/2024-09-20/singing/
I should be sleeping. It's 04:31. I should be asleep. I'm trying to self-impose a rule that I can't go to bed past 4. So what the hell am I doing...
I've been thinking for like two hours straight about a play I recently saw. My friend invited me there. She took part in the writing of it, and she played in it. Her character is the one I remember the most, it was the most touching for many reasons. Especially personal reasons.
That play of her has been living rent-free in my mind for the past two days now. It's stuck in there. I can't stop thinking about it. There is a few lines that she says during the play that almost made me cry, but at the end of the play she sings a song, and that song pushed me over the edge. I cried during the whole thing because the song was beautiful. She sang it perfectly, but mostly I felt like she was singing that song to me, like she was singing about me, and she later told me that in a way she was.
I close my eyes and I see her singing. Earlier tonight, I listened to that song and repeat for like 20 minutes, crying the whole way through again and again. It's beautiful, but it doesn't sound the same. It's not what I'm looking for. I want to be back there. I want to hear her sing that song the way she's saying it again. It doesn't speak to me like she did.
But mostly, watching her play opened an old wound for me. I miss singing.
But not just that. I miss acting. Directing, writing, and all of these things.
I miss them so much.
During the whole play I kept thinking to myself how I wish I could do this. I wish I could be on stage with them. I was imagining them writing together and I wanted to be part of that... and I was hurting.
I didn't got enough opportunities to do these things, but I did got some. Actually, a very strong memory of mine is when a highschool teacher pulled me from my class because he was working on a film project with some students and he wanted me to help with the writing and the directing. It is still one of the best memories of my life at a time that was absolute hell for me. The year before that, under the supervision of that teacher, I acted as the lead role of a short film I helped write. I even came up with the title and everything. I got compliments all over the place. And acting was so fun for me.
I used to sing when I was a kid, and I used to love it. Hell, I wanted to sing metal!
All of this has been beaten out of me through mockery and through feeling an anxiety that would take the shape of a monster in the years to come. I used to love writing fiction, and I still do, but I barely do it. And when I do, I never show it off. Because I'm too afraid, I'm too insecure about it. Even for my own eyes and own ears, it is too much.
I've been wanting to take a piece of fiction that I wrote and transform it into an audio format where I would act every character. And I don't do it because I'm too afraid of it. I'm too insecure about it. I'm afraid of it being bad. And even if I do it just for myself, it's too much already.
My anxiety is not ruining my life. It's worse. It's preventing me from living it.
She has the same problem as me, yet she does it, and that's inspiring to me. That wound, it's been opened because I saw someone like me, another trans woman, who also has suffered from depression and anxiety. Who is like me, we have the same brain on so many things, and she is doing what I can't do.
It opened this wound because I envy her, and at the same time I'm thinking to myself that if she can do it, maybe I can too...?
But saying that and actually internalising it are two different things. That simple step feels like a giant leap for me.