hello down there!

My early days of lucid creativity that sparked my directorial debut have recently amassed 30,000 views. It is perfectly timed with the reminder that I am in control of curating my daily life, and creativity didn't graduate from me after graduating college. In those picturesque days of morbid anxiety and grotesque stature, I knew something then that I had forgotten until now.

I write from my rooftop, another thing I often forget I have. It looks over a church with twin emerald clock towers and sand-colored brick and the Manhattan skyline. Evening is turning to dusk and the sounds of distant car alarms are drowned out by the Giselle soundtrack. The sun is breaking through the clouds on occasion only to remind me that it will soon be going down. I summited these heights to do two wildly exciting things: Read a play that a boy I like wrote and sent to me, and write my story. I will elaborate on one.

It is not my story as in it being autobiographical, but it is mine in that I feel deeply possessive of the thoughts and feelings of these characters that have been ruminating within me for years. The scenes come to me as I fall asleep. When I’m lucky, they are recalled in the daylight and stored throughout journals and notes apps and google docs. 

Now looking out into Manhatta, I realize that trust and time are some of the most valuable creative assets a girl could have. From across the river, the buildings on the horizon are defined and digestible. When You are amongst the towers, the human eye is incapable of observing even just one building in totality. Quite like how I regard the stories that weave in my brainwaves: they can only be regurgitated once I gain insight into why they are. 

To trust a creative process, however, is to feel as though you are dangling yourself, nude, in front of the most horrible monster imaginable. Say, Slenderman. I felt this resistance to vulnerability in so many facets of my life, and one route of its cruel manifestation was my inability to label myself as an “Actor” until a mere week ago. One reason for this being that I regard the artist’s life with such esteem that to claim it in any capacity feels self-aggrandizing. Another, and arguably more relevant reason, is that it would expose what makes me tick. To lead with “i’m an actor” is to present myself to you from the inside out. I am theatrical. I am loud. I am laughably sensitive. 

A recent audition had me read sides for a character whose monologue felt a little too rooted in reality: “I'm a highly sensitive person and I have tried to change but it's just embroidered into my fucking genetics. That's the way it is, and I just have to deal with it.”