This local theatre community member graciously permitted me to share her response to my opinion piece under protection of anonymity. The following is her response unedited. Thanks to her for participating in the discussion.
Shit Zac. So much to unpack here. I will say, on the mobile app, that the blog only started with Part 6. I wasn’t until I got to a computer that I was able to read Parts 1-5. Which is crucial to understanding Parts 6-12.
Ok, I’m biting. Part
1 talks about an issue that really grinds my gears: the virtue signaling of woke, wight,
privileged folks, who, in their desire for wokeness, actually forget to call in
and ask the BIPOC folks what they actually want and need. I don’t get to tell black people what they
need. What I get to do is ask them. And if that makes someone uncomfortable, so
be it. In Part 2, where you talk about
substantive justice……makes sense, but impact is always greater than
intent. Whether it should be that way makes no difference to the fact that it is.
BUT, I’ve come to learn over decades of therapy and 12 step programs
that if I am going to be OK with my feelings on a situation, I have to realize
that another person’s actions probably have
nothing to do with me and everything to
do with them. I am not the end-all
be-all. It actually isn’t all about
me. “The theatre must challenge
everything in its view in order to function at all. It’s not smooth……It’s not
comfortable. It’s not safe for the ego. It’s not a place for the faint of
heart, nor for anyone who would want to set systems in stone. The theatre is a
place of openings. It’s a living organism.”
Ah, and if it were not a living organism, we’d call it a Boomer and set
it on a shelf. “Without the right to
fuck up, theatre makers would never make any kind of decent work.” Isn’t this true of us all?
Part 3, The Rehearsal Room.
Where feelings get hurt. Or as
you say, where these conversations must be unavoidable. Dude, I fuck up a lot. I say the wrong thing. A lot.
And I rely on my friends to call me out when I do so. And they rely on me to say “sorry” and change
my behavior. Because that’s all we’re
trying to do. Well, some of us. To get better and to learn. But there has got to be space for grace and
for nuance. Otherwise this whole shit
and shebang is pointless.
Part 4. Now you’re
making me uncomfortable, buddy. Because
I don’t want to look at myself. It
hurts, it’s messy, it’s ugly, and most of all, because I don’t know who I am without
my trauma to define me. So…..what if
there’s no one on the other side? But
therein lies the problem. What if there
is? I have to have the courage to walk
through that. You talked about abusers
controlling, through me putting them in that situation……this is a lesson I
started to unpack at 34. I went for 34
years, making every decision in life based on the opposite of what I thought my
mother would do. Except guess what? That
meant that I was still putting her in that position of power to dictate how I
lived my life. There’s that stupid-ass meme going around, something alone the
lines of ‘a drug addict has two sons, one never used drugs because of his
father, and one became an addict because of his father’. I forget what the shitty punchline is
supposed to be. But that’s my
point: when my abuser quits abusing me,
either actively or subconsciously because of the role that I give them in my
head, and I base my life’s decisions on that relationship, said abuser is still
in control. I mean, what if I just
learned how to make my own decisions?
But that doesn’t come until I start unpacking this shit.
But let’s do talk about the issue of safety. We do all deserve to feel safe, most
especially physically, but the reality is, it’s not going to always happen
emotionally. Shit happens, people are
people, and we get triggered. I’m not
responsible for my own first thought, but I am responsible for my next
action. I sometimes get super triggered,
not even knowing why I am triggered, react badly, and am shitty to those that I
love. But it’s still not that person’s
fault for triggering some part of my trauma that A) they did not know about and
2) to be honest….I didn’t really know about either. Trauma is a tricky thing when there are years
and decades to work through. I’ve
noticed during Covid, that weird things are triggering me…..things that I had
no idea were there. And if I don’t know
that they’re there, those around me damn sure don’t. I mean, I was recently triggered for being
asked to wear a headlamp. No seriously,
this is real. And I completely lost my
shit. Except, how could anyone have
known that that was a trigger? Most
don’t know that I am a recovered addict who used to be domestic violenced based
on the amount of lights in my house after dark (this is a real thing, paranoia
is a mother f87ker). In any case, my
reaction and how I treated the other person afterwards was my own. I was at fault. And now I have to do something about it. Lest we have more PSPSs and I need a headlamp
🥴. “And
don’t take it personally.” “Being honest
with yourself is the act of accepting what is the reality of a situation or the
world or an issue, and releasing your attachment to how you think it should
have gone.”
“Your trauma is just that: Yours. You have made the choice
(not the same thing as a decision. A decision is a move against, whereas a
choice is a direct action toward) to carry that trauma through your life. It
sits there, in the cue, waiting for triggers to flare it up so that you can
continue your story of oppression; a story that you are somehow less capable,
less valuable, less viable as a human being in this life than others. A story
that you need a parent, some outside force, to discipline the world who is
bullying you because you are incapable of defending yourself.”
I don’t like this Zac.
Not one damn bit. I have an ACES
score of 10. Always wanted to be a
winner, never meant for it to be winning at trauma. But no matter how much I don’t like it, it’s
invariably true. Like I said earlier, I
didn’t know who I was without my trauma.
And I did use it for years to continue that same sad story of
oppression. But shit, I grew tired of
continually victimizing myself, either directly, or by choosing to have the
same sorts of people in my life. If I am
always a victim of my trauma or my abusers, then I am never empowered to do
something about it. I can’t change
them. But I can change me. And that is powerful. “Your traumatizers have forgotten about you
long ago. What they did to you doesn’t belong to them. It belongs to you.”---cannot
stress enough how much I love this line.
This one too---"You can’t have it both ways: you can’t be a victim
and control how your victimizers abuse you.”
On Louis CK---I remember that post. It wasn’t triggering to me at the time
because I had no idea what the controversy was.
Even this morning, I had forgotten.
But after reading your essay, I went back and read the Vox article on
it. And he’s a bad guy, Zac. He’s a real bad guy. Not for having a kink or a fetish (who
doesn’t?!) but for the power he wielded over those women with whom he had a
professional relationship. A very
similar thing just happened to me. Eight
weeks ago. And it has been pure
hell. But even having had a very similar
thing just happen to me…..I’m not going to run around and cancel every single
artist in the world. Because a good
portion of them are garbage. As are
humans. But if I cancel all artists who
are garbage……then we have no art. And
that just won’t do. I give zero f87ks that
you think Louis CK is a great comedian.
I am sure that he is. He is also
a garbage human. Neither of those exist
in a vacuum. He can be both.
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