Expectations

I’ve just been cast in another play and I know it’s going to be a blast. I can’t help but wonder how I managed to not do anything for three years. Now this’ll be my fourth play in 18 months.

I love being someone else. I love the adrenaline rush of being on stage. I love getting feedback like “I wonder if that’s what she’s like in person?”, when I’m nothing like the character I’m playing. I’m grateful for the friendships I’ve found in the theatre.

For all the fragility of being involved in performance; all the self-doubt in my abilities, it’s one place I feel loved and I don’t mean empty accolades like ‘oh we think you’re great…’ I’m talking about being accepted. Truly accepted for who I am.

I just realised something. I don’t expect my friends from the theatre to understand or be interested in my faith, yet I expect people from church to be interested in my theatrical pursuits. I have a double standard in my life that I wasn’t even aware of. Huh!

It just goes to show how much I am responsible for those layers of hurt, hardness, protection I mentioned in ‘A Hard Heart’.

I expected more from people who are Christians because…I guess I just figured they should be genuinely interested in what my interests are. That’s a pretty selfish thought.

It’s put me on the other side. I once told a friend that I liked her but not a choice she had made. It put a huge gap between us because I didn’t understand how that hurt her. Years later we found each other again and she told me how I’d hurt her. To her the issue was more to do with who she was, not just a choice she had made. Now I am on the flip side. I feel the creative is not just a matter of interests or hobby but rather an integral part of me.

So much in life is a matter of perspective and we are all human. We all see things through different colour lenses. We all rate things as having different values.

Wow. Something else to work on. Fortunately like most things, the first step is recognising the problem and now I’ve done that I can start to make my choices with a better frame of reference. It reminds me that often we travel through life with blinders on – not just tinted glasses. How much better would things be if we periodically take a moment or two to step back, take a good look at ourselves and see how we have blinded ourselves to ourselves.