I’m stuck on the story so time to write a note…
This morning’s yoga worked around the skinned knee. When I first started learning yoga, it was during college inside an acting class. (I adored my theater classes & teachers; I really just wanted to do all my English classes with them.) The teacher–Roberta–was always telling me, though, that I needed to be more grounded. Other yoga teachers have said the same. What I’m finding now, though, is that thinking about being “grounded” makes me feel the wrong way for yoga: compact, tense, short, heavy, depressed. A buttoned-up, “responsible adult” type.
This is nothing against my teachers, who have all been great–just not mind readers! I’ve been focusing on being lighter or being lifted lately, and it makes everything easier, from finding balance to deeper stretches to more relaxed floor poses. I think it has to do with being more conscious about how your energy and emotions and body move together and influence each other, and not about having to move your energy in a particular way all the time.
I got up and did selfie practice first thing. It was easier this morning. I feel like I’m negotiating something with myself that will end up with me allowing myself to take more pictures of people. “Once you’re brave enough to face the camera, you can ask other people, too.” We’ll see. I kept the walk short so I wouldn’t overdo it but still managed to see some good stuff. Getting a good selfie put me in a good mood.
Story stuff: I’m down in the weeds on a couple of lines right now. I don’t want to write this scene; I want to write the cute scene I have coming up toward the end of this section. But right now the character involved couldn’t pull off the cute scene to save their lives. They’d close down and be too easily embarrassed, both of them. (They already did that in an earlier section.)
But the problem part isn’t the tense scene; it’s one of the minor moments in a character’s arc where he’s just looking at himself in a mirror.–I’m going, “I DID SELFIES THIS MORNING YOU CAN LOOK IN A FREAKING MIRROR” but he’s struggling to see himself as anything other than Alfred J. Prufrock, good to swell a progress or start a scene or two, as it were. Even though he’s just received a fair amount of evidence to the contrary.
–Writing that all out helped me navigate through the moment. I feel like I’m not honing my writing so much as leveling up my acting techniques to catch unguarded moments in an intelligible way. Selfie practice for the win.