October 25 – Day 38

I can’t help but think how trite this all must sound. All this talking and pondering. Sometimes it seems so silly. I could say that it is just what we do here – what we are commanded to do but I think I would be like this no matter what I did. And all of this thinking is not painful, in some twisted way it is fun, but I wonder how ridiculous I must sound having some sort of revelation nearly everyday. None the less that is what happens. Today I got my first major ass kicking by my acting class. Somehow in coming to Russia, I developed this strange feeling that dressed itself as confidence but moved more like a sense of nothing to lose. It has been so liberating and for a while I struggled to remember the last time I felt this way. (I think maybe when I was little and sang in church every week with Meredith Leonard, and never knew to question whether or not I had any talent.) I suppose it is only natural that the longer I am here the more I will have invested and the more I will hate to fail, but I wasn’t prepared for it to hit this hard. We had been working on independent scenes from Chekhov and finally presented them today. My problem wasn’t that they ripped apart our scene or that I was upset by their critique, it was much smaller. They debated a choice we made and after all their prodding and explanation I still failed to agree with them. That was it. They are the best actors in the entire country and some of the best teachers in the world. They have decades of wisdom and experience on me and even now I think they are wrong. It is such as stupid little thing and I understand where they are coming from but I deeply feel like this can’t be the only way – I want the option to believe in another way. And thus I reach my daily revelation/conundrum. I have this tendency to put my teachers, my superiors, my elders – hell, even some of my friends, on some sort of pedestal and then I have this inner debate between a freethinking spirit and the mind of insolent child - is it ever possible to really agree to disagree? I left feeling disconnected, distanced from the minds of people I deeply respect, wondering if that is just a part of growing up. Is this the beauty of letting go – knowing what battles are worth fighting and when it is okay to be misunderstood? Can you maintain a connection if you fail to find common ground? In the end, is knowing your own truth more important than being heard?