Nearing Maximum Overload

As my Meisner class moves forward, my teacher is becoming more demanding, and I'm beginning to feel overwhelmed. Last night was so frustrating.

I finally made forward progress in the repetition, but only after John brought something to my attention. He said, "You're not demanding your partner be present with you because you're used to not demanding anything in life. You've learned to be quiet and not to rock the boat."

As he spoke, my breath caught in my chest and I couldn't speak, because he was right. So I pushed myself to connect and demand my partner connect, and for the first time, I sat down after the repetition with my heart pounding and feeling a little tender in my center.

Then we moved on to the scene. I had decided that I can have energy and stand up for myself without yelling. So I entered the scene that way. John stopped us almost immediately, and asked me what I was doing. I started to explain my thinking behind my choice.

The thing about John is he gets impatient sometimes if we're not picking up things fast enough. And he tends to yell at us when he gets impatient.

So John cut me off and yelled at me: "You're not supposed to be thinking!" And from that moment on, he did not allow me to say another word, whatever my thoughts or feelings were became irrelevant to him after that. He said, "You don't know yet how to be open, you can't think about crafting your choices!" And he sent me back out of the room to start again with more energy, without letting me speak or ask any questions. And I was extremely frustrated because it seemed John wanted me to yell just for the random sake of yelling and that was supposed to be having energy in the scene.

So I funnelled my gathering frustration into energy, and came into the scene yelling at the top of my lungs. But again he stopped the performance because this time I wasn't connecting with my partner. I wasn't aware of his responses to me, I wasn't letting him affect me. John scolded me for this. I said, "I don't know what you want." And he started yelling again, "Don't do that, that really pisses me off. All I want is for you to listen and connect to your partner. Send your energy into your partner. Don't just randomly throw it everywhere." Then he sent me out of the room to start the scene over for a second time.

Third time, I was so frustrated I was in knots, but again I channelled the frustration into energy for the scene. John coached us to repeat lines as a way of connecting, which helped, but he also impatiently called me when I didn't catch a response from my partner. He called me relentlessly, and at one point I just stared him down and was so close to going off on him, but I turned and threw that back into the scene too.

I chose not to go off on John because last month, John had been belittling my friend who has since dropped the class for not being committed enough because he wanted to run class to 11:30 instead of 11, and my friend asked to leave at 11. So John belittled her and questioned her commitment, and she went off on him, yelling at him for disrespecting her. If it had been a repetition, it would have been wonderful and awesome, but unfortunately it wasn't. John then proceeded to throw a temper tantrum and refused to let her speak, and then blamed her that the class couldn't go on that night, and then pulled me in as a manipulation tool to blame her that I wouldn't get my turn. My friend and I both thought long and hard before going back to class. Yeah. So I decided not to yell at John last night as much as I wanted to.

John said after that run of the scene it was much better, much more connected and alive and real, my scene partner said it felt better, but honestly I was just too frustrated to really be able to tell what the hell happened.

And now we're learning about emotional preparation, we need to come to class Friday with an sad preparation: In other words, we need to be able to cry for class. Our homework is to spend time fantasizing a circumstance that could lead us to that emotion. John told us about one of his class mates from when he was in classes fantasized about being raped and it was seeing her boyfriend unknowingly standing nearby that caused her to cry.

I am dreading this assignment. I have a hard enough time crying in private even when I want to. There are so many times when I want to cry, but the tears just won't come. Sometimes I think there must be something wrong with my tear ducts. That being said, I have actually cried twice since last October. One time I was extremely fatigued and extremely stressed out at work, and someone said something hurtful to me about how I was handling my work and the sobs just wracked uncontrollably through me, I couldn't stop the tears for several hours after that. More recently, I cried off and on for several hours because I hurt myself emotionally by reading too much into something rather than taking it at face value and then having to face the truth of that. And I was tired and stressed out. Seems I can only really cry when I'm tired and stressed out. =/ I don't know what I'm going to do for class on Friday. Purposely not get enough sleep?

And to top all of this off, last night my behavior in a personal circumstance was revealed to me with a flood light. For the first time I can see clearly how overwhelming my behavior has actually been. I feel badly for how I have unintentionally treated a friend I care about. But as I spent some time today looking at my behavior and letting it sink in, I realized that it's an old habit that I'd forgotten about, I thought I'd conquered it long ago. And that helps me a lot, I'm reminded that I'm not a victim of my emotions, and I know how to stop the behavior.