Mute

Hello, friends. Thank you for joining me here.

It has been quite a while since I last shared in this space. I started and stopped writing several times before entering a hiatus that I did not plan, and could not find my way out of until now. There have been many things to say, but something got in my way. Before I return to our adventures on the farm—of which there are so many!!—I need to address the reason I stopped writing.

I am an actor. I am used to having an audience. My entire professional life has been spent in front of strangers, in darkened theaters, sharing human moments. I have done things onstage I would never do in life: brave things, embarrassing things, dark things. I have reveled in the freedom to become whatever the script calls for, without apology or self-consciousness. The goal—hard as it has been at times—was to forget that anyone was watching.

Writing was similar. Honestly, that is why I started doing it during the pandemic. Theater shut down for over two years. All of us in the industry lost the thing that not only paid the bills (sort of, ha!), but that allowed us to connect with humanity. Telling stories onstage helped me to better understand life offstage. Without that arena, I felt lost. Writing became my new stage. It was *almost* as good…for a while. The biggest difference was that there was no collaboration with other artists: no playwright, director, designers, scene partners. There was just me and the keyboard. And then, the readers…

Readers and audience members are similar in that I don’t necessarily know who they are. Sure, sometimes it’s my mom or a friend dropping in to support what I’m doing, but often they are strangers. I have always been ok with that. As an actor, that was just part of the job. In fact, it’s kind of thrilling to know that all these people I don’t know gather together for one night and we share this collective experience before going back to our individual lives. Threads of human connection weave between those who witness the same story in the same moments on the same day. In my mind, sharing my writing publicly was similar. I got feedback from comments and emails that felt nice, with readers sharing their own journeys, or expressing what they had gotten from something I said. That felt good, especially when Covid had us so isolated. The connection I found to others through expressing my own thoughts and hearing theirs was life affirming. Until it wasn’t.

Here’s the thing: you can’t control your audience.

I have been very lucky to have had mainly good reviews for my acting work—and I say lucky because it can seriously go either way. The great critics of days gone by who made or destroyed careers with one key-stroke are mostly gone. In fact, theater critics in general are mostly gone, post-pandemic. For those dark 2 years, there was nothing to cover, and those jobs were made redundant. During the few productions I’ve done since performing has slowly reemerged, there have been very few critics in attendance, and most are from websites that sound fake, to be honest. Their write-ups are a far cry from the art-form that theatre critique once was. There are exceptions, of course, especially for Broadway, National tours and the larger regional theaters, but the landscape has certainly changed. Sorry, I digress. The point is that I have generally sailed through my “public” life with nice words said to and about me. I have taken a few hits, but I do feel I’ve been fortunate overall. Therefore, I have never had an acute sense of foreboding or deep fear surrounding the way anyone might respond to something I shared with the world. I’ve actually always had to be more cautious with real-life relationships. I know full well that close friends and family can say things that may hurt (often without intent), and I try to carefully manage my reactions. That there is lifelong work! Anyhow, I think I sort of floated into the word of ‘pandemic sharing’—mine through writing— without understanding all of the possible consequences.

So, here it is: the part that made me stop writing for the past nine months. It’s not that readers hated on me or my work. No. It is that I realized I also cannot prevent the opposite from happening. I can’t prevent anyone from processing what I say as if I wrote it just for them. In one way, that sounds nice, right? As a reader, I’ve often felt that an author really “spoke” to me. I loved them for that. But take it further…What if the details I share, including my vulnerabilities, get twisted into some kind of invitation, some kind of assumed intimacy…

I have to ask, does creating equal consent?

Standing outside of the question, I would say yes. You put something out there, you lay yourself open to any and all reactions. That’s simply the cost of sharing. However, I’ve realized that the creator (of art or “content” or whatever), is also allowed their own reaction to the audience’s reaction. And so it goes; very chicken or the egg, I know.

I want my audience, be it theater-goers, TV and film watchers, or readers, to find a connection with my work. That’s my job: to truthfully reflect humanity to itself and (hopefully) expand our collective understanding of life in all its messy, magnificent facets. To do that well, I have to reveal parts of myself, either filtered through a character, or through my chosen words here, in order for it to have any meaning or relevance. Does that mean, because someone is in an audience or reading my writing, that they truly know me? No. They do not. I mean, maybe they do—in real life—but that is different. No matter how much of myself I put into my work or my publicly shared self, I reserve a great deal for my close friends and family.

I stopped sharing in this space because I needed to come to terms with my own naiveté around the lack of boundaries within the places where art now lives. I hate being misinterpreted. Doesn’t everyone? But how in the world can I control what anyone who witnesses my work might take from it? I can’t. Damnit. No one can. In addition, I can’t gatekeep and *also* share openly—it’s all or nothing once you hit ‘publish’. You would think this would all be obvious and that I would certainly have learned by now how to manage it, but I have not. It took spending some time with my dismay, my discomfort, my sense of injustice, my feelings of betrayal and violation, and my eventual anger at my lack of control over how others may chose to relate to what I put out there, in order to recover some chutzpah. Finally, finally I think I have begun to understand the lessons I needed to learn. You know that quote from Eleanor Roosevelt, “No one can make you feel inferior without your consent?” Well, it wasn’t precisely that—more that no one can affect you, if you don’t let them. It is actually about power. It is the difference between letting another person’s expression bother/confuse/upset you and letting it go. Sticks and stones, and all that. In my case, I fell right into the groove that so many women have of feeling victimized by the unwanted attention I received. Hello: Me, Too. I could tell you many stories of things that men have done and said to me throughout my life that were actually abusive, illegal, immoral, unethical and/or just plain disgusting, simply because I am a woman. Those are strong words, but I do not exaggerate. And I know that most women have experienced the same. The attention that I received in this instance triggered some of the same feelings, even though it was mostly played out in cyber space. Thanks to the internet, we are all connected now. Awesome. That makes processing the discomfort even harder because you can’t always explain what feels so wrong when it happens out there in the online ether. It took all this time for me to remember, number one, that I cannot control anyone else, and, number two, that I can control myself.

I’ve decided that I will write again. And I certainly will keep acting. I will endeavor to remain open and truthful in those expressions. But, I will also try to be more intentional and unequivocal in my self-protection—both in how I handle what comes at me and how I allow it to affect me. My acting is not an invitation. And my writing is not an invitation. No one “deserves” to be misinterpreted simply because they put art out into the world. They might be misinterpreted, but they didn’t ask for it simply because they shared their art. I struggled with that for a long while. I think I thought that because I willingly put work out there, I simply had to “take it” if someone responded in a way that made me extremely uncomfortable. I just sort of froze, for months—as I have so many times in actual situations with unwanted, real-life oversteps. Are you getting shades of ‘The Accused’ here, because I am. Shame is intertwined with violations of all kinds, and it must be recognized and separated out in order to focus on solving the actual problems. Unfortunately, in our society, blaming the victim is often an inside job. Goddamn, this is complicated. It is not that I can, or even should, try to change anyone’s reaction to what I create. It’s a free country (sort of). The important distinction is that it is abso-effing-lutely OK for me to not silently suffer. And it is more than OK for me to take steps to stop any and all avenues of communication that I can control with anyone that violates my boundaries, whether they understand that they are doing so or not.

I really struggled with whether or not to say any of this. I mean, “sharing” is what put me in this situation in the first place, right? But I finally realized that my power and my sense of safety within the arenas in which I express myself are restored when I do not keep quiet. If you’ve read this far, I want to promise you that my next contribution will be so much more fun—seriously, there are fuzzy baby chicks to discuss!! But, I hope you can understand that I needed to bring to a close, in my own way, the chapter in which I have been stuck. I felt it was important to use this space—MY space— to be honest, and to process, and to reclaim.

I appreciate your bearing witness.

Onward!