Since I finished the Torch improv training, I’ve thought a lot about what it means to me to be a trained improvisor *bum bum BUM*. Mostly, the day after the graduation showcase looked like any other day prior. My hair wasn’t shinier, I didn’t have a new British accent. What I did have was something intangible. It was more than confidence. I felt… malleable. Like I was being affected by what was happening around me. More than I had been, more than I had let myself before.
Some community events that I’ve taken part in over the last year have really affected me. I’m learning to trust in my community more, that there are people giving everything they have to make community better. Lifting each other up. Trust is huge on stage: trusting that everyone is “all in,” no one is holding back or afraid, trust in your own ideas and trust that everyone is working at the top of their intelligence. In an environment built on trust, amazing things can happen. Without trust, big bold choices don’t happen. Creativity dies. People don’t speak and perform from the heart.
A group built on trust can dodge and weave through characters and ideas together like a school of fish, or an amazing basketball team (so I’m told – I’ll trust basketball lovers on that one). We call it “group mind” on stage.
I said Design Week changed me, and as I thought about it more, a lot has changed me. I feel like there is a group mind building in the Phoenix design community. I was open to feeling it, I was seeking it out even. And I felt it more than I had ever felt it before.
That is all well and good, but the REALLY big deal about that more than a year ago, I was told by my therapist that I have Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. I talked about this at TEDxPhoenix, how trust is a choice that we make. My trauma involved stranger danger and public places, so my whole adult life I’ve been guarded against a sense of being part of a community. Five years ago, the terrible events in Tucson would have shut me down. The world would be filled with palpable danger, threats around any corner. While this may be true for everyone, and was proven true for that group of people at that moment, I no longer find myself having that fear make my choices day to day. Still, being affected emotionally by a group of people in public is a struggle day after day. Having a place on stage to push that trust in my fellow player farther and farther, opening my heart to the audience, not hiding behind a playwright’s words anymore and trusting myself to be the producer of the work has begun to rewire my mind. I choose to trust, more often than I allow myself to be guarded.
I’m learning more every day about how my mind works, unravelling and laying out the ratty yarn ball of emotions and structures that have been built around it. I have been living with so many kludges in my system for so long, it will take a while for me to figure all the knots and ends that have been tied together quickly. For me, working on stage as an improvisor is a vital part of that unravelling. I am seeing now the neatly wrapped ball of yarn starting to form, ready to knit into a most amazing scarf at some point in the future. It will be comfortable, beautiful and useful. It will take a lot of work to get to that point, but it will delight me every day.
My heart and mind has been very filled by the victims, survivors and heroes of Saturday’s tragedy. I hope that they, and all of us, can continue to be work towards hope for and trust in the community around us.