Wednesday, September 17, 2008

My Pivot


A Life-turning Experience


Last March 2008, our Theater Arts class was preparing for a stage play for the Holy Week. It was a really stressful activity for the whole class but I felt more pressured because I was the director of the play. All the drama and the stress were starting to get to me. I was starting to get so irritable and so moody. I was a mess. Good thing my classmates and my batch mates never gave up on me. They were always there supporting me with the preparations for the play. Everything was going well until the night of the last performance came. Last minute preparations were done to make the blocking of the actors better. Our professor in theater Arts helped me out with this adjustments and it was only thirty minutes till show time.

One of my classmates did not like the fact that I let our professor over rule my on my role as the director. He said that I should have asserted what I had in mind and we should have stuck with what was rehearsed. At that point, though, all I could think of was to make the show a worthwhile material for the people to reflect on for the Holy Week more than executing the play for get the grade, I was more concerned with giving the people something to ponder on. And so, the violent reactions from that particular classmate brought me down, that made me question myself and my capacity as a director.

I felt really devastated. I was crying but I tried hard not to make them see the tears, I did not want them to think that I was weak. One of my classmates saw me while I was fixing my costume, he asked me what was wrong and at first I was hesitant to tell the story, and when I did, he hugged me and told me that it was not my fault and that I did not have to take all the blame for myself. He said that I did all that I could to make the play a good one and that I should not be feeling bad at all. He says that I should try not to take everything in. “Do your best in the things that you do and God will do the rest.”

It was an incident that I still treasure to this day. I do not know if he still remembers the things he said to me that night, but those words really inspired me. I started to just let things go when I have done my part. I used to have the tendency to just embrace all the jobs and do everything at the same time, but now, I have learned to know my limitations.

I am very grateful to that friend of mine. Until today, he’s my source of daily doses of sanity that keep my grounded.

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