October 23 – Day 36

After the major stomping I got from Russia yesterday I had no energy to go to the disco and opted instead, for once, for a good night’s sleep. Luckily, I heard all about it this morning when I woke up. Jenna came into my room and crawled into bed, lamenting to me and Stephanie about the ‘bad decisions’ she made at the dance. It was the most eerie sense of déjà vu and suddenly I was transported back to a time and place when life was much less confusing, a brief window when Saturday mornings were spent nursing hang-overs and joking around with my sorority sisters about the ridiculous things we may or may not have recalled doing the night before. Somehow in all the laughter and teasing, all the crap I had been worrying about just didn’t seem that serious. Stephanie and I walked to school and had this incredible conversation about our life here, how it is something we will never be able to fully verbalize to those who are not experiencing it and how studying Chekhov in this place is the only way to fully understand our transformation. What was so bizarre, and it really shouldn’t be because it keeps happening, was that the exact conversation we had on our walk was practically repeated verbatim by our acting professor. I am beginning to think of this trip less as an acting excursion and more as a really expensive massive therapy session. Studying this work is like the guidebook to the complications of life. What I love about it is that Chekhov doesn’t try to sum it all up in a nice neat message. His characters have both vision and vises because he embraces the messiness of life. He got that life is complicated and as such his work should be. Just when you think you have it figured out you discover another layer to the situation and you see a person or conflict from an entirely different point of view. After class, I sat down to write about all this and discovered an email from an old friend. He had crossed my mind from time to time while I was walking around St. Petersburg, but it all feels so long ago; it is hard to believe that part of my life was real. At some point over the last few months I came to the conclusion that moving forward meant letting go of people and situations that have been chains to the past. It is a notion I have been struggling with on this trip. If I want to move forward, how can I possibly go back – to Los Angeles, to a life that wasn’t working, to relationships that were destructive? But then I got this email, which caught me completely off guard and reminded me why people never cease to be amazing. I really thought that walking away and starting from scratch was the only way to create a new direction but my old friend has once again challenged my preconceived notions and made me see that there is always more than one way to approach a crossroads. There is always room for second chances, and sometimes even thirds.