Linkage

I've been working on this show (Standing Still Standing) and it's awesome.  I have a fantastic production team, fantastic cast.  Honestly, it's a little intimidating to be surrounded by such magnificent people every day for 6 or so hours...but more on that later.

Today, one of my good friends came and talked to the two actors playing the leads about Chronic Fatigue and what it is like (the leading male has CFS in the play).  It started me thinking a lot about d/a (depression/anxiety) because the two are so linked and there is a great deal of overlap.  My friend talked about how she had good days and not so good days and how those days are unpredictable and how sometimes she would exert all her energy and then be spent for two days afterwards.  For me, I go to 6 hours of rehearsal a day and then I come home and I'm dead.  I'm exhausted.  Getting up in the morning is so difficult.  But I store up so that I can go to that 6 hours of rehearsal again.  This past Sunday, I was on my couch for most of the day trying to rest so that I could have enough energy stored up to make it through the week.  My friend talked about physical fatigue.  I haven't experienced that in the way she described it, but I have experienced spiritual and emotional fatigue.  And just like she described, there have been nights where I have laid awake for hours waiting to fall asleep, crying because I'm so exhausted but unable to sleep.  My friend described how she felt like her body betrayed her at every turn.  I don't feel that so much from my body as I feel it in my mind.  Sometimes my body too, because there are physical symptoms of d/a.   There's much more overlap, but that's not the important part...

What is the important part is that I chose this.  Not that I chose the d/a, but I cheered for joy when Heavenly Father said that I could come to earth and receive a body!  I knew of the imperfections and struggles I would face and I came anyway, joyfully!  I knew I could do it, even though sometimes I doubt it now.  But more than that, Heavenly Father knew I could do it.

We read in the Book of Mormon that there must needs be opposition in all things.  In the Garden of Eden, Adam and Eve couldn't be joyful because they knew not sorrow.  The feelings they had were meaningless because there was nothing to compare them too, nothing they were opposite from.  Our feelings are binaries, defined by their opposite.  In order to know what good is, we must know what bad is.  So I think of us in this mortal probation, experiencing different and varied trials and I think, how great will be our joy!  Those nights where I have sobbed in my bed, where I have experienced the lowest of lows, will also help me to know my greatest joys!  They deeper my sorrow, my pain, the higher, more exquisite my joy!

I hardly know a time in my life before d/a.  But I do know that while I have experienced some incredibly dark days, I have also known such pure joy that it is indescribable.  I wonder if I would be able to say that if I had not been given the challenge of d/a.  I'm sure I would've still had bad and good days, but I don't think they would mean the same to me as they do now.  I relish good days.  I cherish those days that I feel alive!  It's not every day.  I do have good days.  But I also have bad days.  And all those days are shaping me into the person God wants me to be.

  

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The people I work with are fantastic.  Literally brilliant.  Most of the time, I feel out of place with them.  I totally trust my production team's ideas, their insights.  I honestly feel like the dumb kid tagging along.  I direct the show, but it's really just a matter of asking questions (and my cast is getting really good at reading my mind - when I stop them, they almost always know why).  It's really fun, but really... challenging for me at times.  I frequently compare myself to other people and, with these people I'm working with, I come up short.  I direct.  I don't design and act and direct and costume and do films and teach and beatbox and make people laugh and advertise and write and produce and on and on.  All of these people I'm working with, without exception, are multi-talented.  I feel very humbled.  Sometimes humiliated.  But extremely humbled.  

I'm not going to lie, I pray for my cast and my production team daily.  Multiple times a day even.  I fasted for them on Sunday.  And I pray that God will make up what I lack, because I feel like I am lacking in many ways.