help you.
Fear doesn't like to hear that if there's little to no music, nobody will notice if I missed a phrase anyway because the music won't betray me.
But you'll know, it says. You'll know.
I'm just so tired.
I'm tired of having to fight through this voice every single minute of every single day. Memory loss is hell. I can see why depression is so high among dementia and Alzheimer's patients: memory loss -- and how people treat you when you have it -- strips away every single ounce of confidence you might have ever possessed. When you tell people you forgot, they take it personally -- 'if you really cared, you would have remembered.' And once they get that thought in their heads, there is literally nothing in the world that will ever convince them that you really did care about the thing you were supposed to remember. And then they decide that you just don't care about anything, including them, and they abandon you. There are no 'correct' words for the memory-loss patient to say that will make the other person understand that it wasn't intentional. Those words simply don't exist. So we get cut off by our friends and family, one by one. By the time the memory loss is stopped or slowed, it's too late: everybody's already gone, and they're not coming back.
And as I know all too well, the fear of abandonment is crushing.
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