Who are you anyway?

Last week I asked you how you were doing.

This week I’m asking you who you are.

This is me improvising someone authoritative with Shea. Or maybe I don’t know what I’m doing and she’s instructing me? I forget.

Oh, you think you know, do you? I submit to you that this assuredness that you, in fact, know who you are is a compendium of things you have been told about yourself, and wishes of ego fulfillment. In the first group - what you’ve been told about yourself - are the messages you have received from the culture at large (entertainments, commercials, the news), your friends and colleagues and your childhood. It’s this last one that takes an entire lifetime to disentangle. Take me for example. My mom left me (this is how I experienced it) when I was three, and so I have been trying to get her back through other relationships ever since (label me exhibit A under “Mommy Issues.”) Some of what others have told you about yourself is true and useful. But a great deal of it is total bullshit, and has more to do with other people’s needs and desires and not your well-being.

Here I’m improvising smoking a cigarette with Owen after sex . . . maybe?

The other category - ego wish fulfillment - are all the ways you want to be. And sometimes you are. And sometimes you’re not. I try to be who I want you to think I am, whether it’s true or not. Even more distressing, the longer I live in this self-delusion, the less chance I have of sensing that it is indeed a delusion. I begin to act and behave as if I am who I want you to think I am. Unfortunately I am occasionally successful at this. People actually believe the nonsense I trumpet about myself in subtle and not-so-subtle ways. And then I’m trapped. Because I know, deep in my core, that I am inauthentic when I am like this. And inauthenticity is a kind of psychic cancer that slowly destroys the ability have real human connection with anyone.

Take a moment and think about all the ways you don’t want the world to know you. Here, I’ll go first:

• vulnerable

• insecure

• afraid

• vain

• grandiose

• and some more, but that’s a good start . . .

Authenticity is owning accepting these parts of myself too. Even more harrowing, authenticity means sharing from these places with other humans, so others can know me when I’m especially vain or vulnerable. Only then can I take the biggest risk I know: ask to be accepted as the damaged and imperfect creature that I am. I’ve done this a few times and guess what? I have never been refused. Those moments of acceptance of me by others when I am weak or wrong in some way are transformative, healing, revelatory.

So what does all this have to do with improv?

Not sure who I am in this picture, but Bob is definitely someone pretty awesome.

The kind of improvisation I practice is long form improvisation. As I understand it, it has to do with realistic people in deep relationship with each other, telling a story together that extends over time. Sounds heavy, but it can actually be quite hilarious. But it doesn’t have to be. And the removal of the requirement to be funny opens up breathtaking possibilities. Long form improvisation is a kind of personality laboratory. If I trust the people I am playing with, I have the opportunity to inhabit “my self” in any variety of characteristics. I can be the most wounded and awful person, the most appalling self-centered egomaniac, the most toxically masculine manly-man, and why? Because I am playing with someone who accepts my offer.

So when you hear an improv zealot like me tell you the practicing improv changes your life, this aspect of it is one of the reasons why. We are given the opportunity to experience all of ourselves, in collaboration with an accepting partner, witnessed by a group of affirming fellow explorers. The calcified mold of identity we have been trying to fit into in our “regular lives” shatters, and we briefly see the pieces of it on the floor of the stage as we take authenticity for a walk. Such a paradox isn’t it? Finding authenticity in a fiction.

It would be nice to report that the inauthentic mold of identity we temporarily escape from practicing improv stays in pieces on the floor. But It doesn’t of course. Under the weight of memory, habit and the crush of external messaging we find ourselves inside that mold again. But less and less. And then comes the day when we break out of it without an improv class, and those around say . . . wow.

Clearly being a Dad here with Aimee and Kelly - not a stretch for me.

Practicing improv is way to explore ourselves in a safe creative setting. And even though I was playing “someone else” a good coach will point out that it all came out of me. This is why Del Close told his students to “to get the hell out of their own way!” At its apex, improv allows all those parts of me I don’t want the world to know about to come out and play. And when I am seen and accepted like that, behind the thin veil of a co-created fiction, something deep is released.

So who am I? Well, I can tell you today. But ask me again tomorrow, and the answer will change. I am not a solid, I am fluid. And I bend and ebb and flow around the people and objects I encounter. Sometimes I am steam and sometimes I freeze. But if you are kind, you can dip your toes in. The water’s fine.