Exposure, Awareness, and Perspective

Three things in my head, all linked. As a storyteller/performer, I live a schizophrenic life insofar as my work is verisimilitude AND I am pretty private. I'm learning that when people hear my work, either on stage when I perform, or after they read it, they get a sense that they know me. If they see a performance, they come up to me and speak as though the stories I told on stage were actually conversations the two of us shared privately. Or, when they read my work, they contact me and ask for details about how that person is doing, or when I did thus and such in a story, how did that turn out?

I'm new at this business of getting feedback from others about my work, and holy christ on a crutch, it's fascinating indeed how folks make a leap from a performance or a story to behaving as they know me. I find myself reviewing my own dealings with folks whose work I admire and praying that I never made that leap. The assumption of familiarity is bizarre.

This process makes me also incredibly aware of how important boundaries are. As a performer, I'd damned well better NOT expose any part of my life I don't want to have dissected. And I need to realize that it will likely happen anyway, if I'm fortunate enough to do well. All I can do is be careful and keep my need to scandalize in check. Being a whore for comedy can be dangerous!

In a dotted line-related sort of way, this stuff also reminds me of several conversations my girl and I have had lately. In her search for a male Dominant in her town, she touches base to let me know of her latest adventures and misadventures. It is squirmily instructive to me to hear how words I'm certain have come from my mouth in the past sound coming from another's lips. For example, one D recently told her after having had coffee with her and asking her to do some writing, that he now considered her his submissive. And, she was to engage with nobody save himself and me. When she told me that, I realized how arbitrary that bit of control was. Why should he care? What would it matter, so long as she gave her best to him in the time that they were together? I have done that very thing on several occasions, and hearing it from another made me aware just how silly it is. Control for its own sake. What good is that? Just because we can, we must? I think not. Control, when asserted in context, is a luscious device. Used capriciously, it weakens the controller and needlessly burdens the controlled.

I suppose the connecting thread here is that viewing our lives through other eyes can be highly instructive. As always, different perspectives are cause for great learning. Whew, good damned thing.