To be or not to be

Make believe has always fascinated me. As a child I spent hours by myself making up stories and acting them out.

Many years on I  watched in fascination as my own children immersed themselves in fantastical worlds— inventing new languages, building cushion forts and cardboard swords. Such traditions seem as old as humanity itself.

Yet, we grow out of them as we age.  The thespians among us may go on to make careers out of pretending to be other people.  But the rest of us are relegated to playing our many— very real— selves day-today; and only vicariously experience the freedom of being someone else. 

But about those everyday roles, as prosaic as they seem, are they really? How much of what we do is authentic? How much is performance? Is there a difference?

We play many roles throughout our lives, some for mere moments, others for decades. Like actors in a Bollywood musical or on Broadway, we have a repertoire of roles, much as performers have wardrobes full of costumes. Like them,  we change in and out of our costumes. Sometimes into ones that are loose, billowy— something that allows us to be comfortable in our own skin; other times the fit is too tight, too limiting— these are like corsets and hoops that may make us attractive but come at a psychic cost.

Sometimes, a costume becomes a big part of our identity— the clothes making the person— so much so that we begin to feel their weight on our shoulders, their tightness around our waists . Professional titles, academic credentials, careers, reputations can all come to feel like this. We can feel constrained both by how others see us and by how we wish to be seen. The costume that looks beautiful on the outside is then a straitjacket on the inside.

On the other hand, we may change in and out of our costumes many times a day.  Going from parent or child to executive or student to janitor or cook to chauffeur or gardener or myriad other roles. As routine as they are, however, we can sometimes get lost— left wearing the old costume but without a part— like an actor who has played one character for many years, whose show has suddenly ended. It will take time to find a role that makes us feel the same way again; if we ever do.

But the roles, they are a changin'

Sometimes the costume needs to be put away forever; other times it merely has to be hung up in the closet for a while, until the occasion calls for it. But when we are wearing it, there may be something to inhabit each one, to embody our costumes. All without forgetting that  it's just a role and no single one is us— at least not forever.

After all, as method actors, who exhaustively research and prepare for their roles, know you are not always or entirely the character you are performing. The trick is to be and not to be the person you are in any given moment. That may sound like woo-woo but is demonstrably achievable, with some practice— a little bit of awareness training, as it were.

By training ourselves, we can learn to embody a full wardrobe of costumes without getting too attached to any of them; we can embrace the multitude of selves that is us. We can do what needs to be done— to perform the role of the moment— without investing too much of our identity in that one costume.

And, perhaps, that is freedom?