In the course of the imperfect experiment that is these United Stat... I mean my blog, I put up a blog post yesterday written from a negative place, posted it to Facebook with the heading "hopefully I don't regret this!" ended up regretting it, and taking it down.
Now, why exactly did I regret putting it up? Not because of any outside pressure, probably no more then 5 or 10 people read the post. But you know, I said some mean, pretentious and egotistical things, which granted were coming from an honest place, but were still fundamentally negative (and kind of bullshit anyway, honesty and bullshit don't have to be mutually exclusive). Basically, a confluence of experiences over this past weekend lead me to that negative place, stemming from a show I saw that just kind of depressed me, and which I related back to an observational exercise we did in my movement class, and then I became negative about that experience because I had a hard time getting into it. I related them I guess because on some level, it reminded me of the futility and impossibility of observation and artist renderings of what we observe in the outside world. Huh? How do I make this less convoluted... the show read to me as a series of false observations. Then, in that exercise when I was trying to observe people in Boston Common, I was struggling with that falsehood. And more complicated stuff with the voyeur/observed individual relationship that's created in that kind of exercise. And I think I could have done it better if I'd detached myself from the written component that was included. Essentially, I was trying to observe, instead of just observing. And became very self aware of my self in that act of observation, and of the people I was observing's awareness of my observing them. And my classmates had incredibly positive reactions to the exercise, which I had a hard time from my space of negativity not reacting to cynically and immediately questioning my own cynicism and just getting further and further into my head.
At the end of which, I wrote a post about the play, where I said some mean things. And about the class, where I said more things that I regretted saying. And the end of the day, the purpose of this blog is to spread positivity. Basically, the ethos is "if you don't have anything nice to say, don't say it" because people don't want to work with people who say negative things, but my thought is they will want to engage with someone who says positive things. And for my own self, I want to be someone who spreads positivity through my writing, which is why this isn't a theatre review or criticism blog. It's just a blog of my experiences, and in blogging I want to hold on to the positive experiences and not the negative ones.
This is kind of a lesson I learned from my previous blogging project, the Livejournal I maintained all throughout high school. I focused a lot on my negative emotions in that space, because I felt negative a lot of the time and it was kind of cathartic, I guess. But then I definitely hurt people's feelings. And you may not realize this about me, but I'm actually a very sensitive and emphatic person and as soon as I realize I've allowed the negative aspects of my being to affect someone, I feel terrible. And I don't want to feel terrible. I don't do art in order to feel terrible, I don't write to feel terrible, everything we do is an effort to feel the opposite of terrible. Right? Whatever that is for us individually, and whatever makes us feel that way.
So that's why that post went down. I'll maybe try and deal with the things I talked about in that deleted blog post later, like what bothered me about that theatre piece, even though I never said what it was. And next Thursday, we'll be doing movement pieces about our observations, so I'll have more to say on that then.
No comments:
Post a Comment