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I just returned from Ottawa, performing my solo show, A Little Bit Much (by the same name as this publication) at the Fringe Festival. This trip was the pursuit of new dreams! I had a terrible, awful, no-good time.
If you’re new here, lemme catch you up: This one-woman-show has been my mid-life crisis project. It’s taken over as the central creative force in my life. So much aliveness and joy with this project! I just finished a run in Ottawa, I’ll be at the Calgary Fringe in August and will do a BC tour this fall. To say I was excited about this trip would be an understatement.
My husband has a little joke he likes to tell about me. He asserts that I have “idealistic amnesia” which means I don’t remember how much things sucked. When we compare notes of the early days with our sleepless baby I cast a haze of rose over the whole thing. This is baffling to him.
So when I was several days into a stomach bug, brain fog taking over the last of my executive functioning skills, cancelling everything but my performances and bawling my eyes out on FaceTime with him, my husband, Andrew, said “Don’t worry. Within a week of being home, you’ll be saying you had the best time!”
I wanted to have a great time. All of the conditions for a great time were right there. I believed, prior to arriving, that I didn’t try to do too much while I was there. I was wrong. Even if I hadn’t gotten that stomach bug, I was ambitious with time.
I always try to do too much. It’s a joke amongst friends and family. It’s the name of my damn show and publication: A Little Bit Much.
My packed professional and social schedule, in the midst of doing something brand new that I had no reference for, no sense of what I would need or how it would go, was very on brand.
I’d say I’m sick of myself, but honestly, me, myself and I have a really good thing going right now. I have immense respect for myself and what I’m up to in life and I’m offering myself a ton of grace. I don’t know if I’ll ever learn this lesson. I might just devour life and suffer from existential indigestion for the rest of my days.
The show run went well. I received wonderful reviews. It was mostly well attended and most delightfully by friends, family and colleagues, many of whom I hadn’t seen in years. I saw other shows that were awe-inspiring. I met so many talented artists.
I explore the theme of self-perception in my show. Identities. The stories we tell or are told about who we are. Like the identity of being too much. I’ve always been a little bit much and the writing and performing of this show has been a path of reclamation of the less tidy versions of that muchness. The shit show and the anxious seeker. The messy, the unrefined.
Part of growing into being a professional, and doing so as a business owner quite young, was taking on identities of someone capable, resilient and who generally has their shit together. By taking this on, I don’t mean that I’ve been an imposter around these things. I’ve spent decades being someone reliable, who holds space skillfully, who does what they say they’re going to, who is respected. Embodying such qualities has been good for my life. They’ve made me a good friend, partner, and professional. I’ve built a great career and good reputation and for my 20-something self who was a hot and flakey mess, flailing from one big idea to the next, I did right by her ambitions.
One of the side-effects of being someone who has taken intentional responsibility for my life, for how I show up and influence what’s happening, is that I developed “rise, rally and push through” muscles. In part because I’ve been slow to learn how to pace myself, and bite off reasonable amounts to chew. So as I would inevitably overcommit, my choices would be to pivot, let people down and not follow through, or push. So I pushed.
I’m not as interested in flexing those muscles these days.
I’m more interested in flexing muscles around creative risk-taking. I’m interested in cultivating relational safety wherever I go. I think having our shit together is a bit overrated, particularly in a culture that’s increasingly more mediated, with highlight reels and performative lifestyles. I’m more interested in being invited into people’s messy homes to cook dinner together or trying things where we risk looking like fools. I’m interested in dropping all the balls when they need to drop and dealing with whatever consequences come of that.
One of the identities I explore in my show is that of being a Seeker. I share about my first Vipassana meditation retreat. How the “not talking part” was the easiest. Facing, feeling, being with reality as it is - not so easy.
Reality as it is. Now THAT is a practice. And paradoxically, it’s foundational to creating change. One of the worst things we can do to create the change we seek is to rail against how things are. I’m not saying we hang in passive acceptance. But a lot of energy goes right down the drain of “it shouldn’t be this way.”
It is this way. This is reality as it is right now. So now what? How will I respond to reality as it is?
When I first started feeling ill on my trip, I wanted to push through. I had created so many expectations for myself. When the stomach bug got to my head, when a depressive brain fog took over that made it nearly impossible to write a coherent email to cancel my commitments, my inner landscape got pretty dark.
But something remained accessible to me which I credit to years of practice. I wasn’t upset that it was going this way. Sure, the physical sickness rolled into a homesickness that felt devastating. Sure, I spent days in bed and nights sobbing. Sure, I felt disappointed that I couldn’t bring the level of energy and nuanced play I wanted. Sure, not keeping my commitments is deeply unsettling and chafes all my deeply held values. Sure, the gnawing stress that everything I cancelled would need to be rescheduled later hung heavy over me.
But another part of me was able to marvel at it all.
I was able to say to myself, this is your first experience touring your show. Wow. Shitty. No fun. Not at all what you were expecting. Maybe you won’t want to do it ever again. Maybe you’ll conflate how you feel with the artistic merit of your show. Maybe you’ll quit now and decide this was all a waste of time and money and energy. Or maybe by the time this is over and you’re back home, you’ll look back and think what a great experience that was!
You know what?
I think I really did have a great time. I mean, I didn’t, it was an awful time. But I wasn’t upset about it being an awful time and somehow that let me stay present. Somehow the presence gave way to acceptance. Acceptance yielded a renewed energy for the last few days of the trip where I enjoyed the festival, the artists, connecting deeply with new people and my last performance was my favourite.
And now that I’m home, do I have idealistic amnesia? Absolutely. The more I think about the trip, the brighter the silver linings. I think the part I love the most is knowing that things can not go as planned, they can go horribly wrong, I can feel awful and still be present, happy and okay.
I love this piece so much. I can so relate to the amnesia, the pushing and hustling, and the journey you are on creatively. But mostly the slight change that is happening in me were my inner Monger (that is what I call the inner critic) is not holding the mic all the time and my Essence voice or Biggest Fan voice is slightly louder. Which is a small subtle change but so freakin' huge in my world. You did such an amazing job of explaining that small subtle change. Thank you for sharing.
Love your writing so much!!!
You are amazing!!!
I love this line
“ I might just devour life and suffer from existential indigestion for the rest of my days. “