It goes on...

God knows, it's been a strange couple of weeks.

Its been a roller-coaster of emotions, pensive thoughts, fears, loathing, loving, pretending, sincerity, lies and truth.
So basically, just another week in my life. Not much new.

I miss blogging though. But I still have that principle that I will only ever blog/write if I have something to say. This is also partly a reason why I will probably only ever release one poetry collection, since I will never write a poem if I'm not completely feeling it. I did, however, start an Afrikaans poetry website, Gegrif, which will feature some of my stuff. But, if it's not rolling off my tongue and onto the page, it's not being written.
I feel the same way about blogging.
I did get a little sad this week when I logged on after a long hiatus of blogging and realized I still only had 10 followers. It's very demotivating to realize that the thoughts I have, some of which can be very profound (well I think, at least), is only being read by a maximum of 10 people.
But alas, I suppose blogging, like most forms of social media is very much a self-indulgent, personal, therapeutic journey and I shouldn't feel discouraged by my lack of avid readers.

But sometimes, I like to dedicate blogs, as I have done before, and often these for me can be a lot more therapeutic. Perhaps it's the knowledge that at least person will read this and think: 'It's like it was written for me'.

"Acting is probably the greatest therapy in the world. You can get a lot stuff out of you on the set so you don't have to take it home with you at night. It's the stuff between the lines, the empty space between those lines which is interesting."
These are the words of Robert Carlyle, a Scottish film actor, and after reading this I must say that I definitely agree.
Well, for me, at least.
Acting is my therapy. It's the way I have learnt to deal with life and everything it throws at me. Whenever I find myself down in the docks, I read a really dramatic scene, sing a power ballad or I write a piece of poetry.
It's also very interesting to watch how different people allow themselves to be immersed in their pieces. Natasha, whom I have mentioned before, once did a piece from "Mamma Medea" translated by Antjie Krog from the Greek play Medea by Euripides. She asked me to stand opposite her in the one rehearsal as Medea's husband "Justin", who has just told Medea that he is leaving her and her children destitute. The monologue she did drove her to tears, as it did me, and I distinctly remember Natasha coming to me afterwards uttering, rather dramatically: "Die monoloog fok met my kop." (loosely translated as "This monologue is messing with my head"). I have never forgotten it, because this is one of those things that I aspire to one day - to have a piece of text 'mess' with my head.
But as any actor will tell you, the clarity, the euphoria, the triumph of performing a piece like that outweighs any amount of therapy you can buy.
For me, those moments, as Robert Carlyle said, between the lines are the golden ones. These are the moments where your acting becomes so much more than just reciting someone else line's. It's in these silent moments that we often bring our own insecurities, our own vulnerabilities, our own fears, our own personalities into the mix and it's often these moments and how they are 'played' that can define a great actor. Playwright Harold Pinter even had a "dramatic pause" named after his love of dramatic pauses in theatre and acting.

This brings me to the role of theatre and film and storytelling in therapy and in healing and restoration.
It's a well-known fact that millions of people have watched a film or a play and have left the theatre feeling emotionally stirred, touched or moved. This is because in these stories we often, (very often sub-consciously) see aspects of our own broken lives that we can relate to or that we can empathize with.
These are the essential roles of actors in society, to tell the stories. And some actors, will go to extreme lengths to put themselves in the exact position as the character they are playing. This is called method-acting. They believe that this is the only real way they can feel what that character is feeling and thinking. And I suppose that there is some truth in that, but I prefer the Stanislavski method. This is a method where an actor draws on the text to see what the story is saying and they use personal experiences from their own lives to re-tell the story.

What I am trying to get at, in this long-winded dialogue about the founding of 20th century drama, is that we often forget how powerful our story can be to someone else. Today, after a long interval, I started chatting to a dear friend of mine who has been through hell and back these past couple of months.
It was so great to hear from her again and she told me about her thoughts, her feelings and her situation. Although I couldn't relate to the situation she had found herself in, there was so much of what I read in her texts that made me want to burst out in tears. Because, I suddenly realized that so much of what she was experiencing, I had been through. In fact, I had even blogged about it. I immediately sent her the link to the blog post and after reading it for a second time (the first time she read it was when it was first published), she said she saw it in a completely different light. And I felt such a sense of fulfillment in knowing that my 'self-indulgent, personal, therapeutic journey' had meant something to someone.

To my dear friend, whom I am dedicating this blog to, I cannot fathom what it is that you must be going through, but I do know what it feels like to go through it.
Remember the best thing about 'going through the valley of the shadow of death' is that it contains the word 'through'. Eventually we have to go through it, we can't stay there. Robert Frost once said: "If I had to sum up everything I have learnt about life in 3 words it would be: it goes on."
But I know that you don't want to hear this now, so here are some helpers of mine that got me through that stage in my life.

1. Read this (again)
2. Listen to this
3. Listen to this
4. Watch a lot of this
5. Cry it all out.

In 1990, Oprah Winfrey interviewed Truddi Chase, a woman with 92 personalities due to a disorder known as dissociative identity disorder. This was obviously a very hard interview for this woman, with 92 distinctive personalities, to sit through, but years later her story about sexual abuse by her stepfather has sparked hundreds of people to step forward and tell their story. And in doing so, continue the healing.
You know that saying: "To the world, you are just one person, but to one person you can mean the world." ?
It might be a cliche, I know, one of those typical soppy Facebook status updates that love-struck teenagers use because they read it on the back of a cereal box or the bumper sticker of a car.
But sometimes, this is true. Sometimes, our own life experiences can mean so much to someone in their time of need, we don't need to know what they are feeling, we just need to know what we did when we felt like that to make ourselves feel better.

As a closing note, I would like to share with you all her exact words to me on a message she sent me:
"I think after being to so many psychologists and councillors, I have come to the conclusion that the world isn't lacking people who have the right qualifications to help others, but it is lacking people who are willing to live and help others with that experience. The tangible human, tough shit, get down and dirty life experience. You help me like that."

So next time, I am complaining about my measly 10 followers, please will the person closest to me give me a slap in the face? Because I might not mean something to billions of others, but in that one moment, I meant something to one person.

And that is enough.

'It goes on.' - remember that.

<3