Musings on Purpose, Intent, Identity

I've been watching the Unitarian Universalist General Assembly (GA) over the past few days through live streams online. Several of my closest friends, including my boyfriend, are there, and I wish this year more than ever to be there with them, as I've gotten more and more passionate and curious and involved with the UU movement, especially at the youth and young adult level. Right now I'm watching the "Service of the Living Tradition" which is the service for the ministers of the UU Association (UUA), serving our congregations across the country, in Canada, and around the world.

As these ministers are honored for their lives' work or welcomed into the fold, I think of all the lives they have touched and will touch. I think about Nic, who wants to go into the seminary and change people's lives through his ministry, his kindness, his knowledge. And the more I think about it, the more I want to do the same. I want to have a positive effect on people's lives. I want to be life-altering and helpful for as many people as possible. 

For the last few days, I've been thinking that maybe I want to do that through the seminary. Yet as I've been thinking about that tonight, I think I've been forgetting that I believe (I think) that I can do that through theatre, through my art. That's why I love theatre so much - because I feel that my life is touched and I can touch lives by theatre.

I am religious. I am spiritual. I am a Unitarian Universalist. I want to touch lives. I want to be an actress. I want to change the world.

I think I think I want to go into the seminary partially because my friends have been talking about it; partially because I'm very intensely drawn to my faith right now, partially because I want to change the world, partially because I want to be at the heart of my faith community. But before I got so attached to UUism beyond its social benefits, I believed I could touch lives and change the world through theatre. I still believe that, and I need to remind myself of that belief.

This summer I've been more disconnected from the theatre world than I have been in years, and it probably feels more severe than it actually is since I was live almost 24/7 theatre at school. More than NYC I miss my studio friends and working on projects, creating something from nothing. To me, each work of theatre is a miracle. It is a collaboration of so many people, ideas, influences, and intricacies. I learned that more this year than ever before, and I know that experience and knowledge will only increase over the rest of my life. Collaboration I think equally excites and terrifies me.

Perhaps my artistic identity "crisis" is really just a reconfiguring of who I am. Last summer, I mused on my identity after packing up thirteen years of public school into one cardboard box that is still sitting in my room next to my desk. I looked at that box, and thought, This is my life as I've known it, in this box. For the last ten years or so I've thought of myself as someone who excels academically and is connected to and understands this world through theatre. Yet in the days before I left for NYU, I thought about how everyone I was going to school with would be just like me in that respect. I needed to find more in me to distinguish myself as an individual while I entered a world of my peers, of people I expected I could finally relate to. (And, for the most part, I can.) 

At this very moment I think I am coming to the realization that perhaps my faith was an aspect of my identity that just hadn't come into full vibrancy yet. It certainly is shining now, adding itself to my passion for theatre and learning. I have an insatiable thirst for knowledge and understanding, and I find both theatre and religion as an outlet for those curiosities.

I am eternally grateful for the people that have touched my life, most of them coming to me through theatre or church. I have shared transcendental experiences with them; feeling the same sitting in both worship services and in a theatre as an audience member or especially on stage. It's a feeling I can't quite describe - when I feel absolutely exhilarated and at peace simultaneously, my blood pumping steadily in my veins through every inch of my gift of a body. I've had such opportunities to experience this vibration, with such incredible people that somehow manage to touch my soul in a single instant.

Something I've been contemplating for some time, though I couldn't say at what point it started, is temporality and impermanence. I think about this time last year, about less than a year ago when I didn't know 90% of the people who have been most influential in the last year of my life. I have always had my parents, and my brother (well, once I was a little over three). For several years, I have had my DYSC friends. Yet this year, I was blessed with new beings. There are so many incredible people, both teachers and students, at my studio, like Colleen, with whom I continue to find I have more and more in common. There's Michael, who isn't at PHTS, who graduated, who I understand in ways I wish I couldn't. There are new UU friends. There's Nic, who I thank the stars for every day. I wonder how they will continue to create tiny shifts in my path as I try to navigate this life. I wonder what impact I have on them, what fingerprints I am leaving on the web of life. Everything changes every instant. Minutely, so often invisible. Sometimes I spend so much time thinking about time that I literally get lost and don't understand what I'm thinking. I wish I better understood time, or had the patience for quantum physics.

For now I know or at least believe a few things. I have time. For now, I explore. I keep learning (as I always have, and always will). I don't expect to know and understand everything about myself right this second. I don't have to make definitive decisions. Life is not definitive. Everything is not extremes, black and white, on and off. There is dimness, and brightness. There are shades of gray.

11:11. Make a wish.